Help - Porting PC RPG Maker Game to SNES

[Colin Sandquist]

Hello!

Looking to port two Homebrew Video Games Made on RPG Maker 2003 + RPG Maker XP to the SNES Console.

Yes - I own the Licenses - Yes - they are original Video Games.


Does anyone here know where I should start?

Is this even possible?


How do you take PC Files [Specifically RPG Maker Files - and port them?]

Asked the people at Degica [whom are the developers of RPG Maker]
Ironically they "don't support it" so I am guessing they have zero clue.

As do I.

I have attempted to use an X-GEKU Pro and burn the LZH file of RPG Maker onto
a 32 BIT Eprom - this of course - was not successful. As it needs to read a SFC File.

What files consolidate / turn all the files of RPG Maker into a singular SFC File?

Maybe any pro software developers have created some sort of conversion tool?

Thank you!

C.

www.sandquistgames.com

[gauauu]

Hi, and welcome.

Unfortunately there's no easy way to do what you're hoping to do. RPG Maker and SNES are vastly different systems, and there's no simple way to convert between them. You'd have to basically rewrite the game from scratch in assembly language (or possibly C), targeting the specifics of the SNES. It would require significant knowledge of the SNES platform.

If you want to learn more of those details and embark on a huge journey of learning the platform, there's quite a bit of material here (and in peoples' heads here) that can help answer questions and point you to information about programming.

But if you're just wanting an easy route to get your RPG Maker game running on the SNES, I'm sorry to say it doesn't exist.

[Dwedit]

RPG Maker does have a script system used for all the NPCs. It's a set of commands like ShowText, ChangeHP, ChangeActorImages, etc...

If you were writing a brand new RPG engine for the SNES, you could write a script interpreter that would use the existing commands. But you are still writing a brand new engine from scratch.

[93143]

Technically there are a couple of Super Famicom versions of RPG Maker - RPG Tsukūru Super Dante and RPG Tsukūru 2. They certainly wouldn't support modern RPG Maker files, so you'd have to reimplement your games at minimum. I haven't tried it, so I don't know what the feature set is or how much game you can stuff into a project, but I suspect it's pretty limited. The first one has only 32 KB of save RAM, and the second is alleged to have 64 KB.

Also, since it's Super Famicom (and in the case of RPG Tsukūru 2, I think Satellaview?), both games are in Japanese. I think both of them have English translation hacks...

[Colin Sandquist]

I did not expect an easy route at all !

That doesn't bother me - the journey has been fun enough.

I've released the Titles as PC Releases [which was what was intended] so that was easy.


As for SNES:

You are talking about re-developing everything in 'C' Language?

What software would be needed to start with that?

Perhaps youtube tutorials?

Yeah - there is none on the internet - since just about zero people have attempted
to make this happen - which makes sense.



I am hoping this entire NES Dev community bonds together to try and make something happen.

Consider it a challenge?! Tell everyone here: perhaps they can code some file exchange software?

That is why I am here. I don't know. I am technically useless - so my plans will have to stay on hold.

[Bregalad]

You are aware that RPG Maker already exist in the SNES, there is even two versions around, right ?

[Dwedit]

The SNES versions are not comparable to what's available on other platforms. For instance, they use very large preset map chunks because there is so little memory available to hold the user's game.

[Pokun]

Yeah each RPG Maker for each platform typically have very little to do with each others other than that they were developed by ASCII.
The engine changes a lot and things like the in-game interface, the type of commands, resolution, actor handling and sometimes even the RPG subgenre is vastly different in each version, sometimes even for the same platform. For example RPG Maker 95 and RPG Maker 2000 are both on Windows but 2000 uses a lower resolution and is much more SNES-like while 95 looks more like a PC game and supports using the mouse. Early installations in the series for various home computers were more for making Wizardry-like and Ultima-like RPGs while the PS2 versions makes a 3D RPG and so on.
Meaning porting a game from one maker to another may be very hard.

In general the console versions like those for SNES has much more limited ways to edit things like characters, tilesets and sound (although you can supposedly transfer sound composed in Ongaku Tkool Kanaderu to RPG Tkool 2 using a Satellaview data pack) while computer versions naturally have more tools for such things.

You are talking about re-developing everything in 'C' Language?

What software would be needed to start with that?

Perhaps youtube tutorials?

SNES games are normally developed in 65816 assembly. Western Design Center do have a C compiler for the 65816 CPU but I don't think many homebrewers are using it as C is not considered to compile very well for the 65816 architecture, commercial games back in the day was almost always written in 65816.
And even if you use C it doesn't mean you don't have to learn 65816 for the more timing sensitive portions of the game. You also have to learn how the hardware is used (video chip, audio chip, controllers etc).

The SNES homebrew scene is not as large as the ones for NES, Gameboy and Sega Mega Drive so there are indeed much harder to find tutorials, but I know there are some posted on this forum if you search a little. Oziphantom did make one that he posted somewhere here and NESDoug also made one. Also I can't recommend the SNES videos by Retro Mechanics Explained enough. They are incredibly good explanations of complicated technical things regarding how the SNES hardware works. I normally prefer to learn by reading, but for example things about how the graphics works is just much easier explained in a video.

Oh yeah there is a library designed to make homebrew easier to make, but I forgot what it was called.

[creaothceann]

If you want to learn 65c816 ASM I'd recommend starting with the 6502, then reading a document about the differences between 6502 and 65c816.

- Reverse-Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU
- "Hello, world" from scratch on a 6502
- http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3475
- https://github.com/gilligan/snesdev/blo ... /65816.txt
- http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3198

[Colin Sandquist]

You are aware that RPG Maker already exist in the SNES, there is even two versions around, right ?

No I am not aware of that at all.

What do you mean by that?


RPG Maker did a release for Playstation.
But its a computer Software Similar to Unreal Engine.

In terms of game development.

[Colin Sandquist]

You are aware that RPG Maker already exist in the SNES, there is even two versions around, right ?

Okay. So I see RPG TSUKURRU 1 + 2 for Super Nintendo Release.

The question is: how did they port it?

I have a finished game made on the XP and 2003 versions for windows.

Releasing it as a pc game is fine. Its been done.

It has PC Files.

Its turning the PC Files into something that a 32 Bit M27C Chip can read
onto the cartridge is a problem.

[Colin Sandquist]

SNES games are normally developed in 65816 assembly.
[/quote]

What the heck is that?

Where can I buy one?

I am glad I found the right community. You all clearly know your stuff.

[93143]

Where can I buy one?

I, uh...

You don't.

The Western Design Center 65C816 is a 16-bit CPU design from 1983, intended as a backward-compatible upgrade to the 8-bit MOS Technology 6502 and WDC 65C02. It was used as the main CPU for the Apple IIGS, and was also licensed by Ricoh for use as the core of the 5A22, the chip commonly known as the S-CPU - the brain of the SNES.

Programming the 65C816 is typically done using assembly language - a set of simple commands that map directly to machine instructions. Assembly code is written in normal text and has to be translated into machine instructions by a program called an assembler, which generally will support useful features like macros and labels. As you may imagine, an assembly language is specific to the ISA it targets, so there are a lot of them; this is why Pokun mentioned "65816 assembly" specifically. The authoritative text is Programming the 65816: Including the 6502, 65C02 and 65802 by David Eyes and Ron Lichty, and other helpful online resources exist.

There are a bunch of free assemblers for SNES programming. No need to buy anything. The SNES Starter Kit uses WLA DX, which is easy to use, but I found it to be a bit buggy, and there are alternatives.


There are a couple of options for programming the 65816 in C. But since the chip's design is a lot different from the machines C was originally created for, the C language doesn't map well onto it and tends to perform poorly (that, and as an old and somewhat unpopular design, it isn't supported by big modern compilers like GCC and hasn't had the depth of work put into it to make it performant). This may not matter as much for an RPG as it would for an action game. PVSnesLib is something of an SDK, and uses C.

Recently, Kannagi has released his personal SDK, and there's a thread near the top of this forum about it. Apparently it avoids using C in favour of a language he wrote himself. I haven't tried it.

...

Regardless of your approach to programming it, it is important to understand how the SNES operates. There is no OS, no APIs and no file system; everything is bare metal (unless your SDK abstracts it, I guess). There are a number of online sources and repositories of information, and the official documentation can be obtained too if you're into that. I second the RGME recommendation as well; they're great videos.

An accurate debugging emulator is essential. Right now I'd recommend Mesen. You may also wish to try your game on real hardware, in which case you may want a flash cart - the best one right now is the FXPak Pro, which supports large ROMs and most of the special chips, but the Super Everdrive X5 and X6 are quite a bit cheaper. This way you can avoid having to burn an EPROM every time you change anything.

...

Alternately, you could search up some utilities on romhacking.net and mutilate Final Fantasy VI into what you want, but there could be rights issues there...

[Pokun]

Neither I recommend SNES Starter Kit nor the WLA DX assembler, I had bad experiences with them both.

Oh yeah PVSnesLib is the name of the library I was talking about earlier. I know nothing about it but it seems to allow you to use both C and assembly. Either way you are probably not getting away from learning 6502/65816 assembly as I said before.

Among the best and most popular assemblers you have CA65 and 64TASS. They are about equally powerful but 64TASS is a bit easier to setup (mainly because it doesn't use config files that CA65 uses) and that's the one I use for SNES development. 64TASS is also a bit better suited for 65816 as it handles direct page stuff better, but CA65 is the one with more users on this forum (probably mostly out of habit). Oziphantom's tutorial teaches you how to use 64TASS, though I'm not sure how beginner friendly those tutorials are, you may want to learn 6502 first as it is simpler and you can actually use 6502 machine code on a 65C816 CPU (and thus on a SNES) as it's backwards-compatible with the 6502 CPU. BTW both those assemblers can work in 6502 mode too.
Once you learn assembly it shouldn't be too hard to migrate from one assembler to another though, they both use the official MOS/WDC syntax with mostly superficial differences.

Okay. So I see RPG TSUKURRU 1 + 2 for Super Nintendo Release.

The question is: how did they port it?

They didn't, they are made from scratch, probably by a different developer (ASCII owned the brand and published the software but the actual developers probably varied a lot for each version).
Besides the two RPG Tsukuuru games for SNES both predates even RPG Tsukuuru 95 (which was released in 1997, the "95" in the title refers to the fact that it is made for Windows 95). It is more similar to some installations in the "Dante" series for MSX (which BTW is a computer standard actually made by none other than ASCII Corporation themselves) and Japanese computers of the '80s than it is to RM95 which is why it's called "Super Dante". And the Dante series is itself a successor to Dungeon Manjirou and Mamirin (also on MSX and Japanese home computers).

Its turning the PC Files into something that a 32 Bit M27C Chip can read
onto the cartridge is a problem.

Oh yeah I'm quite sure this is not going to happen. Porting RM2K3 and RMXP to SNES so that you can use the project data files directly doesn't sound very realistic to me. RM2K/RM2K3 uses SNES-like limitations so it might be possible but RMXP uses a higher resolution than the SNES can output so you are definitely going have to redraw the graphics of the game in a SNES-compatible resolution, and there is also the Ruby interpreter that I doubt is going to be ported to SNES and run at the same speed as on an IBM PC from 2004 or later. If the game you want to port doesn't use any Ruby scripts it might not be a problem though.
Since music is typically midi it might be possible to port those using an existing open source sound engine, but I don't really know.

Remaking these RPGs from scratch on the SNES sounds like the least hardest way, as we have been saying all along. Making an RPG on SNES isn't exactly a good beginner project though.

Then there are the possible copyright-infringements of using data from the RTP which is owned by ASCII/Enterbrain/Kadokawa or whoever own the brand now, this is a problem no matter how you port the games to any platform. If the games you want to port are using all-original graphics and sound it's not a problem of course, and there are free open-source RTP alternatives like the one used with EasyRPG. I think it's using different songs though as it would be a copyright issue if they remade the tunes using the same music scores.



I think by reading these posts you should now have a rough, but at least much better, understanding of the scale of what you want to do.
It may not be an easy journy and no one is going to do it for you unless you pay them for their time, but you do have a ton of free tools and support.

BTW I started with tools like RPG Maker before I learned "real" programming, so it can be done.

[Nikku4211]

RM2K/RM2K3 uses SNES-like limitations so it might be possible but RMXP uses a higher resolution than the SNES can output so you are definitely going have to redraw the graphics of the game in a SNES-compatible resolution...

Either that or deal with interlacing and mode 5/6.