After 36 years, King's Bounty has been translated into Russian
Recently, gamers were reminded of King's Bounty from 1990 for the DOS platform. An unofficial Russian translation has been released for the classic fantasy role-playing strategy game.
Long-time franchise fan Alexander Tyupin wanted more people to learn about King's Bounty and decided to prepare a localization. He is a programmer, but "does not understand" DOS architecture, assembly, and low-level programming "in general," so he used modern AI technologies like Claude: "Without it, I would have spent ten times more time and given up halfway."
Alexander said that the game has "just under a thousand short lines" of text. The translation itself was not a problem, but there were certain technical nuances.
For example, there are spells "Castle Gate" and "City Gate." In the original King's Bounty, players select a letter on the keyboard that corresponds to the first letter of the castle's name, for example, "F" will take them to Faxis castle; however, there are no names on the screen — just a list of letters:
How to localize this is unclear. Replace letters? Intercept keyboard calls? How to re-sort them? What if there is no Cyrillic on the keyboard?
In the end, Alexander used Claude to write a new interface. The AI "sketched out a solution" in assembly, and after several rounds of debugging, everything worked. The developer said that the same memory area was used for the patch as for the relocated strings.
Alexander Tyupin launched a web-based patcher. Players just need to find the original King's Bounty (1990) for DOS and upload the necessary files through the interface — then they can get the Russian version of the game.
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