NScripter
NScripter is a visual novel engine written by Naoki Takahashi. Due to its simplicity and its liberal license (while it is not open-source software, royalty-free commercial use is permitted), it quickly became popular in Japan, and was used for a number of high-profile commercial and dōjin titles, such as HaniHani and Tsukihime.
Clones and forks
The original NScripter is closed-source and only available for Windows. A number of cross-platform clones have been written.
KScripter
KScripter is Flash-based scripting engine that was inspired by NScripter but uses ActionScript and SWF.
ONScripter
The best-known NScripter clone is the free and open-source software implementation, ONScripter. Its popularity among the visual novel localisation community is attributed to the ease of modifying the engine to support languages other than Japanese. It strives to maintain compatibility with visual novels designed for NScripter.
ONScripter is based on the Simple Directmedia Layer (SDL) library, and can thus be used to run NScripter games on platforms supported by SDL, such as OS X, Linux, PSP and the iPod.
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