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Transport Tycoon English Patch (FAT) for Macintosh
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.
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4 Comments
Bolkonskij
11 September 2026
This is such a cool thing to have! Thank you for your effort! Although I need to figure out how to get Transport Tycoon installed. Took the image from the Garden but since my system isn't Japanese, it just displays garbled text. I can get the installer to do something but it just produces a single exe file instead of a Transport Tycoon folder. Hmm. I need to figure that one out.
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Greystash - Admin
12 September 2026
No problem! I've just uploaded a pre-installed archive of the translated game at Macintosh Garden, hopefully that works for you!
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12 September 2026
That is very kind of you, thanks! I did play around with it a bit more, and I actually get the impression that the .iso on the Garden doesn't install a folder, but just the exe file as standard. The patch, however, is looking for a folder to install into. If I manually create a folder called Transport Tycoon ƒ and place the Transport Tycoon icon into it, the patcher finds the folder it expects to install into. However, the game won't start in this case and reports: "That’s all folks. Error opening kanji font file." I'll try your pre-installed version next. Thanks for supporting classic Macs! :)
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Greystash - Admin
12 September 2026
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