[Banjo]

Hi, so I was thinking this would be an easy one to answer, but I'm surprised that I can't seem to find (anywhere, not just here) any romhacks that either:

A) Translate the original Japanese "Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari" into English.
or
B)Restore the graphics/look of the original game to "River City Ransom".

I would think the second would be quite (comparatively) easy by the standards of some of the amazing romhacks I've seen, but a translation of the original game (keeping the Japanese names for Kunio, etc.) would be even better but a rather large project, I expect. That said, games like the Final Fantasy series or Chrono Trigger have *multiple* translations and re-translations, which must have taken years to do! So maybe it's just a lack of interest? I was surprised mainly (and keep thinking I've just missed an obvious link to this hack) because RCR is one of the most popular/well-known NES games around... heck, we're getting sequels to it to this day.

Can someone maybe let me know if there *is* such a romhack somewhere (even unfinished)?

I know almost nothing about romhacking myself, or I'd give it a try myself! Heck, if someone gave me a few pointers, I'd see if I could try to replace a few sprites at least, but so far my efforts to figure out NES graphics hacking have met with dismal failure.

[4l3j4ndr0]

Try whit tilemolester and Tilelayerpro.
Edit the sprites and redraw will take some time but is possible.

The real challenge here is if you need to change colors, that will require to find the pallets and modify it by using tracing, debugger or hexeditors.

So for now mess around whit those graphics editors.

[Jorpho]

There's an Abandoned project for the X68k version which I've been hoping someone would pick up again.  Seems it makes some interesting improvements to the original.

[Banjo]

Thanks for the tips and tool suggestions!

I'm happy to have a go, as I love the idea of romhacking (I love modding other games) but have always found the tools/skillset really daunting for some reason. Would restoring at least some of the DNM graphics to RCR be possible via "copying-and-pasting" manually between the roms using such tools?

Also, I guess I'm just surprised nobody has done a hack similar to this already, given the popularity of the Kunio series and RCR itself (there are games that are a *lot* more obscure that get fantastic hacks and translations!), so I didn't want to start on this then discover it had already been done.

EDIT: Had a quick play with Tile Molester Pro and saw that I could swap the sprites/graphics to a certain extent, but the RCR colours (palette) remain, so even though Kunio's sprite is used, he's still colored (i.e. different shirt/pants) like Alex. Given what was said about palette difficulties, I am wondering now if "translating" the Japanese rom would be less work than restoring graphics to the US rom...

[#]

EDIT: Had a quick play with Tile Molester Pro and saw that I could swap the sprites/graphics to a certain extent, but the RCR colours (palette) remain, so even though Kunio's sprite is used, he's still colored (i.e. different shirt/pants) like Alex. Given what was said about palette difficulties, I am wondering now if "translating" the Japanese rom would be less work than restoring graphics to the US rom...

Changing the palettes is easy too. There are several tools to make it a fairly straightforward job(though there can be some exceptions which require some light debugging). Even the most complicated palette conversions should be far less work than translating Japanese version to English. Though looking at the cutting room floor article ( https://tcrf.net/River_City_Ransom ) it might be worth translating it anyway for the other regional differences.

[Googie]

A) Translate the original Japanese "Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari" into English.

I'd die a happy man when the day this game gets the English love treatment. I beat RCR on the NES when I was a kid, seeing the Japanese version get an English translation is like a dream to me right now.   

[BeaterEngineering]

I think there's an already translation for this one.