Settings

Aurora’s settings come in three layers:

1. App settings — apply everywhere (volume, appearance, library, saves)
2. Engine defaults — global defaults for all games on an engine (XP/VX/Ace or MV/MZ)
3. Per-game settings — override the engine defaults for one game

Sensible defaults are chosen for everything — most games run well without touching a thing.

• Master Volume (default 100%) — app-wide volume for all games, applied live while playing.

• Animated Background (on) — the moving gradient behind the app’s screens. Turn off to save battery.
• Dark Mode (on) — switch the app between dark and light appearance.
• Icon-Colored Game Pages (on) — tints each game’s detail page with colors pulled from its icon.
• File Ext. Filter (on) — limits the import file picker to supported archive types. Turn off if a valid archive is grayed out.

• Haptic Feedback (on) — vibration on on-screen button presses.
• Button Opacity (60%) — transparency of the floating button, with a live preview.

• Touch to Mouse (off) — taps on the game become mouse clicks. XP / VX / VX Ace games only.
• Controls & Layout — button mapping, layout editor, and control profiles. Covered in Controls.

• Game Icons in List View (off) — shows icons next to games in list view (placeholder art for now).
• Color Tags (on) — colored category dots on library entries. Color Tag Settings picks the default color for new games (green) and the Color Weights that order the groups in the library’s Rainbow sort. See Color Tags.

• iCloud Saves (off) — store game saves in iCloud so they follow you across devices. Requires iCloud Drive. Turning it off with games still on iCloud offers to migrate their saves back to local storage.
• Automatic Save Backups (on) — snapshots a game’s saves every time you launch it.
• iCloud Backups (off) — keep those backups in iCloud too.
• Max Backup Slots (2, range 1–10) — how many automatic backups to keep per game.
• Save Manager / Save Backups / Storage — browse saves across all games, restore backups, and see what’s using space.

Downloads or imports the official Runtime Packages (default graphics/music assets) for RPG Maker XP, VX, and VX Ace. Games that shipped without their default assets need the matching RTP — Aurora prompts you at launch if a game declares one it can’t find.

• Developer Mode (off) — unlocks developer options (extra Link Play debugging, a per-game script console for MV/MZ games, screenshot helpers). Leave off for normal play.
• Frame Profiler (off, under Developer Mode) — logs frame-time breakdowns to the game’s log for performance reports. Applies at next launch.

Settings → Engines → RPGM XP / VX / VX Ace. These are global defaults; individual games can override them (see below).

• Known-Game Fixes (on) — patches known problem scripts in specific games. Harmless for unaffected games, so leave it on.
• Native Tilemap (on) — renders classic PE maps with the engine’s own tilemap instead of the game’s scripted one. A large speedup, especially while the map scrolls. Turn it off per game if a map’s tiles render incorrectly. Applies at next launch.
• Error Tolerance Shims (off) — makes the engine tolerate common script errors (nil values, missing fonts). Turn on if a game crashes; off by default because it slightly changes script behavior.

Apply a bundled look preset, or snapshot your current display and post-processing settings as your own preset.

• Upscale Method (xBRZ) — how the game image is enlarged: Nearest, Bilinear, Bicubic, Lanczos3, xBRZ, or FSR. xBRZ suits pixel art; FSR pairs with CAS Sharpening below.
• Downscale Method (Nearest) — used when the image shrinks instead.
• Bicubic Sharpness (100) — shown when Bicubic is selected.
• FXAA (Anti-Aliasing) (off) — smooths jagged edges.
• Ambient Glow (Letterbox) (0%) — fills the black bars with a soft glow from the game image.
• Integer Scaling (on) — scales by whole-pixel multiples for maximum sharpness; Last-Mile Stretch (on) fills the small remainder so the image isn’t undersized.
• Fixed Aspect Ratio (on) — keeps the game’s proportions instead of stretching to fill the screen.

A PE-only feature that matches the free-roam overworld camera to your screen so you see more of the map — widening the view in landscape and extending it in portrait, with no stretching. Battles and menus stay at the game’s native size. It works on both modern and classic (1.8) PE games. It may cause graphical glitches on some games, so it is off by default.

• Widescreen Overworld (PE) (off) — turns the feature on. Opt in globally or per game. Only appears for PE games.
• Resolution Scale (1.0×) — only applies when Widescreen Overworld is on. Ups the render resolution to reveal even more of the overworld — most useful on landscape iPad, whose aspect already matches the game’s native 4:3 so widening alone shows little extra. Higher values reveal more map but make tiles appear smaller. Classic (pre‑v19) games are automatically capped below the slider value when needed to avoid rendering artifacts.

Both apply at the next launch. On iPad you can also toggle Widescreen on/off instantly and adjust the Resolution Scale live from the in-game overlay — open the overlay, tap the gear (Settings), then Widescreen & Resolution. A quick on/off button also sits in the overlay’s top row.

• Sync to Display (off) — paces game logic to your screen’s refresh rate. Off by default because classic games pace themselves.
• Fixed Frame Rate (Default) — force 30/40/60/120/Unlimited; Default lets the game use its own rate. Hidden while Sync to Display is on.
• Frame Skip (off) — drops frames to keep game speed on slow scenes.
• VSync (on) — prevents screen tearing.
• Show FPS (off) — frame rate counter overlay.

All applied live while playing: CAS Sharpening (0%), Bloom (0%, with a Bloom Threshold at 50% when enabled), Saturation (100%), Brightness (100%), Contrast (100%), Gamma (100%). The neutral defaults leave the game image untouched.

• Solid Fonts (off) — renders text without antialiasing for a crisper retro look.
• Font Scale (1.0×) — enlarges or shrinks all in-game text (0.5–2.0×).
• Kerning (on) — natural letter spacing.
• Hinting (Light Default) — how glyphs snap to the pixel grid: None, Light, Normal, or Light Default.
• Height Mode (FreeType (iOS)) — how text line height is measured. Switch to GDI (Windows) if a game’s text is clipped or misaligned — it mimics the measurements games were designed against on Windows.

• Disable Autotile Animation (off) — stops animated tiles (water, flowers) for a speed boost on heavy maps.
• Path Cache (on) — caches the game’s file layout for faster loading. Leave on unless files change under a running game.

• Enable Hi-Res (off) — renders at higher internal resolution, with Framebuffer Scale and Texture Scale (each 1–4×). Costs memory and battery; for experimentation.

Settings → Engines → RPG Maker MV/MZ. Global defaults for games on Aurora’s web engine; also per-game overridable.

• Graphics (Auto) — Auto lets the game pick (usually WebGL); force Canvas for older or glitchy games that render wrong under WebGL. Applies at next launch.
• Scaling (Fit) — Fit keeps the aspect ratio (letterboxed), Stretch fills the screen, Integer snaps to whole-pixel multiples (sharpest for pixel art).
• Lighting Quality (Reduced) — some games use lighting plugins that redraw the whole screen every frame, which can cut the frame rate by half or more. Full leaves the game exactly as its author made it; Reduced draws the lighting at half resolution (softer light edges, much faster); Performance also updates the lighting less often, which can look laggy. Applies at next launch.
• Frame Rate (Auto) — caps how often the game repaints. Auto leaves the game’s own pacing alone. 30 gives a steady rate on scenes a device cannot hold at 60 — on a 120Hz screen an unstable ~48fps lands between refreshes and reads as judder, where 30 lines up evenly. Game speed is unaffected: only painting is thinned, never the game logic. Also lowers power use. MV only for now.

• Image Cache Cap (0 = engine default) — caps how much image memory the game keeps. Lower it if large games crash on older devices.
• Fast-Forward Speed (3×) — the top speed the overlay fast-forward button cycles up to (2×–4×).
• Resolution Scale (100%) — draws the game at a fraction of its own resolution and stretches the result back over the screen. The picture gets softer, but every layer costs fewer pixels — this is the setting that helps most when a game runs slowly on a big, busy map. Menus, touch targets and game speed are unchanged. Applies live.
• Texture Cap (Off) — shrinks very large images (backgrounds, CGs, big art) before the GPU stores them, which lowers memory use and heat. Those big images get a little softer; menus, text and gameplay are unchanged. A lower cap shrinks more. Takes effect for images loaded after the next scene change.
• ProMotion Smoothing (on) — on 120Hz displays, keeps the screen at its full refresh rate while a game is playing, so late frames appear sooner and scrolling looks steadier. The game itself still runs at 60 fps. Uses somewhat more battery. Shown only on devices with a 120Hz display.

• Pause in Background (on) — pauses the game loop and audio when Aurora is sent to the background.

• Cheat Mode (off) — adds a wand button to the in-game overlay that opens a native cheat menu: party and god mode, gold and items, walk through walls and teleport, switches and variables. Applies immediately and doesn’t change how the game itself behaves.
• Debug Mode (off) — runs games in RPG Maker playtest mode: F9 opens the debug menu (edit switches/variables) and holding Ctrl walks through walls. Some games behave differently in playtest and a few won’t start at all. Applies at next launch.

• Import Font — add .ttf/.otf fonts. Games that reference an imported font by name will find it, or force one as the Default Font (None by default).

• Show FPS (off) — the engine’s FPS counter. Applies at next launch.

Open a game’s detail page, tap the gear menu, and choose Game Settings.

• Use Global Settings (on) — the master switch. While on, the game follows the engine defaults above (rows show the global value, tagged “Global”). Turn it off to customize this game.

For XP / VX / VX Ace games you can override: Known-Game Fixes, Native Tilemap, Error Tolerance Shims, Smooth Scaling (the simplified per-game form of the global Upscale Method: on uses your global method, off renders crisp/Nearest), Fixed Aspect Ratio, VSync, Sync to Display (Auto / On / Off — Auto follows the global setting), Fixed Framerate, Frame Skip, Disable Autotile Animation, Path Cache, Solid Fonts, and Font Scale.

Two per-game items sit outside the global switch:

• Ruby Runtime (Auto) — which script runtime the game runs on: Modern (3.1), Legacy (1.8), or Ace (1.9). Auto picks the right runtime from the game’s engine and scripts; if a game won’t launch or misbehaves, try another runtime. Applies at next launch.
• Cheats — per-game only, applied live to a running game: Debug / Cheat Mode (takes effect at next launch and can change or break some games) and Walk Through Walls; PE games also get Disable Wild Encounters and 100% Catch Rate.

For MV / MZ games the overridable rows mirror the MV/MZ defaults: Graphics, Scaling, Lighting Quality, Frame Rate, Image Cache Cap, Pause in Background, Cheat Mode, and Debug Mode.

The same gear menu also offers: Change Save Folder (link the game to a different save folder — useful when updating to a new version of a game), Plugins (XP/VX/Ace games only), Logs (when the game has produced any), and under Advanced: rename the game or its folder, change its icon, and delete it (save folders are kept, so re-importing can link to them again).

• Changing display and post-processing settings while a game runs applies instantly — the in-game overlay menu exposes the same controls
• Made a mess? The neutral values are listed above next to each setting — or just flip a game back to Use Global Settings