Supported engine · SRPG Studio
SRPG Studio (SapphireSoft) is the dedicated tactical-RPG maker behind a large and growing catalogue of Japanese strategy RPGs — many of them commercial doujin titles on DLsite. Everything those games display is packed inside an encrypted data.dts archive, so ordinary text tools can't see it. RuneTranslate ships a bundled native sidecar (built from the MIT-licensed SRPG-ToolBox) that unpacks data.dts, pulls out every translatable string — chapter/story text, map names and victory/defeat conditions, the full database (units, classes, items, skills), and event/dialogue commands — translates them with your chosen provider, and repacks a runnable copy of the game. Structural/system tokens are auto-excluded so you only translate real text, and very new or custom-keyed builds may fall outside the tool's range. Verify on a real game before redistributing.
Tactical RPGs reuse unit, class, and skill names across hundreds of database rows and event lines, and MT will rephrase them differently each batch. Glossary your playable cast, recurring bosses, class names, and signature skills up front so every roster screen, status panel, and battle conversation renders them identically. Glossary 101 →
Point RuneTranslate at the game directory — the folder containing game.exe, data.dts, and runtime.rts. Engine detection recognises the SDTS archive automatically; the bundled sidecar handles the unpacking, no separate install needed.
RuneTranslate unpacks data.dts and lists every translatable source-language string (Japanese by default; set any supported source language per project) — story/maps, the database (units, classes, items, skills), and event/dialogue commands — grouped by source file so it's easy to work through. Internal command tokens and system identifiers are auto-excluded so you only translate real in-game text.
DeepL is a strong default for narrative and battle conversations; OpenAI GPT-4o or Anthropic Claude handle stylized speech better. Free Google Translate or a local model (Ollama / LM Studio) covers menus and item names, and you can point the OpenAI-compatible provider at OpenRouter or NanoGPT. Provider routing can split short strings to a cheaper lane.
On export, RuneTranslate copies the game, writes your translations back into the project data, and repacks data.dts. Run the game from the exported copy and it plays in your target language — no loader or overlay needed.