EasyRPG Blog

When you start a game created with RPG Maker 2000 or RPG Maker 2003, you will be greeted by different startup logos. It is very easy to replace the startup logos with custom ones using a resource editor, so many games and patches use custom logos. As many of you know, RPG Maker 95 and RPG Maker 2000 were unofficially translated into English by a Russian developer using the alias Don Miguel. With his English translation of RPG Maker 2000, it began to spread around the world and translations into other languages began to appear. Many of these translations decided to replace the startup logos, which is what we want to document here.

All these translations are illegal, as they distribute hacked versions of the commercial RPG Maker software for free. RPG Maker was only sold in Japan and a few other Asian countries. But in the early days of the Internet, nobody cared. Here in Germany, the video game magazine Bravo Screenfun even bundled games made with these versions on a CD. Among the most famous are Vampires Dawn and Unterwegs in Düsterburg.

In 2015, Degica released an official English translation, making it finally possible to get a legal version of these great RPG Maker products all over the world.

In the upcoming EasyRPG Player 0.8.1 release (expected this March!) we extract the logos from the engine (RPG_RT.exe) and display them on startup. By default, we skip known startup logos to make the startup faster. This works by calculating the CRC32 checksum of the logo. The logos with checksums are documented below. If you want to see them on startup, you can change this in the settings. (#623, #3096, #3152, #3344)

We know that CRC32 is a terrible hash function, but we did not want to add more dependencies to our code (CRC32 is provided by zlib). For logo detection, this hash function is good enough.

Official Logos

Let’s start with the official logos. RPG Maker 2000 versions before VALUE! (1.50) show three logos, later versions show one logo. RPG Maker 2003 generally displays one logo.

These are the three logos displayed by old versions of RPG Maker 2000. The first one shows ASCII, the company that developed RPG Maker 2000. Later a subsidiary of ASCII, ASCII Visual Entertainment, became independent and renamed itself Enterbrain. The second shows in Japanese Katakana アスキー ツクール シリーズ (ASCII Tsukuru Series). RPGツクール (RPG Tsukuru) is what the RPG Maker is called in Japan. The third shows デジタル (Digital) in the middle and ファミ通 (Famitsu) at the bottom. Digital Famitsu is the in-house software development department. (CRC 0xdf3d86a7, 0x2ece66f9, 0x25c4618f, we found unmodified logos with different hashes 0x6a88587e, 0x4beedd9a, 0x1c7f224b)

With RPG Maker 2000 VALUE! (1.50) and RPG Maker 2003 they reduced the startup time by showing only one logo. On the left is a smaller version of the second logo from earlier RPG Maker 2000 versions, and you can see the Enterbrain logo for the first time. (0x25c4618f)

The official English translation by Degica has a huge Kadokawa logo in the middle, as they are now owned by Kadokawa. (0x91b2635a)

French Versions

Let’s start with the French logos, because there is only one.

This is RPG Maker 2003 1.09 by Rabbi Bodom. The background with the dragon is the cover used by the band “Rhapsody of Music” for “Symphony of Enchanted Lands II – The Dark Secret”. At the bottom left you can see a smaller version of the original logos. (0x476138cb)

Italian Versions

We do not know the original source of this RPG Maker 4.0 logo. According to the logo text, the authors are Bassking, Hel and DragoVerde. (0x8afe1239)

Another Italian version of RPG Maker 2000 displays the text “RPG Maker Italia Presenta” and an image of a green dragon holding a sword and a shield. The green dragon could be related to “DragoVerde” (translated as green dragon). The second names the authors of the translation: Matteo Sciutteri and Christian Crocenzi. The third shows the text RPGツクール2000 with the ツクール overlaid with a green “MAKER” using the Matisse ITC font. This green “MAKER” is used by Don Miguel in the copyright screen of the translated editor. (0x1a1ed6dd, 0xad73ccf5, 0x4ad55e84)

Spanish Versions

Hellsoft is a large RPG Maker community in Spain. They have made several versions of RPG Maker 2000 available under the name RPG Maker PRO. They called it RPG Maker PRO because they rebranded RPG Maker 95 as RPG Maker 2000.

The first version was RPG Maker PRO 1.05. The version number is not related to the RPG Maker 2000 version, but you can see that it must be older than VALUE! because it has three logos. The first shows the text “Este juego ha sido creado por un usario de Hellsoft y no puede ser distribuido sin el consentimento de su propio autor” (This game has been created by a Hellsoft user and may not be distributed without the author’s consent). The second advertises the Hellsoft website and the third is a lens flare with the text “Presenta…” (Presents…) in front of it. (0x5ae12b1c, 0x3d1cb5f1, 0x04a7f11a)

With RPG Maker PRO 1.10 they altered the logos. The first displays now the company name ASCII and the main developer of RPG Maker 2000, Yoji Ojima. The second has a similar style and shows “RPG Maker PRO”. Version 1.10 of this logo lacked the version information which was added with version 1.15 (0x0x2e8271cb). The third advertises the Hellsoft website again. (0x9307807f, 0x652529ec, 0x5e73987b)

These three logos are not from RPG Maker 2000, but from different RPG Maker 2003 games. The first (1.0.2) and the second (1.0.4 and 1.0.7) are almost identical. Both contain copyright information from Enterbrain and Yoji Ojima, and in the background is a monster from the RTP (Runtime Package): バハムート (Bahamut) for the first and 龍 (Ryuu/Dragon) for the second. The third logo (1.0.8 and 1.0.9) shows a 3D rendering of the characters H and 4. The H4 is the version number of the Hellsoft website. (0x4e3f7560, 0x59ab3986, 0xd333b2dd)

This one is finally not from Hellsoft. This is an RPG Maker translation by Makerhack and fdelapena. You know fdelapena as the founder of the EasyRPG project. (0x089fb7d8)

Another Spanish translation of RPG Maker 2000 of unknown origin is SoLaCe. The three screens read “LyNX” (the author), “Presenta” (presents), “SoLaCe”. What “SoLaCe” means is unknown. (0x544ffca8, 0x4fbc0849, 0x7420f415)

Thai Versions

RPG Maker translations into Thai usually include custom fonts. Thai uses combining characters to draw above or below previous glyphs. The RPG Maker 2000/2003 font renderer does not support this. A workaround is to create custom fonts with pre-composed glyphs instead.

One RPG Maker 2000 translation is by “House of the Dev”. They advertise their (defunct) website http://chan024.cjb.net. The second logo just shows “RPG-PROJECT” and the third shows the website again. (0xa8be4ed3, 0xc75ccc6d, 0xcea40e5f)

The RPG Maker 2000 translation by Thaiware uses a background image taken from the Editor’s splash screen. According to AI, the Thai text is “โดย ฒ.ผู้เฒ่าเจ้าเก่า” (translates to “From Th., the old master”) and the website mentioned is http://all4you.web1000.com. Unfortunately, the website is not available on archive.org. (0xc9b2e174)

The RPG Maker 2000 translation by soprasongk uses the same background of an unknown, presumably Thai, village on a rainy day on all three screens. The text on the screens reads “Thaiware RPG Maker Community”, http://rpgmaker.thaiware.com and ASCII. (0x29efaf6a, 0xfeb8f6b2, 0x265855ad)

Patches with custom logos

Assembler patches applied to RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 to add new functionality are quite popular. Some of them replace the logos and not much else.

Gnaf’s Picture Patch claimed to increase the picture limit in RPG Maker 2000, but it is just a rebranded version of VALUE!. (Source: Makerpendium, 0xc5e846a7)

This logo that contains the text “Big Vio Soft” is from the special patch by Rikku2000. It was advertised as a patch for RPG Maker 2000 1.10, but it is just a renamed version of 1.51 with no significant changes. (Source: Makerpendium, the patch also modified the editor splash screen, as shown on Makerpendium, 0x806b6877)

Bonus: Editor splash screen

So much for the logos. Some translations have also changed the editor’s splash. We do not want to discuss them here and fortunately they have already been documented in a forum post on rpg-maker.fr. You can check out all the beautiful screens on that linked site.

This is the splash screen used by the unofficial English translation by Don Miguel. We only included it here because we wanted to show you the “MAKER” using the Matisse ITC font.

As a final splash screen our favourite: A funky cow, used by a Brazilian translation of RPG Maker 2003 v1.09.

We hope you enjoyed our logo showcase and that you will come back to this blog when we release EasyRPG Player 0.8.1.

Disclaimer: The Flatpak has actually been around for 8 months. We just haven’t got round to announcing it yet. 😉

You can get the stable release on Flathub or through Discover, which is a front-end to Flathub. We also offer a Flatpak of the continuous build in our download section.

For the continuous build on Linux we recommend that you use the Flatpak instead of our static binary from now on. It’s tricky to build static binaries for Linux that work on every distribution because of compatibility issues (like an old glibc version), but Flatpak makes this much easier by providing a common build and runtime environment.

What is Flatpak?

Flatpak is a system for building, distributing, and running apps in a well-defined environment. It’s designed to work seamlessly across different Linux distributions. Unlike traditional package formats, Flatpak bundles apps with their dependencies, making them portable across systems.

Flatpak gained popularity with the rise of the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck’s root file system is immutable, and the most convenient way to install software outside of the Steam store that will survive a system upgrade is through Discover.

You can find a more detailed explanation of what Flatpak is in the recent progress report of Dolphin Emulator.

Getting started

Drop your RPG Maker 2000/2003 games in a directory. These games come with an RPG_RT.ldb file. Games can also be in ZIP archives or LZH archives (continuous build required).

The only notable difference to our non-Flatpak versions is the first start. Our Player always uses the working directory when listing games and this is inconvenient for the Flatpak, especially on the Steam Deck. When you launch it from the start menu the working directory is the home directory and when you start it from Steam as a non-Steam game it is /bin. So on the Steam Deck it is unusable unless you know how to change the working directory.

To make this all a bit more user friendly, carstene1ns has created a first start wizard to help you choose your RPG Maker game directory:

To start the wizard again you can use the --first-start command line argument as shown in the screenshot below. Steam calls these arguments launch options. Alternatively you can provide a startup directory with --project-path PATH.

Have fun with your games on the go 😊.

Our last homebrew port of EasyRPG Player was 6 years ago for the Nintendo Switch. Now there’s finally a new one for its predecessor: we’re releasing EasyRPG Player for the WiiU. You can get the wuhb file in our download section (under Continuous builds → Other).

Compatibility is better than on the Wii because the WiiU has more memory (2 GB instead of only 64 MB) and most crash reports we get for the Wii are related to running out of memory because the games are too demanding (and load too many assets).

Please do not get the version available in the Homebrew App Store. This version is outdated and does not work.

Unfortunately, compared to the Wii and Switch, there is very little homebrew available for the WiiU. Except for RetroArch there is a lack of emulators and engine reimplementations (in our case it is the latter) for this platform. Therefore: Port your software to the WiiU! Developing for this platform works really well. Thanks to Aroma, Homebrew is also perfectly integrated into the system menu and several iterations of your homebrew can be tested quickly via FTP.

Authors

The initial port was done by carstene1ns but he was unable to test it due to lacking a WiiU. Ghabry has dusted off his WiiU to finish the port.

As this is not an external contribution: For the authors please simply state EasyRPG Team.

Installation

For running homebrew on the WiiU you need the Aroma environment. We do not support any older environments such as Tiramisu.

We recommend that you put the wuhb file from our download section (under Continuous builds → Other) into a subdirectory of /wiiu/apps on your SD card.

Place the games (valid games have a RPG_RT.ldb file) in directories right next to the wuhb file. Besides game folders we also support games inside ZIP archives and LZH archives. The LZH support is new and was added after the 0.8 release. LZH is popular for RPG Maker 2000/2003 games because the editor can create game bundles using this format.

The RTP (RPG Maker 2000/2003 Runtime Package), which is a collection of common assets used by games, is searched for in /wiiu/data/easyrpg-player/rtp/2000 and /2003.

Technology

The porting was made quite easy because there is a port of SDL2 for the WiiU. SDL2 is an abstraction layer for things such as video, audio and game controllers. So you can run a program (with minor modifications) on any platform that has a port of SDL2.

The Wii port uses SDL1, but there is now an SDL2 port for the Wii. We already played around with and the results were really promising. There will probably soon be an improved Wii port with much better image quality and more features.

Performance issues resolved

For the WiiU port we noticed that it has awful loading times. This is a longstanding problem we have in many of our homebrew ports. The good news: We finally fixed it. We do our own caching now when doing file IO (input/output) on the homebrew platforms. This means the IO performance was also improved on 3DS, Wii, PS Vita and the Switch.

Known issues

The WiiU crashes when launching Yume2kki (ゆめ2っき) from a ZIP archive. We have no idea why that happens and the game works fine when extracted. Note that the game is more than 2 GB in size by now. If you want to play it, attach the WiU’s SD card to your PC and transfer it this way. Sending it via FTP takes several hours!

Reporting bugs

We provide official support for this port. If you think you found a bug please also check the official versions (e.g. in the continuous build of Windows or Linux). Afterwards please report an issue and state whether the bug is WiiU exclusive or a general EasyRPG Player bug.

When can we expect a new EasyRPG Player release?

The last official release of EasyRPG Player was in April 2023. The Player is still under active development, we just have not prepared any official release since then. To enjoy all the new features added since then, you can use our continuous build. The blog post for the new release is currently being prepared. Depending on our free time the release will happen in December or in January but hopefully not later…