👾 EasyRPG Player
I decided to give EasyRPG Player a try tonight and see if I could get things working to play RPG Maker 2003 games natively in macOS. My first choice program for this test was an indy game called Bibby Bobby. It seemed to work fine initially, but was missing all the RTM assets once you got past the title screen. EasyRPG actually has their own custom RTM alternative to avoid licensing issues, but it doesn't seem to really be available in a downloadable release currently.
I ended up downloading the official RPG Maker 2003 RTM and extracting it via Wine. I then copied that over into /Applications/RM2K3/data/rtp/2003 where I hoped EasyRPG would be able to find it since it was also in the RM2K3 folder. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
Turns out you have to set the RPG2K3_RTP_PATH environmental variable in the terminal first. In order for that environment variable to work within the macOS GUI context you need to use launchctl. Here's the terminal command that worked for me:
launchctl setenv RPG2K3_RTP_PATH "/Applications/RM2K3/data/rtp/2003"
I don't mind working in Wine for the RPG Maker 2003 application itself, but I'm much happier being able to just run EasyRPG to play actual games since there's so much less overhead. I just wish the developers of EasyRPG made it simpler in macOS to reference a given RTP installation.