BookStory is a book store business simulator from KairoSoft. Released as freeware, it has only been available in Japanese until now.
Original thread with some more context plus behind the scenes hex editing action!
WINDOWS PLAYABLE ALPHA HERE
MENUS AND UI ELEMENTS ARE 99% TRANSLATED! WE ARE LIVE
Translated strings are located in the translation.csv file. Translated source files and playable binaries are in the en directory.
- English (playable)
- German (not playable yet)
- Romanian (not playable yet)
You should be able to run BookStory_en.exe directly. I've tested it out on Windows 95, 2000, and 10.
If you receive a message like "The program can't start because MSVBVM50.DLL is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem." the fix is to install the VB6.0 Runtime Plus https://sourceforge.net/projects/vb6extendedruntime/
According to joelburget on HN, the following snippet lets you play BookStory on OSX via wine
brew tap gcenx/wine brew install --cask --no-quarantine wine-crossover brew install winetricks winetricks corefonts vcrun6 vb5run native_oleaut32 vcrun2010 richtx32 comdlg32 comctl32ocx wine BookStory_en.exe
If you have trouble getting things running or just want to follow the newest developments, you may join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/XqAhyqyUxU
- Figure out a way to change all the ???s to Japanese characters.
- The font is MS GOTHIC but doesnt seem to be rendering properly
- Translate book and dialogue strings recovered from module.bas
- Identify method of entry in
module1.basand how to patch it. Currently I am editing the .exe directly using VBReFormer but that might not be sustainable since it does some seriously messed up things to the resulting binary.