RPG Maker 2003 Games on Windows 7/8/10

You’re probably here because you’ve been trying to play an RPG Maker 2003 game on Windows 7, 8 or 10 and keep getting an error message that says, “The RPG Maker 2003 Runtime Package is not present or not registered.” Luckily there’s a relatively simple solution to this problem, albeit a bit of an awkward one.

First of all, you need to download the official RPG Maker 2003 RTP. Install it anywhere, but remember the folder it was installed to. Then go to that folder (it should be something like C:\Users\<your username here>\AppData\Roaming\KADOKAWA\Common\RPG Maker 2003 RTP) — if you don’t see the AppData folder, select View in the file explorer and tick the Hidden Items box. If you’ve gone to the right place, you should see a bunch of folders like this:

Select all of these folders (but not the icon.ico or uninst.exe files), copy them, then go to the folder where you’ve unzipped your RPG Maker 2003 game — it should have a bunch of similar-looking folders. Paste the ones you copied from the RTP folder in here, but if Windows asks if you want to override any existing files, say no.

Next, look for a file in the game folder called RPG_RT.ini. Open this file in Notepad (or your text editor of choice) and look for a line which says: FullPackageFlag=0

If this line exists, change the 0 to a 1. If you can’t see anything like that in here, then just add a new line at the end of the file and type: FullPackageFlag=1

Now save the RPG_RT.ini file, and try running RPG_RT.exe. If you’ve done everything right, the game should work! If it’s having issues with your graphics card, you may have some luck by right-clicking RPG_RT.exe, selecting Properties, then the Compatibility tab, and enabling the option to run the game in compatibility mode for Windows 7 (or an older version of Windows).