Rune Worth

Rune Worth is one of T&E Soft’s most ambitious MSX2 role-playing games, but its large amount of Japanese text makes it difficult to approach without a translation. That challenge—and the opportunity to make a major story-driven MSX game accessible to more players—is what first drew me to the project.

The project began in 2019, when I contacted Rieks and suggested working on Rune Worth alongside our other translation work. He told me that he had already experimented with the game around 2004, replacing some Japanese text with English using a hex editor, and agreed that it could be a strong translation project.

We began investigating the game together. I extracted its font and studied how its scripts were stored, while Rieks helped convert the character set into a Unicode reference and translated the opening system menu. From that exchange came the first text table, system-text dump, and the technical foundation for a proper English version.

After that initial work, however, the project did not progress. The files and discoveries remained, but Rune Worth stayed untouched for several years.

In 2026 I spoke with Rieks about returning to it. His interests had moved elsewhere and he was no longer keen to take on the game. Rather than let the early work disappear, I decided to continue Rune Worth myself and finally carry the translation forward.

Restarting the project also meant rebuilding its development workflow. I converted the earlier Z80-based tools into Python utilities and moved the project to a cross-development environment. This made testing, rebuilding, and repeating changes significantly faster.

That approach grew out of my work on Illusion City, the first project where I used a wide variety of Python tools and a complete cross-development workflow. Burai improved that process, and Rune Worth has taken it another step further. Its code and text systems required a different approach, particularly because the game has much less free space, so I also developed new compression techniques to make the English text fit.

At this point, all of the main game code has been disassembled and recoded to support a variable-width font and the other changes required by the English version. The main game screen has also been altered so that the longer English body-status labels fit cleanly within the interface.