Mac Classic 2024

It may have taken 28 years for an English port, but it's finally here!! In 1996 Digital Amusement released a Japanese version of Transport Tycoon for Macintosh. An English version was also produced but Microprose chose not to publish it.

In 2023 I worked with Csaboka (who worked on the original translation tooling) to build an English release of Transport Tycoon for Mac. After release it was found that the English translation only applied to the PowerPC binary, while 68k remained in Kanji.

I've been meaning to re-visit this for a long time, but many other projects have got in the way until now.

Technical explanation:

The Macintosh release is a FAT application containing separate PowerPC and 68k executables. THe PowerPC executable is a PEF container stored in the data fork. This is what was modified by the original tooling to produce the initial English release.

The 68k executable is stored in the resource fork with its application data encoded in a DATA resource. After decoding this data I was able to identify the text block and pointer arrays, rebuilt the text using the existing English translations, and updated all pointers. I then re-encoded the data to its original size, and we now have the full FAT translation of 68k + PPC.

Transport Tycoon Patcher

The Transport Tycoon patcher requires an existing installation of the game. It runs on both 68k & PPC systems, and replaces the game executable when prompted for the installed game directory. The patcher can be downloaded below from the Manticore SW website.