RPG Maker 2000 Preservation project

Here’s where you can find most of the games made by the Polish community:

http://tsukuru.pl/index.php?link=gry

http://rpgmaker.pl/?co=gry&typ=rev (2003 games are labelled “RPG ME”)

Great idea.
How big is the whole repository so far?
Maybe it would be a good idea to make a torrent out of it so it can better be shared by more people just in case something happens to your hard disk.

Puh, don’t have statistics. Japanese should be around 1500 games. For the others I will tell you when I check the server again.

Don’t worry, the games are stored on a server, so it’s less likely to have data loss.

Some good news in the meanwhile: I encountered two other people from Germany who had the same idea as me and much more freetime then me: They already added metadata like Author, Description and screenshots. Their archive is currently 99% German only (>1000 games) but that’s a nice small dataset for experimenting :slight_smile: (Metadata like file hashes are already generated, too).

I plan to extend that archive by non-German games after the summer break (~September). Will make an official announcement when everything is set.

I found out Yume Nikki wasn’t the only game to get a bunch of fan games inspired by it.

There’s a game called OFF which has a bunch of [spinOFFs] (http://off.wikia.com/wiki/SpinOFFs_(OFF_Fangames)) by various people. Not near as many as Yume Nikki but I think there’s at least 20 completed games so still that’s pretty impressive. I just hope all the downloads work. I don’t know how up to date that page is kept.

It would be some help for me if you could collect all the fangames at one central location, e.g. DropBox. Makes downloading them easier for me.

You might have all these already, but if not, there are a little over 100 older games archived here, that might be worth your time looking through. That page has been up forever, but the site has been dead for nearly as long.

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Hi Ghabry,

Thank you so much for starting this:

Over on rpgmaker.net. We recently rehauled, the rpgmaker archive thread, because one of our main contributors who we relied on for archiving rpgmaker games since 2007 sort of vanished.

(You can check it out here: https://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/22883/)

So I decided to rehaul the thread, compile games, compile lists and just sort of gather what I could find until I could find someone whom I could place what I have so far in more competent hands

At the moment, I’m sort of tied up with other life responsibilities so unfortunately I can’t be more help but - But when I have some more free time, I would very much like to collaborate with you on this. When you get the chance, please speak to TheGameArchivist:

https://rpgmaker.net/users/TheGameArchivist/
TheDigitalArchivist@protonmail.com

He’s a fellow archivist, he’s fulfilled most of the requests RMN’s community has had when looking for lost or forgotten rpgmaker games - but he’s also much more thorough than I am at sorting and categorizing archives. I’m pretty sure he would be very pleased to talk to you as well.

Again, thank you for starting this. When I have a bit more free time available, I’ll be in touch.

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Wow that topic contains a lot of games.

Thanks for your message. If you have any games archived feel free to upload them somewhere, so I add them to my collection. Still nothing public but will happen.

Okay, will write a message to this guy.

These are the games I made all three are either rmk2000/3

The games don’t work perfectly on easyrpg though…esp Final Tear 3 doesn’t because that game is heavy scripted,

https://finaltear3.000webhostapp.com/index.htm

Keep in mind that I will release a new version of Final Tear 3 this weekend. So if you going to archive it please wait until the new version (3.09) is out.

It would be some help for me if you could collect all the fangames at one central location, e.g. DropBox. Makes downloading them easier for me.

After I posted about those OFF fangames I got stupidly busy and forgot all about this.

It would be multiple GB to upload them all (which would take way too long on my net), so I’m posting download lists for JDownloader 2 instead. That means you should probably get them as soon as you can, cause there’s no guarantee that some won’t go dead. Hopefully you know how to use that downloader.

Off translations fangames downloadlists.zip (7.6 KB)

It has OFF with all translations I found a download for (Polish download I didn’t find so that’s missing).
There’s a separate list with all OFF games by a specific author because he’s the only person who made more than two OFF fangames.
Then the other list has the fangames by everyone else, which I could find downloads.

Unfortunately I didn’t think to keep track of what games were missing downloads.

Hi guys, just a small update:

uboachan.net has uploaded a torrent of almost all yume nikki fangames, ever, in all versions:

https://yumenikkifgarchive.gitlab.io/

Over on rpgmaker.net, we’re still working on getting some of those rpgmaker games together in one place, so you can download them on mass, all at once, etc.

But yeah, I’ll keep ya posted!!

Hello,

thanks for the info, I already downloaded that torrent a week ago. Unfortunately I don’t have enough traffic available on my server to provide a public download :confused:

Hey! Would you happen to still have the download for the original Mogeko castle? I’m having a bit of trouble finding it, thank you in advance!

This one is really hard to find. Unfortunately it is Japanese only.

There was a Chinese translation patch, actually. But the DL for that is dead as well.

I don’t have the link, but I can reupload it without issues. The truth though is, now that I read your post and think about it, I might be owning the game with the chinese translation applied, as text doesn’t seem to be coherent and comparing with japanese gameplays I found on yt the text seems to be anything but japanese. Anyway, give me a minute and I shall provide you a link.
Make sure to download soon, I’ll remove it on Monday so it doesn’t spread (doubt deep-sea prisoner wants this thing to be avaliable).

Edit2: Monday it is. Link gone just to be safe

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In the meanwhile I joined forces with ryg who hosts https://rmarchiv.tk. The goal of the website is to preserve (German) RPG Maker games. In the meanwhile the site is also available in English and many non-German games were already added. Feel free to contribute if you want.

The focus should be on games that aren’t available on common websites (like rpgmaker net) anymore, just rehosting RMN games makes no sense ^^.

Here are multiple threads which list lost games, maybe you have one of them?
https://rmarchiv.tk/board/thread/8?page=1
https://rmarchiv.tk/board/thread/60?page=1

All game files are automatically backed up every night on multiple servers, when the site ever goes down we will still have all games.

Bonus: When you create an account you can play any RPG Maker 2000/2003 game in the EasyRPG Web Player and the savegames are stored in the cloud.

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Oh my god, thank you so much! It’s Chinese, by the way.

Thought so. Oh well, still better than anything

I just found this thread because I was wondering if somebody had already done this. Now with rmarchiv being a thing I’m wondering if it is planned to create DAT files for ROM managers like b2282009 already has mentioned in this thread?

Personally, I think it’s crucial for a proper preservation afford to make sure that all the files are very easy available to everyone who wants them. It’s really wonderful what the guys over at rmarchiv have already achieved but I think it would be better if the archived games would be shared as a whole as well and not only just on a game-by-game basis. Otherwise only a fraction of the whole archive will be backed up on various PCs of the community out there and some games will be lost again when the rmarchiv is no more, or isn’t allowed to host game XYZ anymore.

What the maker scene has perfectly shown is that websites and its hosted content can be gone forever at any time. I’m sure that you guys are really serious about preservation with multiple backup servers, etc. in place. But even all of this doesn’t protect you from things like copyright strikes if, for example, Nintendo finds that they don’t like their copyrighted music and sprites in some of the projects. Basically, the same reason why many German RPG-Makes sites have removed download links from their pages. You also have to think about the future, can you really say that the archive will be available in the next 10, 20 or 30 years?

What I’m trying to say is that I think that a critical part of digital preservation lies in decentralized backups and to give it in as many hands as possible. And, in my humble opinion, the best way to achieve that is to share the whole thing in its entirety as easily and convenient as possible, for example as a single .zip package accompanied by a DAT file to verify its content or at least make it easier to rebuild it on your own.

A good example for comparison would be the Flashpoint project. That’s a project determined to preserve flash games, animations and a wide variety of other web games. They offer it in 2 variants. One very light weighted variant, where their launcher downloads the games on-demand from their servers when you start it (very similiar to what is already offered by rmarchiv). The other one is a giant package that has everything included and runs completely independent on your local computer with no internet connection required at all. With that they make sure that everything is backed up on as many places as possible even when their own servers or the project as a whole is long gone.

I think with rmarchiv we have the proper infrastructure already at hand for something like this. You have all games available as .zip archives and a lot of metadata to rename them with a proper naming convention like No-Intro or TOSEC does it.

As for hosting I think that general preservation sites like archive.org or the-eye.eu would be good place to start.

And in regards of what Ghabry has said about that it doesn’t make sense to also re-host games from common websites. I have to whole-heartedly disagree with that, for the exact same reasons I just talked about.

Just something to think about.

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