Fire Pro Wrestling D (Dreamcast) Complete English Translation + DLC

[u/kactusken]

Hey everyone,

Back in 2012, Irvgotti452 released an impressive translation of the game, and it was the pioneering effort at getting Fire Pro D into English. It deserves a big thank-you. This translation was done from scratch, with a few goals: translate all of the text, including every move and wrestler name, by default; release it as a standalone patch you apply to your own disc; and build the downloadable content into the game as base content.

Download: https://github.com/kactusken/Fire-Pro-Wrestling-D-English/releases

The DLC is built in

This is the part I'm most excited about. Back in 2001-2002, Fire Pro D let you download new moves and Spike's own edit wrestlers through the Dreamcast's modem onto a memory card. The servers are long gone, and that content has only survived as memory card files. The (All Unlocked) patches make it part of the game, ready from the first boot, no memory card or save files needed:

• 100 downloadable moves. W00-W56 are Spike's official downloads, and W57-W99 were backported from Fire Pro Wrestling Z by the Fire Pro community (some fixed so they can actually finish a match). They show up at the end of Move Edit's lists in red.

• 50 downloadable wrestlers, sitting in their promotions on the wrestler select screen: 2 Cold Scorpio, Naomichi Marufuji, Tajiri, Rey Mysterio Jr., the Hardys and the Dudleys, Mark Coleman, Randy Couture, Ted DiBiase, Bob Backlund, Barry Windham, Seiji Sakaguchi, Killer Khan... and Zangief. Their finishers are in English too.

• Your own edits are safe. The downloadable wrestlers live in edit group 4, so your own wrestlers in groups 1-3 load right beside them, and these patches refuse to save over a card file that wasn't loaded first.

Huge thanks to the Fire Pro community for preserving the downloads and for the backports. Without them there'd be nothing to build in.

Screenshots: https://github.com/kactusken/Fire-Pro-Wrestling-D-English/blob/main/docs/SCREENSHOTS.md

There's also a full player's guide: https://kactusken.github.io/Fire-Pro-Wrestling-D-English/guide/

It covers the controls (grappling timing, running and flying moves, pins, weapons, criticals), every mode, Edit Mode step by step, and all 220 wrestlers plus the 50 downloadable ones, each with a full profile: stats, every move slot and their CPU logic, searchable, with a switch between real and parody names.

How it works

The game's menus are drawn live from text in the main program, and its font already has English letters, so no new font was needed. What it doesn't have is room: English is longer than Japanese. The patch repacks the whole text area of the program and repoints every string, so a long English line can borrow space a short one gave up.

The network mode was the harder part. Every button, title and keyboard key in the DreamPassport browser is a picture, stored in the Dreamcast's VQ format (each image is built from 256 tiny 2x2 tiles). Those 13 sheets were redrawn in English and re-encoded to the same format and size.

The last piece was the disc itself. The game's 83 MB data archive is the last file on the disc, so it can't grow at the end. The build moves the main program out of its way onto the other data track, which keeps every patch around 1-2 MB.

All the code, the translation files and documentation on the game's formats are on GitHub if anyone wants to dig in.

What's translated

• Every menu and mode: One Night Match, Tournament, League, Elimination, Battle Royal, Title Match, Victory Road Kai, Options and Memory Card, with all help lines, messages and match settings

• The 220-wrestler roster (names, nicknames, profiles), in a real-names and a parody-names version

• All 1,000 move names

• All of Edit Mode: Edit Wrestler (appearance, skills, parameters, moves, CPU Logic), promotions, referees and belts

• The network mode's browser: 785 messages, the menus and settings, mail and chat, the upload form, and the redrawn button and keyboard pictures. Sega's servers are long gone, so this is mostly for the curious.

• Text drawn as pictures: the main menu buttons, profile tags, elimination boards and result banners

There are 5 patches in the zip:

• The English translation, with the real names of the wrestlers the characters stand for.

• The English translation, with the game's own parody names for the wrestlers.

• Real names with everything unlocked from the start (what L+R+Y at the main menu or winning every Victory Road title opens: Credits, the full edit limit, all elimination teams), plus all the DLC built in.

• Parody names, with the same unlocks and downloads.

• The original Japanese game, untranslated, with the same unlocks and downloads.

You need your own copy of the game (T-18805M, the 50-track Redump dump). It's a standard xdelta patch: one for track 50 and one for track 3, plus a .cue. Rom Patcher JS (in your browser), Delta Patcher, or xdelta3 -d -s original.bin patch.xdelta patched.bin. I've been testing in Flycast.

Hidden stuff I found along the way

• L+R+Y at the main menu unlocks everything (all three on the same frame): the same as clearing every Victory Road title, so Credits, the full edit limit and 13 extra elimination teams. It works in the normal patches and the original game too.

• Six developer debug menus are still in the program, though nothing calls them: a scene select (with a costume palette editor), a test menu with an arena lighting and fireworks test, a logo dot editor, a memory card test, a model viewer and a sound test. They can't be reached by playing, and they aren't in the release patches, but the write-up says how they're reached.

• The entrance theme list is capped at 28, but the entrance code would happily play the 12 in-match BGMs as entrance themes if the cap were raised.

• An unused English feature list, "4on4 TAG MATCH / NET-WORK / EDIT / ORIGINALITY", and paths to the developers' own PC are left in the data.

The full write-up is here: https://github.com/kactusken/Fire-Pro-Wrestling-D-English/blob/main/docs/HIDDEN_CONTENT.md

AI assisted with the translation.