Version 2.0 of Willy Wombat English Improvement Patch Is Finally a Full English Translation

This morning, version 2.0 of Exxistance’s Willy Wombat English Improvement patch went live. This patch is markedly more ambitious than its version 1.0 predecessor, going well beyond English menus. Exxistance’s new release is a true, full English translation.

You can download the Willy Wombat English Improvement Patch version 2.0 here!

The first ~35 minutes of Willy Wombat with the English Improvement Patch version 2.0

In December last year, Exxistance released v 1.0 of this patch — full SHIRO! coverage here — which translated the interstitial loading screens, the options menu, the RAM selection screen and the Save/Load menu but notably left in the Japanese subtitles during character dialogue.

A hacker by the name of Vermillion Desserts began their own Willy Wombat translation project in March of 2026 — SHIRO! has all the details here. While rather small in scale, by Exxistance’s own account (see interview below), it was this “English Advancement” effort by Vermillion Desserts that illuminated the path towards the full English translation we see today.  

The Willy Wombat English Improvement Patch GitHub credits Exxistance with translation, texture art, and quality assurance, with special thanks to Bo Bayles, Vermillion Desserts, the Willy Wombat 20th Anniversary website, and Rasputin3000.

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An Interview with Exxistance

SHIRO! reached out to Exxistance, asking if he could share a bit on his journey from Willy Wombat English Improvement version 1.0 to 2.0:

“I was always a bit dismayed that the initial patch wasn’t a full localization since that’s the bar I try to achieve for my projects. So much of the credit for v2.0 has to go to “Vermillion Desserts,” who released their own patch that showed that the game’s subtitle text lived in one of the game’s files (07FILE.BIN). Each dialogue scene in the game has a small font that holds the letters needed for each scene.”
— Exxistance

“I initially tried a similar approach as Vermillion, where I’d draw certain letter combinations in CT2, but the game’s text blitter meant that the spacing would never look quite right, and there wasn’t enough display room to match what the English audio was saying. That can create a jarring experience for a player who is both listening and reading at the same time.”
— Exxistance

“That led me down the path of updating the game’s text blitter so that it could display each letter proportionally. The result meant more characters per line and text that matches the spoken English audio 99% of the time. (A few spoken lines are still longer than the space allows, so in those sentences, the odd word here and there gets trimmed but you don’t notice it too much.)”
— Exxistance

Exxistance Continued recalling his trials and tribulations getting this project to version 2.0:

“The most time-intensive task was actually mapping those subtitles to the English audio. I started doing it manually, listening to each scene and transcribing by hand, but that got tedious pretty fast, so I searched for tooling that would make it less so. Turns out there’s a transcription tool called Whisper that can pull a transcript from an audio file, and from there it was just reviewing, correcting, and timing the corrected text to produce the final subtitles you see in-game.”
— Exxistance

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Applying the Patch

The Following Patching Instructions are from the Willy Wombat English Improvement Patch GitHub repository readme. Please note that the patch has been tested with the Willy Wombat (Japan) game image.

If patching with Sega Saturn Patcher:

1. Download and unzip the Willy Wombat English Improvement Patch bundle
2. Open Sega Saturn Patcher
3. Click “Select Saturn Game”
4. Click “CD Image”
5. Find your original disc image on your computer, then click “Open”
6. Click “+ Game Patch (SSP)” 
7. Locate your unzipped patch bundle, select “Willy_Wombat_English_Translation_v 2.0” and click “Open”
8. Finally, select “Build Image” and choose your desired directory to output the patched game image

If patching with an XDelta patching utility:

1. Download and unzip the Willy Wombat English Improvement Patch bundle
2. Open an XDelta patching utility (e.g. Delta Patcher)
3. For “Original File”, locate Track 01 of the original Willy Wombat game image (i.e. Willy Wombat (Japan) (Track 01).bin)
4. Locate “Willy_Wombat_English_Translation_v2.0.xdelta” in the patch bundle
5. Click “Apply Patch”
6. If successful, Track 01 will be replaced with the patched track