GETTING WINDOWS XP/7/8 TO PLAY OLDER RPGMAKER GAMES.

A step by step guide.

RPGMaker 2000/2003 games not working? Compatability issues? Odd scaling? Well fear no more - this guide will solve all your problems! (Hopefully.)

First, an explanation to the people like me who had no knowledge of compatability issues. (...Maybe I'm the only one?) Later versions of the Windows OS are programmed in such a way that they cannot run old programs. This could be the RPGMaker game scale, the 256 colours issue etc. It's pretty stupid but good news, totally fixable.

Step 1) Right click on the program RT or .exe file and select Run as Administrator. This is some advice I came across while trying to remedy the issue for myself but it didn't do anything for me. Should be the first thing to try.

Step 2) In the case that step 1 doesn't work... right click again and select Troubleshoot Compatability. Select the second option, Troubleshoot Program. Tick all options that specifically apply to you as well as: The program opened in earlier versions of Windows but won't open now. You will then be prompted to choose the Windows OS the program worked on, choose Windows XP (Service Pack 2).

If, like me, the problem is your display you should also select: The program opens but does not display correctly, Program does not display properly when large font scale settings are selected and Error message saying the program needs to run in 256 colours. Together these settings should resolve the most common display issues. This worked for me one time only, but hopefully you will have more success!

Step 3) The final step, the one that actually did solve my issues! Unfortunately you will have to do this manually for every older game you install...

Right click on the program again and this time select Properties. Navigate to the Compatability tab and check these options: Run in 256 colours, Run in 640x480 desktop resolution and Disable display scaling on high DPI settings.

Did that work?! Hopefully it worked and now you can finally play some of the older games :)

If... it still doesn't work then I apologise for not being able to offer any further advice. I only found this out through research and some messing around, I'm not actually that educated about backwards compatability on the Windows OS. (Or Windows in general really...) I delurked just to post this because I thought it was important so if anyone has any other help to add maybe they could leave a comment?

Good luck and happy gaming! <3

Posts

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LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Once you press F4 to switch from fullscreen to windowed mode, RPG Maker 95 games seem to run perfectly for me. Unfortunately it seems to only let you do that once you've actually started or loaded the game, but that's not a huge deal.

Pressing F4 should probably be mentioned in this article. A lot of people don't know it's the keyboard shortcut to switch in and out of fullscreen mode. (Alt+Enter works also in some versions of RPG Maker, but not all of them.)
What I need is to know an effective method to run RPG Maker 95 games. Playing them is a nightmare when I want to minimize 'em. :/
If these methods work, then it will be perf :D
Also, for Windows 8 users that are having any problems running any of the older games, like for 2k or 2k3, Ramza’s article here also has some really nice advice on how to work around some of these issues.

I really haven’t had much of a problem running any of the older games on any of the laptops that I own throughout the house, but the only two things that happen on occasion to me is that, one, in full screen mode the screen will begin to flicker like crazy once and a while every time you decide to move your character sprite (which can be easily amended using Cherry’s “Another Full Screen Mode” if this decides to happen), and, two, the DIRECTDRAW error that pops up once and a while upon start-up (but strangely, for me, it seems to go away the next time I double click on the RPG_RT file again).

Good article. It never hurts to remind everybody about this stuff once and a while; it’s like an annual tradition here.
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