| | | Back in the day I filled up two 4x mem cards with I don't know downloaded edits or something for this? And played some 8 man matches or whatever to see what all the fuss was, and looked at the very Japanese-text-heavy edit mode. And then never really played it again.
It has a Hogan-alike. Wrestlers are bigger on-screen than in G, and not sort of low-res-like as in G, but now the almost-flat-3D-pieces feel of the later games--but still big sharp unfiltered pixels on both wrestlers and ring, at least on my Nearest Neighbor or whatever setting in Flycast. So, pretty much the bigger size of the later games, but the more pixelated look of the earlier games. Is this the way to go?
I was worried about filling up virtual mem cards of wrestlers or something but I'm not really worrying about edit characters currently so maybe that wouldn't come up even if it's still possible to have trouble with that now that it's all emulated, which it probably isn't but I don't know. |
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| | | | This game is going for like $16 near-complete on eBay, sheesh! Quite a contrast with say X Premium on SFC or G on PS1. |
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| | | | Flycast's Widescreen toggle works for this: menus are stretched wide, but in gameplay the wrestlers remain exactly the same aspect, with the sidebars simply opened up to show more of the area around the ring. |
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"ファイヤープロレスリングD"
I think what I gotta do about that content warning with the pack 2 wrestlers is download and import the NON-translated DLC moves. In the end I got very little actually keepable importing and translating done in this session--but I think I've MOSTLY learned what to do now--I hope!
According to https://www.thesmackdownhotel.com/games/#sort=attr.ct1.frontend_value&sortdir=desc&attr.ct7.value=fire-pro&page=1 , the Fire Pros with the most included (not counting available to be made as edit chars) + DLC wrestlers are:
Returns: 345
D: 264
2 (GBA): 264
Z: 237
(GBA): 200
G: 193
S: 160
WS: 132
World: 110
BUT that number for D only includes additional non-fictional wrestlers, and is not even quite accurate according to the lists I found through https://criticalclub.com/thread/77/classic-fire-pro-information-repository : it should be 220 pseudonymous non-fictional base wrestlers plus 48 non-fictional DLC wrestlers = 268 wrestlers.
But Spike also released 298 fictional DLC characters--counting those, D has 566 wrestlers!
(The developer was technically Vaill but I can't find anything under that name and the packs are generally referred to as Spike packs and Spike was mostly Human Entertainment people-- Ah, Wikipedia's Spike page says "Spike established a game development subsidiary named Vaill (ヴァイル株式会社) which consisted of former Human staff in November 1999, and it was eventually absorbed back into Spike in July 2001.")
The SYS file from both my file sources--the criticalclub one above and
http://www.bucanero.com.ar/dreamcast/vmu/fireprowd/
--has the same 16 wrestlers in it: 5 Japanese-named wrestlers from edit pack 1, and 11 w/ real English wrestler names, so someone at least renamed them:
1. Perry Saturn
2. Ted DiBiase
3. BubbaRayDudley
4. D-Von Dudley
5. Shane Helms
6. Yun Yang
7. Dustin Rhodes
8. Dusty Rhodes
9. Shane Helms
11. Nikita Koloff
Helms is in twice; DiBiase is in edit pack 6 and the Dudleys are in edit pack 7. This SYS file supposedly unlocks all hidden wrestlers included with the game; I think it probably ISN'T an official Spike file release, and the 16 wrestlers in there are just ones the user who won every federation championship to unlock all wrestlers (or does the cheat code save the unlock?) happened to have in there. So I'll delete them.
That's 16 more edit slots for Spike DLC characters, for 216 added wrestlers + 220 base wrestlers = 436 available wrestlers.
With Spike's 48 non-fiction DLC edits in there, I can fit 168 of their fictional edits, which I'll pick from the 298 they released--trying to pick fun-looking edits but probably avoiding the weird flat or negative-color edits.
There are no translation lists I know of for the fictional wrestlers. I found an on-screen translator--that can still use Google Translate's engine--so I won't have to burn out my phone: https://github.com/Danily07/Translumo
(I'm using Translumo with Tesseract OCR and Windows OCR going; enabling the third OCR module and its 5 GB Python-powered thing made the whole install stop working properly--I think because it requires certain NVIDIA GPUs. The Windows OCR module required a Windows Update Japanese language pack installation, which Translumo handled completely automatically once I ran it in Administrator mode, then restarted for translation to start working. A little freaky maybe since it seems to be a Russian program but eh deep virus scan says everything's okay so...whee!)
Gonna use my keyboard for the input, at least to start with 'cause I'll also be having to do a fair amount of mousing in moving files around with vmuexplorer--the game doesn't seem to support the DC keyboard, but WASD and cursors should work at least as well as my DualSense pad for entering text with the game's menus.
This might take a while. I'll be uploading my edit sessions 'cause I'll have nothing else to put out in the meantime! If I get through it, I'll host my final SYS and Expansion Edit Data files on my site so anyone interested can download them. |
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Finally noticed some tricks the person who made the rename file I downloaded for the base character names used:
- Can use the no-space setting to combine the first/last name fields and can insert whatever space characters you want in there
- Use the first/last name swap setting when there's a long first name and short last name
- When there's two long names, keep one and use the combined field trick on it (I've got I think four wrestlers still to go back to and use this on)
The Translumo screen translation software held up a little better this time, probably because I was playing with the settings less. It actually did one translation BETTER than the Google Translate phone app, and a few as well as... But mostly it's worse; quite often, much worse. (I don't have the right Nvidia GPU for its third, most powerful OCR module. : P) And it keeps translating the katakana for "bu" or whatever, which looks kinda like a 7, as "7." ; PPP
Enjoyed the "MSG King" nickname. ; D
Some of the Spike nicknames for Black wrestlers are not so good. Hopefully they're a lot better about that now than they were 23 years ago. It's unfortunately a problem I've come across in old-ish wrestling games from a number of Japanese developers/publishers--it wasn't just Spike.
Was listening to the game's OST--it rules! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ6vHwuwk-E Spike/Human don't seem to have sold soundtrack CDs for the Fire Pro series--dang! Well, more reason to play each of these entries in the series, I guess. ^ _^ (I wonder if some of the ST songs/themes are "inspired by" other sources or something like that that could possibly have led to legal issues if they were sold in an album.) |
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Packs 7-10, 4-5
After recording, I happened to be checking out an old Japanese wrestling video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH9__Cg2mqI in the archive of Fire Pro edit wrestler creator Rev ( @goodreverend2k1 ), and realized that wrestler with what I thought might have been a sunny-side-up egg on the top of his head in pack 5 was probably meant to be the wrestler in this footage: Curry Man! Checking his name in Fire Pro just now, he's in there as "Ramen Mask." ^ _^
And what looks like a tiny Zangief? A good neighbor for Spike's bootleg Wolf Hawkfield. = D |
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The tiny Zangief in Spike DLC pack 5 is "This Bastard" "Gebid" according to my phone's Google Translate app. But in one of the later DLC packs there's a taller, straight-up "Red Cyclone" "Zangief"!
I sorted through Spike's 298 fantasy DLC wrestlers and whittled them down to the 168 I could fit in the game at a time, alongside the 48 non-fictional DLC wrestlers, and the 220 base game wrestlers, and got my selections all imported into the game.
Finally figured out what was causing that warning after the game's intro, too--DLC real wrestler Barry Windham and DLC fantasy wrestler--well, he's swiped from Virtua Fighter--Wolf Hawkfield weren't assigned to any of the game's wrestling organizations for some reason, so they'd just been shoved into a "Uninitialized group 4" org. They still showed up at wrestler select for Exhibition matches, though. : P Anyway, I moved 'em into actual groups and the warning finally went away.
I THOUGHT it had been a sign I was missing DLC moves, but no; the translated versions of the moves would probably have been fine--not that it matters, since I don't plan to be doing move editing. Did find out though that according to https://www.reddit.com/r/firepro/comments/ddybnv/fire_pro_wrestling_d_saves_with_dlc_included/ , "DLC" moves 57-99 are "backported" from Fire Pro Wrestling Z (JP PS2, came out before Returns)--I suppose by fans? Which would explain the Decepticon icon on them in the DC BIOS... Those moves appear--at least in VMU Explorer's interface--to be all in English, so why bucanero.com.ar presents vanilla AND "English Translated" versions of them, I'm not sure...maybe the vanilla versions still show up with Japanese names in-game, I don't know--I tried wading through the move assignment menu to see if I could spot what I thought might be missing move assignments for some DLC wrestlers, but quickly got horribly confused. ; D
Sort of bummed that a lot of the base wrestlers don't have nicknames entered for their entries in the common English rename file. I tracked down the Japanese one for Curry Man and edited what I could fit of it into my local version of the rename file...but I guess I'm not gonna go do that for the 219 other base characters, uh... ... I think. I WILL be translating (badly) the nicknames of the DLC wrestlers (already did the 48 real wrestlers' nicks) I've imported--still gotta do the names of almost all the fantasy wrestlers, too. = o |
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After recording, I decided I am NOT going to redo the rename file after all...because then I would feel like I should also redo the rename files for G and Returns, which removed Spike's nicknames for the base wrestlers just like the rename file for D did. I suppose if I, say, redid the one for Returns, with its 345 base wrestlers, that would give me almost all if not all of the translations--which Returns already has in English--needed for D and G as well, and it would "just" be a matter of plugging those in, but eh it would still be a bunch of work--and anyway, who am I to seek to replace the longstanding rename files with my own, completely unqualified efforts? (Also I suspect Returns' English nicknames may be slightly watered down?) So I'll content myself with translating G's wacky DLC character nicknames, which I don't think anyone has bothered with before. And maybe GameFAQs WILL let me upload my selected and translated DLC character expansion files? 'Cause there are edit files uploaded for Returns, for instance. I'll give it a shot, at least.
The " katakana modifier mark in the game's font is tiny and somewhat indistinct, so even my Android Google Translate phone app is having trouble reading it. : P This would all be going faster if I hadn't let my katakana knowledge rust all to heck once the PS3 pretty much killed import gaming. ; D
Oh, "You wa shock!" ("You are shock") is from the first opening theme song for Hokuto no Ken / Fist of the North Star: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p18E4aRHeiY
That name that looked kind of like 井川 was a puzzle: it COULD be the kanji for "well" and "river," according to what I could Google up (I have no actual Japanese language knowledge!!!!) but together they just seem to make the Japanese first name "Takao," and that didn't seem to fit here because they already HAD a first name, "Keiichi." AND the left leg of the kanji curves outward at the bottom, whereas whatever this in-game character was was straight down--just like a "#" hash mark (I think I kept referring to it as a "hashtag" ; P)--BUT it wasn't one of the TWO hash marks in the game's punctuation list. So... IS it a kanji? And isn't it frustrating for Japanese users that they can't enter the vast majority of kanji in the game--unless I'm missing some input method, which is quite possible? Eh anyway so I just put it as Google Translate kept rendering it, "#river" : P.
And then there was "Marine Boy" with the surprisingly off-color and elaborate "Man with the White ..." nickname...where I opted to avoid the eh risque translation and just put in an ellipsis (the Japanese "mid-line"--mid-character-height--ellipsis 3-ten rīdā ("3-dot leaders")--Wikipedia) to leave it up to the imagination--or to my memory. ... It looks like the Google Translate phone app had an incorrect, more risque translation, and really it was just what Translumo said a few times--so the nickname that fits is probably "Has White Poo"; I'll have to go back and fix that. ; D Google Translate might have struggled with this because the central character in the word in question is the circle mark, 〇, which is used in Japanese to censor a sensitive word/character; but I couldn't find a Google search result corroborating the word that the Google Translate phone app thought was being censored there.
Used various katakana charts but for the sake of expediency I'll try to stick to using Wikipedia's, on my phone. |
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Hulk Hogan is already in the game under a pseudonym--I think I'd overlooked him before in this Fire Pro 'cause he's in the freelancer category--as are the Steiner Brothers. This DLC "Steiner Grench" looks sort of like a contemporary (2001) Hogan, and the superlative nickname suggests it is meant to be Hogan--I think? But I don't know much about actual wrestlers--and I have no idea what "Grench" would refer to, aside from just being a funny name, like "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." Maybe a heel Hogan character--I'll have to do a Grench v Hogan match and see how their moves compare!
I got the Dreamcast VMU icons shown at the start from http://dcvmuicons.net ; they're ICONDATA.VMI/VMS files, you just put (with vmuexplorer, if you're doing this with virtual VMUs for an emulator in Windows) the pair you want in the VMU you want to have display them, and that's it! |
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| | | Download added: dlc_216_eng.zip (85884 bytes)
"SYS & 4 expansion files w/ translated DLC wrestlers"
I (relying almost entirely on Google Translate and Translumo) translated the wacky Spike-created nicknames of the Spike DLC's 48 real wrestlers, and as many of what appeared to me to be its most interesting fictional wrestlers as the game can have loaded at once--168--and exported them as Dreamcast-importable VMI/VMS files from my Flycast virtual VMUs with vmuexplorer. My software and I also translated the names of the fictional wrestlers; the names of the real wrestlers came from readmes in the file repository from the criticalclub forum thread linked above. Aside from 16 translated fictional wrestlers I added to it, the included SYS file, originally downloaded the bucanero page, inherited the ability to unlock all of the game's hidden base wrestlers. |
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All done with the wrestler translations!
I've uploaded DCI-format versions to GameFAQs; if they accept them, they should appear there in a few days...or maybe longer? Dunno now long they take to process DC save files.
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The katakana table on Simple English Wikipedia https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana includes the "y" sounds and others that AREN'T IN the more jumbled and harder to read regular Wikipedia page. : P |
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I kept calling Battle Royale "Royal Rumble." = P It was a little inconvenient with my four simulated controllers in--so I could have 8 VMUs for possible DLC files = P--'cause I had to switch my one actual controller to them one-by-one in the emulator to then have them switch to CP(U).
I think I might've kept calling Victory Road Kai "Fighting Road" Kai. = P "Fighting Road" is the story mode in Fire Prowrestling G on PS1; Victory Road Kai in Fire Pro D seems to be a series of Championship Belt match gauntlets, no story. (I've read stuff suggesting that beating these is what reveals the game's hidden characters, and indeed with the SYS file I originally downloaded from a fan site that unlocked all those hidden characters, the belts were already completed--but you can do them over if you want.) |
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| | | | GameFAQs accepted my saves with the DLC name/nickname translations; they can be downloaded from https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/dreamcast/580485-fire-prowrestling-d/saves |
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| | | | Wolf Hawkfield is also in Fire Pro G! |
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