RPG Maker 2000 is the second Microsoft Windows version of the RPG Maker series of programs developed by Enterbrain and published by ASCII. RPG Maker 2000 was originally released as RPG Tsukūru 2000 in April, 2000 in Japan. Initially outside Japan, it had only received weak distributions among Taiwan and South Korea markets, undergone unauthorized translations into various languages, and unauthorized distribution via Internet. On July 7, 2015 the Humble Game Maker Bundle went live, including this program, which is where it was first officially released in English. It is now also available for purchase on Steam.
Features
Compared to RPG Maker 95, RM2K features lower-resolution graphics than RM95, using a 320x240 resolution instead of 640x480, and using 16x16 tiles instead of 32x32 tiles, but has other visual improvements such as a higher frame rate, weather effects and panorama backgrounds. It also includes an extra layer for tiles, jumping characters, additional functions and customizable message and menu boxes. RPG Maker 2000 uses a 320 x 240screen resolution for playing games, and has 16x16 pixel tiles, with 24x32 character sprites. Its default green message-window and menu systems are one of the first signs that a particular game was made with RPG Maker 2000, although it can be customized. Some may view these low-res graphics as a limitation, but they could also be viewed as an advantage, because the low-res graphics are not only more compatible with older computers, but sometimes they can be much easier to draw. RPG Maker 2000 uses a Dragon Quest-like battle system which features a classical turn-based, "front-view" battle system, where the enemy faces you directly on the screen and you do not see your characters on screen. With some tweaking, the battle system can be made to look somewhat like a "side-view" battle system. The music featured in RPG Maker 2000 consists of a large collection of MIDI and, less commonly, WAV files. An update to version 1.50 at the release of VALUE! added the possibility to use WAV files compressed with ADPCM as well as support for the MP3 format. At the same day, these features were added to the successor RPG Maker 2003. Through the use of unofficial patches released afterwards, MP3 files can also be used in older versions, though reliability with said patch has always been an issue. In some RPG Maker communities, it is still a common misbelief that RPG Maker 2003 was the only version to support MP3 files natively before RPG Maker XP's release because newer versions of RPG Maker 2000 were unknown to most users outside Japan. RPG Maker 2000 was the first in the series that introduced the "Runtime Package", also known as "RTP", which was also adopted by the later PC versions. The RTP is a whole set of default graphics, music, and sound effects that are used in RPG Maker 2000 and, in most cases, the RTP must be downloaded to the computer to play the games made with RPG Maker 2000. Thanks to the RTP, created games can lessen their file size if a lot of material from the RTP was used.
Bonus contents
The Japanese version of RPG Maker 2000 included the following demos:
These were not appended to Don Miguel's English translation version, while Don Miguel incorporated his original sample game instead. Materials included in those games are free to use, and often utilized for actual RPG making.
RPG Maker 2000 VALUE!
This version includes the following changes to RPG Maker 2000:
Network RPG Maker 2000 is a multi-player variant supporting up to 8 players per game. The game map is displayed in isometric format. The multi-player server was run by TECHWin.
