AI5-SDL2

AI5-SDL2 is a cross-platform implementation of elf's AI5WIN game engine.

Compatibility

Only the games listed below are supported.

Additional Features

AI5-SDL2 adds the following features which are not present in the original AI5WIN engine:

• The game window can be stretched to any size.
• Built-in text hooking features (see the --texthook-clipboard and --texthook-stdout command line options).
• Various issues caused by AI5WIN running with an unlocked frame rate are fixed (by limiting the frame rate).
  • The speed of transition effects can be adjusted with the --transition-speed command line option.
  • The speed of message skipping (with CTRL) can be adjusted with the --msg-skip-delay command line option.

Key Bindings

The following keybindings can be used in-game.

Fonts

AI5-SDL2 ships with suitable fonts on non-Windows platforms, but they are not perfect. In particular, the font used for the English version of YU-NO gets cut-off at the bottom on certain characters.

You may want to copy msgothic.ttc from a Windows installation and use it instead of the default fonts. Custom fonts can be specified using the --font option.

On Windows this is not a problem, as the system's msgothic.ttc is used by default.

Configuration

AI5-SDL2 can be configured using command line options or an INI file. You can use the AI5WIN.INI file that came with the game, or create a new INI named AI5SDL2.INI. Options for AI5-SDL2 should go under the [AI5SDL2] section. E.g.

[AI5SDL2]
FONT=myfont.ttf
FONTFACE=1
TRANSITIONSPEED=0.5
MSGSKIPDELAY=8
NOWARPMOUSE=1
TEXTHOOKCLIPBOARD=1
TEXTHOOKSTDOUT=1
MAPNOWALLSLIDE=1

The available configuration options are as follows:

Building

This repository uses git submodules. You must either pass the --recurse-submodules option when cloning this repo, or initialize the submodules manually:

git submodule init
git submodule update
cd subprojects/libai5
git submodule init
git submodule update
cd ../..

Then install the dependencies (corresponding Debian package in parentheses):

• meson (meson)
• libpng (libpng-dev)
• libsndfile (libsndfile-dev)
• SDL2 (libsdl2-dev)
• SDL2_ttf (libsdl2-ttf-dev)
• ffmpeg (libavcodec-dev) (optional)

Then build the ai5 executable with meson:

meson build
ninja -C build

Windows

ai5-sdl2 can be build on Windows using MSYS2.

First, install MSYS2, and then open the MINGW64 shell and run the following command,

pacman -S nasm diffutils \
    mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc \
    mingw-w64-x86_64-meson \
    mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config \
    mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 \
    mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_ttf \
    mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng \
    mingw-w64-x86_64-libsndfile

To build with FFmpeg support, you should compile FFmpeg as a static library:

git clone https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg.git
cd FFmpeg
git checkout n7.0.1
./configure --disable-everything \
    --enable-decoder=cinepak \
    --enable-decoder=indeo3 \
    --enable-decoder=pcm_s16le \
    --enable-demuxer=avi \
    --enable-demuxer=wav \
    --enable-protocol=file \
    --enable-filter=scale \
    --enable-static \
    --disable-shared \
    --extra-libs=-static \
    --extra-cflags=--static
make
make install
cd ..
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"

Then build the xsystem4 executable with meson,

mkdir build
meson build
ninja -C build

Installing

If building from source, run:

ninja -C build install

to install AI5-SDL2 to your system.

Nix

Run the following command to install AI5-SDL2 to your user profile (note: flakes must be enabled):

nix profile install git+https://github.com/nunuhara/ai5-sdl2?submodules=1

Windows

The recommended way to install on Windows is to copy the executable into the game directory. Then you can simply double click ai5.exe to run the game.

Windows builds can be found on the releases page.

Running

You can run a game by passing the path to its game directory or .INI file to the ai5 executable.

build/ai5 /path/to/game_directory
build/ai5 /path/to/game_directory/AI5WIN.INI

Alternatively, run AI5-SDL2 from within the game directory,

cd /path/to/game_directory
ai5