Not me.

Btw the banner image appears broken.

I realized I opened myself up to some really ambiguous answers. I'm talking about the RPG Maker 2003 emulator this used to be. It was something you copied and pasted into the game folders of existing RPG Maker 2003 games and it would play them, with enhancements.

The circumstances have changed. There is an official RPG Maker 2003 you can just easily get legally. This might make the RPG20XX of old more appealing. To me it feels like unfinished business, it always sort of had.

You can see in the comments section beginning from 2010 a huge demand and the brave yet naive 21 year old me charging along. A lot of those people from the past were let down when it was cancelled two years later. Most of them are probably not even around here anymore.

With the legal 2k3 apparently getting updates with new features

The problem is they aren't so much "updates" as just piling on more hacks. Didn't they keep their original source code? The old RPG20XX provided RPG Maker 2003 with:

- Fixed/Fast Agility Stat
- 32-bit alpha channel images
- Using high resolution graphics
- Video shaders
- Local variables (no more having to make a new variable for each item box)
- Extra drawing functions (much more robust than "picture pointer")
- Execution of string commands in item labels and stuff (adding colors and stuff to item names, etc.)

There was quite a bit more than this actually that I got working, and a bunch more I had planned.

Or would it only work on the illegal version anyways?

It could work with 2000, old 2003, new 2003? I guess I could find out.

I can't respond for anyone else than me and my personal opinion, but I believe I should say that the me from some years ago would probably say "yes! go for it!". But on my part at least, I've been taking myself apart from the old RPG Maker engines, even though I still love them because even if doing workarounds was a good experience, it was not for productivity.

I feel RPG 2003 Enhancer would end up being a workaround by itself. People would still need to buy RPG Maker 2003, and wait for Degica to decide if its permitted. Then work in an editor with no easy integration for enhancements.

But anyway, I know your work will be appreciated. I know I will not use it, but someone else will probably do. And I'll probably try it out and give some test if needed (this depends more on my time O^O).

(If there is already ways to manually do a battle system with RM20XX, and there is nothing else important you consider adding to it, I think you can call it finished. A "finished" tag would make it feel useable and people will start to try developing for it -I mean, an "in process" is sometimes seen as "it's still not ready"-).

(Update)

I just grabbed whatever was at the top of games made in the newer RPG Maker 2003.



Yeah, the format on games made with the newer legal RPG Maker 2003 seems compatible. I've already written a proof-of-concept decoder that creates atlas of the data format that's a lot more resistant to oddities than the old RPG20XX. I figured there might be all sorts of non-standard junk that gets saved if they're hacking up RPG Maker 2003 some more, so I went the more cautious route.

Probably one, and that one is the new RPG20XX. This emulator is just something I'm doing for some fun nostalgia (and because I'm ahead of schedule on LandTraveller). I wouldn't expect this to get released ever.

If you're doing a custom battle system and you want to do it with event scripts, RPG20XX is a much better tool for the job than RPG Maker 2003. Don't forget RPG20XX also has more advanced battle sprite action animations, a character generator, huge tilesets, a complex collision system, MODE7, etc. No amount of hacky patching is going to bring 2003 up to the same caliber if you set out do your own menus and battle systems. Somewhere on Ruby Wolf's game page are the project files with an example.

Because of all that, this time I'm not going to add a bunch of weird syscall junk and crazy features to the emulator. It will simply play RPG Maker 2003 games, but with the RPG20XX look and feel. The default systems and menus will all be completely different, but functionally equivalent. It can just be a simple enhancer.

RPG20XX has been silently recieving hotfixes and such for crashing bugs and the like. I'll also be adding "missing" event commands to aid in creating custom systems.

And @Cap_H, there's no point in a scripting system when you simply have the source code. I changed the license to MIT so you can do so for commercial purposes too.

Finally, by creating a program that can map the data format, a project converter might become possible. However, it will result in a project that will require you to redo most of it anyways, so such a thing might not be so useful.

(If I remember the story correctly, RM2k3 source code was lost. Dameet EB! Now you did it! "orz).

Well hell, they'll be able to borrow mine if I manage to finish the thing (MIT license) I kid, I'm just pointing out the source code license gives you a lot of freedom vs. something viral like GPL. I figured out how to port engines with this design to Linux and Mac OSX, too (LandTraveller runs on those now).

I still just think that the reason you made RM20XX was because the enhancer was going to be limited to whatever restrictions RM2k3 had in some way or the other (the editor). Going back to it feels like taking several steps back. But I also understand the personal demon chasing. If not, why am I still developing Drekirökr xD?

Actually its kind of fun to be playing RPG Maker 2003 games through my engine, to be honest. I might sit down to play some of these if I finish.

Its all in the format of the saved game data files (the .lxx files). No part of RPG Maker 2003 is relied upon or actually used, everything is written from scratch. None of the knowledge I used to build this emulator was obtained from disassembling any of the programs from RPG Maker 2003.

There's been major updates until summer 2015, and then after that there's been a lot of silent bug fixes to the engine itself. I've been focusing on LandTraveller mostly. RPG20XX has an inherent problem, you can't have something that's robust and powerful without a learning curve. In practicality is has only really served well as a database and resource handler for LandTraveller.

I was just messing around with decoding RPG Maker 2003 files, but if there's a huge petition style demand for it I might consider getting serious about an RPG_RT replacement again. With the source code, you can do anything. Cracking/patching adds features at the cost of stability- it must be so without understanding of what the higher order structure used to be. When the same happens for software engineering, it is much easier to restore stability since you have the source code. Optimization, simplification and refactoring are all also possible with the code.

Personally I'm more in the mood to remake Ruby Wolf as a GBA game.