The common PC releases of Rayman all contain data for English, French and German languages. The language setting is determined by the first byte of the configuration file (RAYMAN.CFG) – 00 – English, 01 – French, 02 – German (other values are invalid). Rayman v1.12 allows the language to be chosen by the installation program. Rayman v1.21 took a different approach, and a strange one: the executables of different local release simply force the language of the locale, completely overriding the configuration file. Thus, the ability to switch language on the fly is removed, which is unfortunate.
PluMGMK from the Rayman Pirate Community has provided a patch utility to fix this limitation in the GOG Rayman Forever release (which uses Rayman (US) v1.21), and also documented how it works. Comparing the hex dumps of the patched vs. unpatched executables, and consulting the disassembly (obtained via the DOSBox debugger) I was able to narrow down the required changes to just two bytes, and also port the patch to Rayman (FR) v1.21. The latter uses basically the same code to “force” French, except instead of clearing the registers, it sets their value to “1” (since 0 is English and 1 is French).
Rayman (US) v1.21 Code
B874E81A00 mov eax,001AE874
30FF xor bh,bh
31D2 xor edx,edx
883D350A1B00 mov [001B0A35],bh
E862EAFFFF call ($-159e)Rayman (FR) v1.21 Code
B701 mov bh,01
BA01000000 mov edx,00000001
B874E81A00 mov eax,001AE874
883D350A1B00 mov [001B0A35],bh
E85FEAFFFF call ($-15a1)The DOS executables are PMODE/W compressed, and must be decompressed before patching, as described here. After decompression, the following offsets must be changed (replacing a mov [byte ptr], bh with a move dl, [byte ptr]):
Rayman (US) v1.21 Patch Offsets
0x6D3A3: 88 3D → 8A 15
Rayman (FR) v1.21 Patch Offsets
0x6D3B6: 88 3D → 8A 15
If there exists a German version of Rayman v1.21, I imagine the fix would be similar.
Cloaked Thargoid 