Could SRW Compact 2 Trilogy Go Full Color?

I wasn’t planning to announce another project today. Honestly, I was just doing a little Super Robot Wars research, trying to figure out which games still haven’t received a proper English fan translation. You know how it goes: you open one tab, then another, and suddenly an hour has disappeared.

At some point I asked AI to help me check the list, and one name kept catching my eye: Super Robot Wars Compact 2. Not just one game, either. Three games on the original monochrome WonderSwan. As far as I could find, the trilogy still doesn’t have a complete, playable English translation.

And of course my first reaction was, “Wait… all three are still sitting there?” I already have SRW F and F Final on my plate, so the sensible thing would have been to close the browser and get back to work. Naturally, I did the exact opposite.

I started poking around, looking at gameplay videos and screenshots, and eventually ended up staring at Super Robot Wars Compact 3 on the WonderSwan Color. And there it was: that familiar little SRW look, except this time the battle scenes and maps were actually in color.

That gave me one of those dangerous little ideas: what if I translated the entire Compact 2 trilogy and made a Full Color DX version at the same time?

From a first glance, Compact 3 looks closely related to Compact 2 in how it presents its battles, menus and maps. My hunch is that the later game’s technology could teach me a lot about adding color to the earlier trilogy. Maybe some of its graphics routines or data formats could even serve as a useful reference. But that’s a hunch, not a technical finding yet. I still need to pull the games apart and see whether the similarities go deeper than the screenshots.

For all I know, I’ll spend a weekend buried in hex dumps only to discover that my brilliant shortcut wasn’t a shortcut at all. That’s ROM hacking for you.

Still, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. So I took a couple of actual Compact 2 screenshots and played with some color concepts, using the much more modest look of Compact 3 as a rough inspiration. This is the sort of before-and-after I have in mind:

Nothing here is running in an emulator yet. The color images are visual mockups, not screenshots from a working DX hack, and they’re not proof that I’ve solved the hardware or engine side of things. I just wanted to see how the idea might feel before diving into the real work.

But imagine it for a second: all three Compact 2 games in English, the original story and progression carried from one part to the next, with maps and battles finally getting a color treatment that still feels right at home on a WonderSwan Color. Not some flashy modern remake. Just the games we already know, given a little more life.

Will I pull it off? I genuinely don’t know. I’ve barely started looking into the technical side, and there are plenty of things that could go wrong. So please don’t read this as a release announcement or a promise that a finished DX patch is on the way. Right now, it’s just an idea I’m excited enough about to share. Super Robot Wars Compact 2 Trilogy — English + Full Color DX might be my next project. Or it might become a very educational pile of disassembly notes. We’ll see!

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been daydreaming about lately. What do you think? Have you played the Compact 2 trilogy? Would you want to see it translated, and how do you feel about a proper color edition? If you know anything about the Compact 2/3 engines, I’d love to hear that too.

Leave a comment and tell me what you think—even if it’s just to say this sounds completely crazy. I really do read your comments, and seeing other people get excited about these odd little games gives me a lot more motivation to keep digging. Besides, sometimes the best projects begin with a silly idea and a few people saying, “Hey, why not give it a try?”

Image note: the black-and-white frames are original game screenshots supplied for this post. The color frames are speculative artwork based on those images, not playable ROM output.