MajiroTool is a tool designed to work with the files used by the "Majiro Script Engine", a visual novel engine. This project was a cooperation with trigger-segfault, who made a lot of very useful discoveries regarding the script format and wrote some tools as well as most of the wiki.
We don't know much about the engine's history. It was developed by someone who goes by the name of Koeta Koehata (越畑声太) around 2004.
The earliest known game using the engine is Mahjong by NekoNeko Soft, and even newer versions of the engine still contain a lot of Mahjong specific logic. The theory is that Majiro was developed specifically for that game.
The latest known game is Ryakudatsusha no In'en by Akabei Soft3, though new releases of earlier games have come out since.
Majiro games are easily identifiable, the game directory usually contains these files:
- A single game executable (
<name>.exe) - Several
.arcarchives with the game assets. - A
moviefolder with any video files the game might use. - A
savedatafolder with your settings and save data.
The .arc archives contain the various game files, which include graphics, audio files and scripts. The name can be followed by a number from 1 to 12 if there are multiple archives with the same base name. This is the order the archives are searched in (higher numbers take precedence, so update12.arc has the highest priority):
update.arcfastdata.arcscenario.arcdata.arcslowdata.arcstream.arcvoice.arc
There must exist at least one update or fastdata archive, as these are the only ones which are searched for the essential file majiro.env at startup. Without this configuration file, the engine fails to boot.
Majiro supports images in .bmp, .png and .jpg format, but also defines two proprietary image formats. .rct files contain 24 bit RGB images, while .rc8 files contains 8 bit indexed pixel data. Since .rct files only contain 3 color channels, they are often accompanied by a grayscale .rc8 file, which serves as the alpha channel. For a file <name>.rct the alpha file name has to be <name>_.rc8.
Majiro objects (.mjo files) are the binary script files controlling everything the game does.
They are not meant to be read by humans, which is why MajiroTool will disassemble them back into a human readable format.
The source files end in .mjil (Majiro intermediate language) and may be accompanied by an .mjres file of the same name.
These .mjres files use the CSV format and contain all of the text from their corresponding script.