README

SuperSakura engine

SuperSakura is a modern visual novel engine that can run certain Japanese games from the 90's. Many of these old titles were surprisingly good, but were never localised. SuperSakura has tools to help localise games, and supports enhanced graphics and a modernised user interface.

The engine is written in Free Pascal, uses SDL2, and targets Linux/Windows, 64/32-bit.

Note that this is just a game engine and a set of asset conversion tools. The actual games themselves are under copyright and are not distributed with this project. To run games on the SuperSakura engine, you need to convert the game data from original files using these tools.

For a list of supported games, run sakutool list, or see inc/gidtable.inc, or visit the main site at supersakura.net.

To see how the engine is progressing, see CHANGELOG.md and todo.md.

Screenshots

https://supersakura.net/gfx/sakutitle.png

For more, see here.

Downloads

You can get a reasonably recent Win32 build of the engine and tools from supersakura.net. But for best results, you can try to compile your own copy.

Compiling

Please see BUILDING.md.

SDL2

SuperSakura needs SDL2 to run. This is a famous video/audio library used by many modern games, so you may already have it. If not, it is easy to get.

If you've downloaded the SuperSakura Win32 build, that includes the SDL2 runtime DLL's, so you don't need to do anything.

64-bit Windows: The precompiled 32-bit SuperSakura will work just fine on 64-bit Windowses.

If you've built a 32-bit version of Supersakura, get the win32-x86 SDL2.dll runtime from github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases, and the win32-x86 SDL2_ttf.dll font-rendering runtime from github.com/libsdl-org/SDL_ttf/releases. Put both in your \Windows\SysWOW64 directory (or in the same directory where SuperSakura is, if you prefer).

If you've built a 64-bit version of SuperSakura, get instead the win32-x64 runtimes and put those in your \Windows\System32 directory (or in the same directory where SuperSakura is, if you prefer).

32-bit Windows: Get the win32-x86 SDL2 runtimes. Put both in your \Windows\System32 directory (or in the same directory where SuperSakura is, if you prefer).

Linux: Your distro's main software repository should have SDL2 (original, or compatibility version) and SDL2_ttf. Install both through your normal package manager.

• Archlinux: pacman -S sdl2-compat sdl2_ttf
• Fedora: dnf install SDL2-devel SDL2_ttf-devel
• Debian/Ubuntu: apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev

You should end up with libSDL2*.so files somewhere under your /usr/lib or /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu directory. To build SuperSakura, the two files that must be present are libSDL2.so and libSDL2_ttf.so, which are provided by the -dev packages. The compiled binary should however actually link to a runtime version of the library files, so you shouldn't need the -dev packages to just run the engine. I intend to switch to a different library load mechanism that will eliminate the need for -dev packages entirely, at some point.

Some useful information on setting up SDL2 for Linux is here.

• If SDL has trouble creating a renderer, you may be able to override the renderer preference: Overriding the SDL video driver. Try something like SDL_RENDER_DRIVER=software or SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11.
• If SDL_InitSubSystem throws a division by zero or invalid operation when setting up SDL_video, particularly in a virtual machine, see this bug.
• If video-related failures persist, examine saku.log and try running LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose ./supersakura if on Linux for more information.

Using the engine

To compile resources into a usable SuperSakura data file:

sakutool make <projectname>

For example, to compile the included Winterquest ministory/testsuite:

sakutool make winterq

To run any compiled game through a friendly front end:

supersakura

Or, to run the console port, which doesn't depend on SDL:

supersakura-con

The tools and engine print their log output into files: saku.log and sakutool.log. By default, these are put in the program's working directory. If the working directory is write-protected, then the logs are saved under your profile directory.

You can add -h to any executable's commandline to see what other commandline options are available.

The console port works best when playing games in English. If your terminal is configured to correctly display UTF-8-encoded Japanese characters, you can also play games with Japanese text. Linux terminals usually display Japanese correctly automatically, while a modern Windows command prompt will probably work fine as long as it has been set to use a font that supports Japanese glyphs, such as MS Gothic.

Converting game data

Sakutool reads individual files from original games, and converts and saves them under SuperSakura's data directory in standard file formats, like game scripts in plain text and graphics as PNG files. Note that although various PC-98 games are supported, sakutool cannot yet extract the individual data files from .HDI or .FDI images, so if you keep your PC-98 games in those, you will have to first extract the files from the disk image manually. Possible tools for this:

• Ryo-Cokey's FIVEC (Windows, GUI)
• EditDisk (Windows, GUI)
• NullMagic2's 98Bridge (Windows/Linux, GUI)
• My own 98ripper (Linux/Windows, commandline)

To convert resources:

sakutool x <filename or directory>

For example, to convert and run the DOS version of The Three Sisters' Story (the Windows port is not yet supported):

sakutool x /mygames/threesistersstory/
sakutool m sanshimai
supersakura sanshimai

Caution: Although sakutool has a lot of fuzziness in autodetecting file types, in some cases it needs to know which game's resources are being converted or it won't recognise the game files. Normally it does this by checking a CRC of the game's main executable, but if that isn't working, you can use sakutool x <path> --id <game's shortname> to force detection. Known game shortnames can be seen with sakutool list.

Using SakuraScript

If you just want to play the games, you don't need to understand SakuraScript. This is the custom scripting language used by the engine. The syntax is both described and verified by the parsertest project included in the data directory; you can read the single script file there for details. A list of recognised built-in functions can be found in sakurascript-definition.pas. Then, if you're curious, you can examine the decompiled scripts from any supported game and see what's happening behind the scenes.

Translating games

Under EU law, translations count as derivative works. Therefore, game translations generally can not be distributed with this project, since it could be a copyright infringement to make them available to the public without permission from the rightsholder. However, you can easily produce a basic translation through machine translation, which is not an infringement as long as it is only for your personal use.

An automatic translator hook is planned for the engine, but not fully working yet. You can dump all text from a game for viewing and editing in a simple tab-separated spreadsheet. First make a dat file: sakutool make <game's shortname>, then run: sakutool dump <game's shortname>.

Game modding

You can replace any game file by dropping another file by the same name in the data/<project>/override directory, then restarting the game. This includes any graphics, scripts, or a translated string table.

For a neater package, you can also create a mod data file. This will show up as a separate item on the front end. When loaded, the engine loads the parent dat first, then the mod dat, which replaces files from the parent using the same override logic as above.

1. Create a new project directory under SuperSakura's data directory, for example walrus98-en.
2. Put your modified files in the new project directory.
3. Create a data.inf file there. It should contain a description that can be shown on the front end, the mod's language, the project name of the game being modified, and any necessary metadata for modified graphics.
4. Compile the mod project normally: sakutool make walrus98-en.

Example data.inf file:

desc Warez Walrus (English patch) (PC98)
language English
parent walrus98

Contributing

If you find bugs, please report them! It's better to have problems reported multiple times than not at all, as a general rule. You can raise an issue on gitlab, or e-mail me, or noot. (There is another Mastodon account for SuperSakura announcements only, if you'd like to just track those: supersakura@mastodon.gamedev.place)

If you think you've followed the build instructions correctly but it still won't build and run, that's also worth complaining about. Maybe it's genuinely broken, maybe there's something unexpected in your system configuration, maybe the instructions aren't clear enough...

If you're brave enough to attempt reverse engineering on a particularly interesting old game, you can use any tools you're comfortable with, and share your findings on how to correctly read some of these mysterious old files. I can always use additional file format documentation! However, SuperSakura's scope tends toward older games - if a game natively runs well on modern systems already and was published after 2010, it's probably out of scope here.

If you can work with Pascal, you could try adding a new resource converter to sakutool, in the style of the existing ones. There may also be some interesting small tasks in the todo-file that technically anyone can do, or bugfixes etc. You can do a merge request or just email me with code if you've written something. All code in this project is artisanal; it would not be appropriate to include any AI-assisted code anyway in this GPL-licensed project, since it doesn't seem possible to legally assign a license to such code,

License

Supersakura is free software under the GPL3. Some used libraries have simpler licenses. Everything under the /doc directory should be considered CC0 public domain.