Rockman ZX (Mega Man ZX) - Full Undub (2024)

Hello guys!

Everyone knows Mega Man ZX had all the awesome voice acting removed from it during localization.

Until today, we had only one option to play the game while enjoying the removed voice acting: the Magic Fish mix (man, that thread is 10 years old).

Unfortunately, that modification of ZX has a flaw: it was essentially just a file swap which put some English text and graphics from the American version into the Japanese one. While that worked to some degree (you could at least successfully play the story with voice acting), the game crashed under a lot of circumstances like talking to NPCs or checking the database. This was mainly due to the bigger size of the English text files, which the Japanese ROM didn't allow for. To stop the crashing, all the text files that caused it were restored to their Japanese versions, which resulted in gibberish in all texts aside from main story. This was taking away a huge chunk of the game by making it impossible to understand, and was very disappointing. And that's why I don't consider the Magic Fish mix a good way to play the game.

I was looking for a way to fix it and finally play Rockman ZX the right way for a long time, and finally, about a year and a half ago, I stumbled across a project of pt-BR translation of this game. To my surprise, the guys behind it (Solid One and DiegoHH) have done a magnificent job hacking the game and producing a text-editing tool. What's even cooler, they found a way around all the problems and crashes, and their hacked ROM allowed for bigger size of text files!

Of course, I immediately contacted Solid One, and he agreed to help me on my quest of making a full undub of the game.

That's how the story began. Next, over the course of 2016 and 2017, we were working simultaneously: Solid One worked on his pt-BR translation, and I was modifying the game's text and graphics to produce a full undub using his tool and DiegoHH's hacking solutions. The road wasn't perfect: a lot of new features and fixes were implemented during this process, we helped each other a lot and did a lot of testing. Despite all difficulties, this was a pleasant and new experience for me (I've never done anything related to game hacking/modification before).

Finally, it's done.
So there you have it:

Rockman ZX: Full Undub
Technically not an undub: instead of transferring Japanese audio into American ROM, we transferred English text, graphics and some more features to the Japanese ROM

- Every piece of voice acting is present;
- No crashes, game should be playable in every aspect;
- Magnificent ASM hack from DiegoHH: a subtitle feature originally present only in the European version was added to the game's FMV cutscenes;
- All in-game terminology is restored to original;
I know some of you guys won't be very happy to see "Rockman" and "Irregulars" instead of "Mega Man" and "Mavericks", but my goal was to make a full undub including such changes.
- The undub was tested and confirmed fully working on DeSmuME and Acekard 2i flashcart;
- We know for sure it won't work on old R4 flashcarts from 2008, and unfortunately this is impossible to fix.

Also, not a problem or a bug, but you should be aware: due to English game script being much longer than the Japanese one, not all dialogue boxes ended up having an associated voice clip. It doesn't mean some clips are lost. It just means that some blocks of text which fit into one box in Japanese, now have to be split in two due to a longer text (Japanese text is much more compact than English). The voice for such two split blocks plays during the first of them, so if you wanna hear everything, don't scroll the dialogues too fast. Technically, this is fixable by completely rewriting all the game's text to fit the original number of blocks, but no volunteers so far.

Tools used:
Solid One's Mega Man ZX text dumper/inserter tool for dealing with game text scripts
DiegoHH's tool for unpacking and repacking subtitle files from ZX/ZXA
Tile Molester for editing graphics
DSLazy for ROM packing/unpacking
jEdit for convenient text editing
Crystal Tile 2 for uncompressing and recompressing the arm9.bin
HxD and Translhextion for some hex editing

Credits and thanks:
Solid One for his great help and support, and also tools he wrote for modifying this game
DiegoHH for useful tools he developed and impressive ASM hacking that has made this whole project possible
Geo a.k.a. illuminor (me) for putting this together, which took much more time and effort than it may seem, even though I had a lot of help

A .zip file containing the patch is attached to the post. It includes a README, which you should read.

Please don't ask for ROMs or links to download them.

P.S. Even though the patch has been thoroughly tested, there's always a possibility for new bugs, problems or mistakes to be discovered. Please report them here.

Enjoy playing!

Also check out the undub of Rockman ZX Advent.