Gomoku Narabe & Reversi: Touryuumon

What’s translated

Every word in this game is a picture, so everything was redrawn in English:

• The title logo (GOMOKU & REVERSI over TORYUMON) and the menu logo drawn in stones.
• The main menu (Free Match, Tournament, 2P Match, Settings), Match Setup (rules, level, side, Renju opening, Reversi layout) and Settings.
• All 24 Renju opening names and the six Reversi layouts.
• The game screens: 1st/2nd panels, Thinking, the pause menu (Undo, Quit, Back), “Can’t play there”, the pass messages, the Reversi stone tally and every result banner (five in a row, the Renju fouls, wins, losses and draws).
• The tournament (opponent list with WON badges, New Game / Continue), both endings and the staff credits.
• The message shown on a blank or reset save.
• Already English in the original and unchanged: PRESS START BUTTON, the copyright lines, COM, ON/OFF and the GOMOKU label on the board.

Names and terms: the Renju openings use the standard romanised names used in English Renju (Chosei, Kyogetsu, … Sangetsu); long names are written over two lines (Shin- / getsu) to fit their cells. The levels are Easy / Medium / Hard. The counter word 石 (“stones”) after the counts is dropped, so the tally reads “64” and “64 diff”. The credits give the staff’s names in Western order with their most common readings.

How it was made: AI translation, independent checks, human decisions

• Claude translated everything directly from the Japanese pictures and did all the hacking, including the lettering: a small pixel font in the style of the original, drawn into the game’s own picture sheets.
• A separate, independent Claude reviewer checked the whole game against the Japanese (screens, text and documents); its 13 findings were verified and fixed.
• On screen, in the emulator: every screen of the game from power-on (menus, setups, both games, the Renju fouls, Reversi wins, losses and draws as both colours, passes, the pause menu), both tournaments through all nine opponents to the endings and the credits, random play from three points, and the title left alone for 10 minutes (no demo). A detector compared the Japanese lettering with every tile on screen and found none left. 2P Match was played between two linked emulators. Every screen was also compared side by side with the original, enlarged, for alignment.
• The judgement calls were listed with the Japanese, a literal reading, screenshots and the options, and I decided all 16 by hand over two rounds: the title and logos, the opening names, the levels, the banners, the dropped “stones”, the endings and the credits.

Changelog

• v1.0: first release.

Sources consulted

• Japanese text: the WonderSwan ROM itself.
• Renju terms and the opening names: the standard English Renju names, as listed on Wikipedia’s “Renju opening pattern”.

How to patch

Apply gomoku-reversi-en-1.0.bps to the Japanese ROM “Gomoku Narabe & Reversi - Touryuumon (Japan)” (CRC32 6CD1411E) with Floating IPS, beat or ROM Patcher JS. The result should be CRC32 36BF164B.

The ROM stays 512 KB. It’s a WonderSwan (mono) game, so keep the .ws extension.

You must provide your own copy of the original Japanese game to apply it.

Download: gomoku-reversi-en-1.0.bps on the release page.

Known issues

• It hasn’t been played start to finish by a person. If you find leftover Japanese, a broken picture or a crash, please tell me where it happened.
• A few banners never came up in testing and were only checked as pictures: “Black passes” and the Renju foul banners for White (they share their letters with banners that were seen).
• 2P Match was tested between two linked emulators, not on real hardware with a link cable.

Technical notes (for the curious)

• The game has almost no text: every word is a picture in one of 25 image resources (2-bit tiles plus a tile map), and each screen copies rectangles of those pictures into place. Only the blank-save message uses a font.
• The English is drawn into the same pictures. Only changed cells are re-tiled, and new tiles are shared wherever possible, because several screens load a whole picture sheet into 512 tile slots that were already nearly full; repeated banner halves (“Black wins”, “White loses”…) are split at a fixed place so they share tiles. Pictures that grew were moved to free space and every reference to them was repointed.
• The game also copies tiles into the screen at run time, so the redrawn pictures keep those target tiles separate, and the ending text stays inside the strip the game redraws between frames.
• The cartridge contains a developer task menu (pad check, memory viewer, a console expecting a development keyboard). It helped test the endings; it isn’t in the patch.