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A 15-Year Fan Project Translates Falcom's 1994 PC Engine CD RPG The Legend of Xanadu Into English by Recompressing the Entire Game to Fit in Memory
Homebrewer Elmer and translator SamIam released xdelta3 patches that decompress Falcom's files, apply the English text, and recompress the whole game with a tighter method so the longer English script still fits the PC Engine's limited memory, with no AI text and no AI-generated code.
English is a bulky language to fit into a 1994 console. Translate a Japanese script and the lines get longer, and on the PC Engine’s Super CD-ROM² there is not much room to put them. The team behind the new fan translation of Falcom’s The Legend of Xanadu solved that by rebuilding the game’s compression rather than trimming the words.
Their patching program, as the project’s GitLab README describes it, “decompresses Falcom’s files, applies the changes, and then finally recompresses the entire game using a more-efficient compression method so that the translated game still fits within the limited memory available on the PC Engine console.” It ships as a set of xdelta3 patches and a patcher you compile yourself, rather than a ready-made game image.
The game itself is one of the PC Engine’s hidden Falcom RPGs, the eighth entry in the Dragon Slayer series, following Prince Arios as he defends the land of Macria. It never left Japan. Owners who want to play it in English now point the patcher at a redump-compatible rip of their own CD, which the README insists you must actually own: “In order to legally use the patches and the patching program, you must own the original PC Engine game CD-ROM.”
The patch comes from homebrewer Elmer and translator SamIam, and according to Time Extension, which reported the release, the work has been in progress “for almost 15 years.” The timing was deliberate. Time Extension writes that the team wanted it out “before anybody else cheapshotted them by taking the A.I. route.”
The README makes the same point without the hedge, in bold: “This project uses no AI-translated English text or AI-generated code.” It credits the result instead to “years of hard work, a passion for the original game created by Yoshio Kiya and his team at Falcom, and lots and lots of coffee.”
Not everything that was planned shipped. The team meant to redub the game’s spoken dialogue into English, but Time Extension reports that this “proved too time-consuming” and was dropped. The patch covers the text; the voices stay Japanese.
The team is not done. Time Extension reports they have already started on the 1995 sequel, The Legend of Xanadu II, and expect a beta patch “in the very near future.” So the project that spent fifteen years on the first game is lining up the second, which leaves the obvious question of whether the hardest compression work carries over or has to be solved again for a different disc.