Kit 6 (2026-10-11)

WCCF 2010-11 (Rev D) on a PC - kit 6. Community-made tools for your own copy of the game: a launcher,
stand-ins for the cabinet's hardware and an on-screen panel, so the game's server, the projector and a player
cabinet (seat 1) run on one Windows PC - or play online on a shared server. The game is not included. Download
WCCF-2010-11-kit-6.zip below.

Updating

Close the game, open SETUP.exe and pick the new kit under UPDATE (your club, keys and settings stay); it sets up
the game folder again, and the English if you use it. From a kit without that (Kit 5.4 and older): unzip the new kit
over the old folder, then SETUP.exe - it also removes the old .bat files and ENGLISH.exe.

You need

Windows 10/11 (64-bit) · your own copy of the game, Rev D, as a folder of files · DirectX June 2010 runtime (setup
tells you if it is missing). Python is inside the kit.

Play

PLAY.exe (two windows: the projector and seat 1; online only seat 1 - no projector on players' PCs). Quit by
closing the game's window. Online: SETTINGS > NEXT START: ONLINE, type the server's address, then RESTART
NOW (click it twice).

The zip's SHA-256: 2489cd1a753021aaf439c9708f46e4af631478acc854c1e68293e021906dc2ac

What's new

Changed

• Online: no PC gets the projector any more. The first player to join used to run it as a second window; now every
  PC runs only its own cabinet. The seat desk always answers PROJECTOR 0 (kit 5's PCs follow that too), and
  PLAY.exe server sets the server's WAIT_PROJECTOR=0 - with 1 it would never start a round with no projector
  connected. A projector box that joins by itself still works; it catches up at the next round. PLAY.exe local
  keeps its own projector.
• A start compares the game's copy of the hook (wccfk.dll, in the game and in seat1) with the kit's own and sets
  the game up once if they differ - a newer kit unzipped over this one by hand no longer starts the old hook.
• Hosting a server: the server program now gets the players' messages only whole. Over the internet a message can
  arrive in pieces, and Sega's code for putting pieces back together is broken - the most likely cause of the server
  crash that cuts every player ("WCCF CONTROL NOT FOUND", Error 3000). The kit's hook (wccfk.dll) now holds the
  pieces and hands the server each message only once all of it is there; bytes that cannot be a message are skipped,
  and nobody is disconnected for them. WCCF_WHOLEMSG=0 turns it off. The crash was not reproduced on purpose, so this
  is the likely cause removed, not a proven fix; the keeper's restart stays the safety net.
• Simpler folders. The kit's Python is in code\ (was scripts\); every program, the panel included, is in
  programs\ (was bin\ and overlay\); the panel's picture is in art\; the English tables are in languages\english\ (one folder per language); the catalogue and card pictures SETUP
  makes from your game are in data\cache\. Updating from an older kit and pressing set up moves your catalogue and
  card pictures over (no waiting for them to be made again) and removes the old kit's leftover files and folders -
  anything of yours in those folders stays. Inside code\, the kit's Python is in plain folders with plain names:
  cards\, hardware\, online\, server\, helpers\ (_keys_seat1.py is now hardware\keyboard.py, and so on).
• Updating from an older kit by unzipping it by hand (or saying no to "set up now?") is fine: the first PLAY sets
  the game up for the new helper by itself, as SETUP would, instead of starting the old one Windows Defender deletes.
• The kit's helper no longer gets deleted by antivirus. It used to sit beside the game pretending to be a Windows
  file (winmm.dll), which is how some malware sneaks in - so Windows Defender flagged and deleted it, and the game
  would not start. Now the helper has its own honest name (wccfk.dll) and SETUP simply points the game at it (a
  tiny, exact change it can undo). Turning English on or off keeps it. Nothing else about your game is changed.
• Fewer things that look suspicious to antivirus: the panel no longer writes screenshots of the game to disk
  (wccfpanel_frame.bmp, wccfpanel_atlas.bmp), the scene helper no longer runs tasklist, and SETUP now also
  removes the two old files Windows Defender flagged (overlay\inject.exe, bin\logowin.exe) when you unzip a new
  kit by hand.

Added

• ITALIANO in SETUP.exe's GAME LANGUAGE (and english.py on it): the game in Italian. Each line comes from this kit's
  Italian (languages\italian\screen_text.tsv, 4,477 lines), else Sega's own Italian of the older European WCCF
  (languages\italian\sega_rstring.tsv, 2,705 lines with the same Japanese), else the kit's English - never
  Japanese. The game's font has no accented letters, so the Italian writes them with an apostrophe (perche',
  citta'). Player and CPU team names are the English ones; money stays in dollars. The SETTINGS panel still offers
  only ENGLISH and JAPANESE.

• Every crash of the game, the server or a match engine leaves two memory snapshots in data\dumps (debugger.py):
  a lean one (every thread's stack and the memory it points to - about 1 MB, 90 KB zipped) and a full one (also the
  program's globals - 3.5 MB for the server, 36 MB for a cabinet), the newest 5 of each. The report printed at a
  crash says where; the snapshot holds what is needed to find why. Tested: source\test_crash_dump.py crashes a
  program on purpose under the real launcher.

• The cabinet's link to the server is watched all the time (wccfpanel.dll): data\logs\server_link.txt gets a dated
  line when it comes up and when it drops - before, nothing recorded the player's side of an Error 3000.

• Online, a run that ended badly (a crash, or the server link lost) sends this PC's logs to that server's log inbox by
  itself, with the newest lean snapshots and a report.txt saying why - what SEND LOGS sends: never the club card,
  names on the PC blanked (in a snapshot, with as many underscores, so it still opens). A server out of reach: kept
  as data\report.pending and sent at the next join. auto_logs=0 in data\panel.txt turns it off. Tested on a test
  server: a killed seat (sent at once), a dropped server (kept, then sent at the next join).

Fixed

• A stop no longer loses the end of a cabinet's debug log (data\logs\_dbg_client_seat1.txt): the launcher kept it
  in memory and a stop ends the launcher at once - after an Error 3000 the file was empty. It is now written
  whenever the game is not waiting on it, so SEND LOGS carries the cabinet's side too.
• English: the players' full names (the card name, e.g. Mahamadou DIARRA) were still in katakana; they now use
  Sega's own Latin spelling, accents dropped, like the short names. The second katakana full name stays: the game
  looks player partnerships up by it (partnership.bin).
• English: the last 22 Japanese lines a player can meet - the win/loss/draw marks on the manager's career record
  (W, L, D), the weekdays Monday to Saturday, and 12 supporter-group words (Heroes, Stars, Samurai, Tigers, ...).
  7,200 lines are now in English; only the debug menus stay Japanese.
• english.py check names the screen lines still in Japanese, so a gap shows without a survey.
• Not in this kit yet: the six team stats around the hexagon and OK / BACK redrawn in English (and Italian). The
  redrawing works, but with the redrawn pictures in the game's archive the game gave every club card straight back
  instead of reading it - so it is switched off, and those pictures stay Japanese. The code is kept for a fix
  (WCCF_PICTURES=1 turns it on to test one).
• The game no longer refuses to start just because the card CATALOGUE has not been built. The catalogue is only the
  panel's card browser; now the game starts and only the catalogue is empty (SETUP rebuilds it).
• The card-overwrite switch (SW1) no longer has a key by default. On Sega's card-recovery screen SW1 means "write
  the backup over your Club Card", and it used to be the 8 key - one stray press could roll your card back. SW1
  and SW2 now have no key unless you set one in KEYS.
• Closing the game during a manager transfer now warns you too. When your contract ends and the game is making your
  new club, closing the window used to close with no warning and cost that new club a bad ending - the warning only
  watched your old card. Now it (and the SETTINGS > RESTART NOW gate) watch both cards.
• The game no longer fails to start because a log file is open. If something is holding a file in the logs folder
  (an antivirus, or you viewing a log), the kit sets that folder aside and starts anyway, instead of failing every
  time until the file is released. (source\test_rotate_logs.py.)
• Online: your live match can no longer be hijacked. The match relay now treats a seat as belonging to the address
  that holds it, so a stranger sending "I am seat n" from somewhere else is ignored while you are playing. Before,
  anyone could redirect another player's match to themselves and drop them to a CPU game. (source\test_relay.py.)
• Online: a brief network blip no longer loses your seat. The kit now reconnects to the server's seat desk and
  re-claims the same seat; before, one missed reply ended the hold for good and the server freed your seat under
  the running game. (source\test_seat_lease.py.)
• Online: two PCs can no longer land on the same seat. If the server's seat desk was slow or gave an odd answer,
  the kit used to start on seat 1 anyway - so a second PC could take seat 1 and one of them never got into the game.
  Now it only plays "as before" when a server genuinely has no seat desk; otherwise it stops with a clear message
  and offers local play. (source\test_take_seat.py.)
• A long game is no longer force-closed. Before, any session was killed after 12 hours even in the middle of a
  match, which costs your club card a bad ending. Now a run ends only when you close the game window.
• Your club card can no longer be lost to a busy file. When the card cannot be saved to disk because something else
  (an antivirus scan, a backup tool, a search indexer) is holding the file, the kit now keeps your newest card in
  memory and tries again - the card on disk stays your last good one. Before, it would write the card straight over
  the file as a last resort, which could leave a half-written, unusable card.
• A damaged or wrong-size card file no longer locks you out. The game now still opens with a new blank card (so you
  can use CLUB CARD), and your unreadable file is kept safe as a .bad copy so it can be recovered. Before, the game
  would simply fail to start, with nothing on screen to say why.
  (The card reader now has an automated test for both - source\test_icc_reader.py.)

Every change: CHANGELOG.md