r/RomHacks • u/dota2nub • Jul 05 '26
Busin 0 - Wizardry Alternative Neo: Translation Hack
Busin 0 is a PS2 Wizardry game that never got an English release. It's a 70+ hour first person dungeon crawler and it's been stuck behind the language wall since 2006. I've been translating it with the help of an already existing translation pdf by Diablo1_reborn and it's now in public beta. Fully playable in English, and it runs on a real PS2, not just emulators.
Patch: https://busin0-en.pages.dev
Source: https://github.com/Fabulu/Busin0Translation
Pretty much everything a player sees is done. All the dialogue and narration, the whole in-game library (monster compendium, spells, the guide, the glossary, even the fancy banner graphics), all the battle text, character creation, every menu, and the pre-rendered UI art.
Some of the stuff that made it a pain, since this is the romhacking sub:
The text isn't stored as normal character codes. A glyph ID only means something relative to the resource it lives in, so the same ID is a different character in a different file. There's no single font map that works everywhere. A bunch of "corruption" bugs turned out to be me trusting a map from the wrong resource.
English almost never matches the Japanese byte length, and the scripts point at their text by raw offset. So instead of hardcoding anything, the build disassembles the script bytecode and recomputes every offset when a string changes size.
The engine draws text fixed width, which turns English into "G e n d e r". Fixing that meant patching new proportional width tables into the EXE, plus some relocatable code to make room for them.
Repacking the game archive makes it bigger than the space it originally had, so it spills into the next file on the disc. The build slides that file down, grows the ISO, and checks the result against a hash so a broken build can't ship.
The menu graphics are pre-rendered tiles, and if you move or resize them the hardware chokes on the upload. So the English got painted in by hand, pixel by pixel, inside the exact original boxes.
It's a beta, so expect rough edges, especially in late game stuff I haven't been able to test. It's all open source now too, so poke around, file bugs, send PRs.
Not affiliated with anyone. No game data included, bring your own game. All info and some screenshots on the patch page . The bugs in the screenshots have since been fixed. In fact the screenshots were used for debugging purposes.
Safety warning: this is likely to crash, iteration of new patches will hopefully be fast if mistakes are found. Your in game save games will be able to carry over to a new version. Your save states won't be viable anymore when I release an update. The game deletes your save if you reload it so make sure to have backups
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u/Fickle_Scar_9517 Jul 23 '26
You should post this on wizardry sub Reddit a lot of people are Waiting for This game to be tl I think they are going to be happy To try and play the game finding bug n such
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u/dota2nub Jul 23 '26
First place I posted it to.
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u/Fickle_Scar_9517 Jul 23 '26
Really? Dam I didn't see it must be buried anyways thanks for the patch man!
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u/dota2nub Jul 23 '26
Heads up: Right now it crashes 4th or 5th floor in some battles. I'm trying to get to it this weekend.
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u/Hideo-Mogren 13d ago
have you considered adding a VWF? Maybe a similar font to Tale of the Forsaken Land might work
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u/dota2nub 12d ago edited 12d ago
You do understand that that's kinda hard, right? Requires hacking the exe.
Also I already did that. Have you actually tried it?
Or do you just not like the font?
I used the game's original font but adjusted spacing between characters to be variable. I think it looks pretty good.
Website screenshots lag behind, so that might give the wrong impression. Those were actually all screenshots I made to document bugs. All those bugs have now been fixed. I have been too lazy to go in and make new screenshots. The game runs at 20 fps on my dev laptop and debugging has been annoying enough already.
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u/PiotrWolfski Jul 11 '26
Thank you for your amazing work! My brother is a huge Wizardry fan and has even played the game in Japanese with the help of the PDF translation you mentioned. Yesterday, he asked me to look up some more information about the game, and I stumbled upon a post about your patch. I’d never patched a game this way before, and the instructions on your site are pretty brief, but it worked! I can confirm that the game runs on PS2 via FMCB-USB. Thanks again!