A brand new fan translation patch has just been released for Sega Rally 2006 for the PS2, making it easier than ever to play the Japan-exclusive title.
Sega Rally 2006 is the third game in Sega's classic arcade racing series, following Sega Rally Championship and Sega Rally 2, and is the first to be released exclusively on consoles. Unlike other entries in the series that were released worldwide, Sega Rally 2006 was never officially made outside of Asia, meaning that those who imported it in the past had to contend with the menus being presented entirely in Japanese.
This new patch from Astraxis seeks to remedy that situation, translating several menu items, including the garage and shop menus, pre-race splash screens, sponsorship contract tutorials and objectives, and career mode features.
As the listing on Romhacking.net states, the translation was achieved by editing the core asset file, DATA.FAB, with a hex editor, but has some limitations at the moment.
For one thing, the translation isn't exactly one to one, with the UTF-16LE encoding format meaning that the exact same number of bytes must be used in the English text as the original Japanese. This has led the translator to have to abbreviate quite a lot where possible, as Japanese can often fit a lot more information into a tiny amount of space.
In addition to this, graphics featuring text are currently untranslated, This is because, though the textures files are accessible, there is no easy way at present to edit them directly.
You can download the patch here.