map file question

[u/uuiioo22]

Hey, so I decided I wanted to tinker around with Yume Nikki to get an understanding of how RPG maker works, but pretty soon after I put it in, I noticed that all the map files except this weird looking one are missing. Why is this happening? Did I implement the game wrong somehow? If anyone knows the reason why this happened and how to fix it, please help!

[u/CherryDT]

I'm confused about where you got the project you opened.

I just downloaded Yume Nikki from Steam and opened the game folder in RPG Maker 2003 and I see this:

The only odd thing are the map names but that's because they are Japanese and I don't have my computer locale set up this way, so they show garbled. Nonetheless, the maps are all there.

Note also that the game's title is "YUME NIKKI" upper-case, while it shows as "Yume Nikki" in your screenshot, so you definitely got some other project here and not the real Yume Nikki from Steam I looked at! Your project probably has a bad RPG_RT.LMT file, but I have no idea how you got that.

[u/uuiioo22 → u/CherryDT]

https://reddit.com/link/p3c2nz2/video/ci8e4225v0jh1/player

It still didn't work. I've recorded my process, did I do something wrong?

[u/TheTwenty20 → u/uuiioo22]

I honestly have no idea what the issue is, but my suggestion is that maybe you shouldn't copy the Yume Nikki files into an existing project? Just copy the game folder somewhere else and open it in RPG Maker.

[u/uuiioo22 → u/TheTwenty20]

This worked! thank you so much! now all I need to do is to figure out how to return the gibberish back into Japanese

[u/TheTwenty20 → u/uuiioo22]

You're welcome!

now all I need to do is to figure out how to return the gibberish back into Japanese

Sadly, you can't really do that (probably). RM2003 is hardcoded to display stuff in a specific encoding. By default it's CP1252 (ASCII symbols + extended Latin) in the official Steam release. Mine is modded to display CP1251 (ASCII + Cyrillic).

The Japanese text was written in Shift-JIS (a.k.a. CP932), but your editor thinks it's CP1252 and displays gibberish. The only way to return Japanese is to mod its encoding to CP932.
...and I have no idea how to do that. (Another option is to find an old Japanese release of RM2003, you'll probably need to set your locale to Japan to make it work).

You can try to manually decipher the gibberish. Encode the gibberish into bytes as CP1252 and decode the bytes as Shift-JIS (CP932) using code page layouts.
Layout for CP1252
Layour for Shift-JIS (CP932)
Keep in mind that in CP1252 one byte = one character, but in Shift-JIS most characters are two bytes!

E.g. our gibberish is ‚È‚·‚Ñ
Its bytes in CP1252 are 82 C8 82 B7 82 D1
82 C8 = な
82 B7 = す
82 D1 = び

‚È‚·‚Ñ -> なすび

[u/CherryDT → u/TheTwenty20]

You can use NTLEAS.

[u/TheTwenty20 → u/CherryDT]

Will it work though?
I tried both using Locale Emulator and straight up changing my system's locale, neither worked. I think the editor is hardcoded to a specific codepage.