Fan patch finally gives Dreamcast wrestler Giant Gram 2000 an English voice

A new fan translation patch for Dreamcast puroresu game Giant Gram 2000: AJPW 3 uses AI tools for graphics work, while a human fan handled the wrestling terms.

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A fan translation patch for the Dreamcast wrestling game Giant Gram 2000: All Japan Pro Wrestling 3 has surfaced on GitHub, promising a fully English version of a title that never left Japan. The project, credited to a user called Levine91, pairs old fashioned romhacking with AI assistance for the fiddly graphical work, and the maintainer says so plainly in the project's GitHub page.

The game itself is a puroresu simulator built around All Japan Pro Wrestling, the kind of licensed wrestling title that rarely gets a Western release because the sport and its roster mean little outside Japan. That makes it a natural target for translation fans, but also a tricky one: wrestling games are stuffed with menu text, move names, commentary graphics and create a wrestler screens, all of which need re-ripping and rebuilding rather than simple text substitution.

Why AI and pro wrestling knowledge both mattered

According to the project notes, the translator describes themselves as “a lifelong pro wrestling fan with extensive knowledge of puroresu as well, so much of this was easy enough to give a proper translation to.” The AI component, by contrast, was used for something less glamorous: automating the extraction and reinsertion of graphics assets, a process the notes describe as heavily AI assisted. The repository includes Python scripts generated with OpenAI Codex, an AI coding tool, though the notes are careful to separate authorship from direction, stating that Levine91 “directed and reviewed the translation project” rather than writing the scripts by hand.

That distinction matters for how the patch should be read. The translation choices, the wrestling terminology and the judgement calls about what counts as a proper rendering came from a person steeped in the subject. The repetitive grunt work of pulling graphics out of a Dreamcast disc image and putting translated versions back in leant on automation. It is a fairly ordinary division of labour for 2026 era romhacking, even if it is unusual to see a project state it this directly.

What is still rough around the edges

The maintainer lists two known gaps. A handful of leftover graphics from the game's NAOMI arcade board version were left untouched, since they do not appear in normal play. More awkwardly, the Create-A-Wrestler mode only has a partial English alphabet available for naming custom wrestlers, something the notes say “may be fixed in a future update.” Two small gameplay tweaks were also folded in: players can now press Y near the ropes to leave the ring at will, rather than waiting to be knocked out, and VS mode now defaults to facing a computer opponent instead of defaulting every match to Player 1 versus Player 2.

The patch itself ships as a single file, GG2000EnglishV1.dcp, applied to a user's own Dreamcast disc image using a separate tool called Universal Dreamcast Patcher. The GitHub repository is explicit that it contains no game files, ROMs or BIOS data of its own: it is the development workflow, scripts and documentation, while the actual patch is distributed as a release attachment that embeds the translated game files as binary deltas. The maintainer also notes that the source tree is not a self-contained reproducible build, since some scripts depend on private game files and intermediate data that were deliberately left out.

What is unconfirmed is how widely the patch has been tested beyond the maintainer's own checks, and how the Create-A-Wrestler lettering issue will be resolved. The discussion thread on r/romhacking has the usual mix of thanks and requests for fixes that tend to follow a fresh romhacking release, but no independent verification yet of exactly which disc revision the patch expects beyond the file details the maintainer supplied.

Sources

Image: GitHub