The MangaGamer version of Rance 02 has a custom proportional font implementation which makes assumptions about the font in use. This is worked around by rewriting their '_CalculateWidth' function to use fixed-width logic. I also tried using TTF_SizeUTF8 to get the proper character width but I found this made the text overflow even worse than using a fixed width (at least with the default gothic font, perhaps other fonts would fare better).
xsystem4
xsystem4 is an implementation of AliceSoft's System 4 game engine for unix-like operating systems.
NOTE: This is a work in progress. I am focusing primarily on the Japanese version of Sengoku Rance (and by extension, the English fan translation) which is currently more or less playable. Some other games from the same era may also work, but I have not done any significant testing on them so breakage is likely.
Building
First install the dependencies (corresponding Debian package in parentheses):
- chibi-scheme [optional, for debugger]
- bison (bison)
- cglm (libcglm-dev) [optional, fetched by meson if not available]
- flex (flex)
- meson (meson)
- libffi (libffi-dev)
- libpng (libpng-dev)
- libsndfile (libsndfile-dev)
- libturbojpeg (libturbojpeg0-dev)
- libwebp (libwebp-dev)
- SDL2 (libsdl2-dev)
- SDL2_ttf (libsdl2-ttf-dev)
- zlib (zlib1g-dev)
Then fetch the git submodules,
git submodule init
git submodule update
(Alternatively, pass --recurse-submodules when cloning this repository)
Then build the xsystem4 executable with meson,
mkdir build
meson build
ninja -C build
Finally install it to your system (optional),
ninja -C build install
Running
You can run a game by passing the path to its game directory to the xsystem4 executable,
build/src/xsystem4 /path/to/game_directory
Alternatively, run xsystem4 from within the game directory,
cd /path/to/game_directory
xsystem4