I spent a couple of days on investigating why some NTSC-U/PAL games display Japanese on my NTSC-J Wii, and finally found out that most games share the same code to detect the system's language. So I made a versatile patcher to make those games display any language they support on my single-language console.

What is it:
This utility patches the main.dol to cheat the game's language detection mechanism. We can force a multi-language game to use specified language rather than the system's language with this utility. This could be useful when we play multi-language games on NTSC-U/NTSC-J consoles, which come without a language option in the system.

How to use it:
- Open ISO with Trucha Signer
- Extract Partition2/SYSFILES/main.dol
- Drag&drop the main.dol to wglp.exe
- Select a language (For example, if you patch an NTSC-U game, please select [1] en)
- Replace Partition2/SYSFILES/main.dol with the patched one and re-sign it
- Burn and play

I tested it with Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicle (U). When I set the language code to 1(eng), everything is in English, including the home button interface. But when I try some European language codes, it still displays English except the health warning screens and home button interface. This is because it is an NTSC-U game. It re-overrides the language code on top of the common detection mechanism. Of course we can still hack it with additional asm code patches, but this utility won't do this for you

Rayman Raving Rabbits (PAL) works perfectly for me, because this is a real multi-language game.

Super Monkey Ball should also be ok.

Cooking Mama (U) can run on NTSC-J Wii after being patched.

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UPDATE (03/15/08):

While the patcher was initially intended to merely change the language a multi-lang game uses, a lot of people tried to use it to region-free NTSC-U games for NTSC-J Wii and found that there were still some games refused to work.

So here comes the V2 update. It enables more NTSC-U games to run on NTSC-J consoles and vice versa. Please note that this new hack has no effect for PALNTSC-U. It only works for NTSC-JNTSC-U, and maybe NTSC-JPAL with the help of VMC.

You still need to WBB a game if necessary since this patcher has nothing to do with the firmware update partition!

Download Here

 

You deserve a medal. An awesome one. With loads of shiny bits and shit. This is the news I've been waiting for!

 

Has anyone tried this with SMG USA on Jap Wii?

 

Well done, this is exactly what I'm looking for! A huge boost for Jap wii owners...

 

i see... but Japanese language shouldnt appear on a pal game 2 .

 

@dweirdo: Its not for changing the language to Japanese - its for a small subset of games where the US versions failed to load on JAP consoles, or loaded with the JAP language and no option to change. This allows US games to load in English on a JAP console (or whatever other languages you choose).

 

Nice tool, successfully tested with Family Sky (J) on Wii Pal, to put Automatically the game in english whatever the console language.
Thanks.

 

report:

DQS(USA version), FE(USA version), bomberman land(USA version), SMG(USA version), dragon ball 3(USA version), Nitrobike(USA version) all work fine on JP Wii console.


you can check this out (those game originally can't run on JP console)
http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/index.php/Wii...ty_List:_NTSC-J

 

Just tried Super Mario Galaxy USA version on my JPN wii, and it works perfectly, with of course English text.
Absolute massive respect to you ReturnerS for this extremely quick, and simple method

 

How about Big Brain Academy?