v1.7.0 — Language packs

Vandal Hearts — PC Port v1.7.0

A native PC port of Vandal Hearts (US, SLUS_004.47). You must supply your own
legally-owned disc image (.bin); the download does nothing without it.

The port can now display the game in another language, loaded from an optional language pack
beside the executable. The base build still ships no game text and behaves identically without a
pack; normal mode remains byte-for-byte the retail game. Packs are a community effort — this
release ships the engine and the complete authoring toolchain, not translations.

Added

• Language packs. Install a pack under langpacks/<name>/ and pick it with the new
  LANGUAGE option (SELECT+START overlay, System) — the one overlay setting that is not live:
  the choice is marked * and applies at the next launch. A pack covers everything the game
  draws: story dialogue, menus, battle messages, item/spell names and descriptions, character,
  class and terrain names, the text hardcoded in the game's code, Tactical Mode's text, and the
  save-slot captions (translated at display time, so save files stay language-neutral and
  portable). A pack is a diff — untranslated entries simply stay English. Player guide:
  language-packs.md.
• Non-Latin scripts. Accented Latin (French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Spanish…) renders
  with no extra art — letterforms are composed from the game's own font. Scripts the game has
  never drawn ship their own glyph sheets, rasterised from GNU Unifont by the tooling and
  hand-tweakable: Cyrillic and Greek are proven in game. Packs can also opt into true
  mixed-case rendering (--mixed-case) instead of the retail ALL-CAPS folding.
• Longer item names (pack format 2). A pack can store item names as 16 characters instead of
  the retail 8, rendered through the small font across the shop, depot and battle screens — the
  difference between MEGAHERB and a real translation. A build that doesn't understand a pack's
  format refuses it loudly and keeps English — never garbled text.
• Localized backgrounds. A pack can replace backgrounds with text baked into the art (the
  title card, signposts) with translated versions — same content-hash mechanism as the HD pack,
  and a translated background takes priority over the HD one. They render at every INTERNAL RES
  setting (at 1× the art is downscaled to native resolution) and need nothing from the player —
  no HD pack required.
• The authoring toolchain
  (hands-on quickstart ·
  reference):
  export the game's complete text from your own disc into a translator working set (every entry
  carries its English source and its display limit), translate, merge, validate against the
  engine's real limits (hard rules + on-screen fit lint), and build. Non-Latin packs derive and
  rasterise exactly the glyphs a translation needs. Game text is never committed to the
  repository — everything regenerates from the disc.

Changed

• The console is quiet by default. Recurring per-event lines (per-table pack loads, per-scene
  HD replacements, per-movie decoder open/close) are now behind VH_VERBOSE=1 (env or ini). The
  boot summary and every warning still always print — a refused or damaged pack says so loudly.
• The issue template asks about language packs, and the documentation covers them throughout (the
  Player Manual, configuration reference, feature guide, and a
  translator entry point in
  the README).

Downloads

Platform	File	How to run
Windows 10/11	VandalHearts-v1.7.0-windows-x64.zip	Unzip; put your disc in a game\ folder next to vandalhearts_pc.exe; run it.
Linux (glibc ≥ 2.34)	VandalHearts-v1.7.0-linux-x86_64.AppImage + vandalhearts.ini	Put both together; put your disc in a game/ folder beside the .AppImage; chmod +x and run. Needs FUSE2.
Any	VandalHearts-v1.7.0-Manual.pdf	The Player Manual: setup, controls, features, troubleshooting.
Optional	VandalHearts-v1.7.0-hdpack.zip	HD backgrounds + movies. Unzip so hdpacks/ sits beside the executable. Unchanged since v1.6.1 — keep yours if you have it.

Config: edit vandalhearts.ini next to the executable (window scale, audio, etc.).

Note on contents

A release binary embeds a portion of game-derived data (the executable's static
data segment, a small BIOS-derived font, reconstructed tables) so the port can
run — © Konami / © Sony, no ownership claimed. It is a fraction of the game; the
bulk loads from your own disc at runtime. See NOTICE/DISCLAIMER.

Verify downloads against SHA256SUMS.txt.

Optional HD pack

VandalHearts-v1.7.0-hdpack.zip — higher-resolution backgrounds + re-encoded FMV
movies. Optional; the game runs identically without it. Unzip so hdpacks/
sits next to the executable, then enable HD PACK in the Select+Start options
(see docs/hd-pack.md). This is upscaled derivative art (© Konami), provided for
convenience and also buildable from your own disc — see NOTICE / DISCLAIMER.