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So let me get this straight, you arent hacking the rom persay just making a hack for the rom that is in the form of a patch. We then have to supply the rom and pacthing program to use it. Then the emulator? This seems overly like too may hours of searching for items, i dont have that kind of time.

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Don't fear the reaper!
Wonderful system this "Democracy" is no mechanism to break a tie -Dinobot-
It's spelled Raymond Luxray Yatch but it's pronounced Throat Wobbler Mangrove.
Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici
Sic Semper Tyrannis bush.

Not too difficult at all, I believe you can find an IPS patching utitlity here. As for finding a rom and an emulator, that'll just take some searching. Most rom hacks are patched manually at least initially, unless the rom is already prepatched.

Edit: Eh...I don't see it here. Well, this was the first page I searched in.

This post has been edited by Zeromus_X on 6th February 2007 04:40

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OSonic Rave
/ \Last Arcanum
[ ]Strike Raid
XRagnarok

Quote

i dont have that kind of time.

Yeah, you do.

There's this nifty tool called google.
Type in:

"IPS patcher"

they take up next to no space, and are efficient.

I'd suggest either Lunar, because it's very user friendly. Or something just flat out titled IPS patcher, that patcher is solid and has a wrench for an icon.

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

Yea, I use the latter patcher. It works. The ROM is easy enough to find, considering you don't need the translated one to patch if we use the japanese one as our original (which we might do later, who knows). Emulators aren't illegal, so if you, by some outrageous series of events, can't find ZSNES, we can give that to you. All you need to find on your own is the ROM.

I don't think a few minutes on google is too much time to spend to play a hack that we will've worked on for several months.

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Is PJ

Wow, damn, I had a post but it vanished. :x Blah... must've been the stupid emote limit. God that s... is annoying. :x

Anyhow, my bad for not double-checking after closing the window.

There remains a lot of work to be done on jobs before they're ready, but that's to be expected. Between the sprites, the commands and abilities, the new JP tables, the various text data we'll have to change, the new mechanics some of them introduce to battles, and the Bare class, we have, quite frankly, quite a bit of assembly to work with. No biggie. I figure if I can implant a command a day, I'd have only about 2 months' worth of work ahead of me.

Ceasar and I have turned our research and testing towards animation scripts and maps. Caesar has a good deal of the animation scripts figured out (as he said in an earlier post) and I'm making good progress on a map editor. Barely had time to work on anything last night though, I was out all evening.

Quick question, because this has been driving me nuts ever since I found it. There's a special portrait for Mini and Frog. Not the actual character sprite under the effects of the ailment, but a real portrait. I've never seen this anywhere. Double yew tea eff? Could it be used elsewhere? It's really not the thing you see on the menu screen, but I can't seem to find any other place where it'd be displayed. And the game DOES load it in VRAM at some point, along with apparent junk for a few byes...

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Quote

There's a special portrait for Mini and Frog.

I had no idea those were floating around in the code, and i actually want to see them...

Really bad.

This post has been edited by Cloud_Strife510 on 7th February 2007 23:20

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

Since you're messing with maps anyway, I wouldn't mind having a clean, full-resolution dump of any maps you can output from the source game.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

Once RL gets the Map Viewer in working condition we'll hook you up, Josh.

Not much in terms of updates guys, sorry.

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Is PJ

Similar to the Ranger guy's request, I wouldnt mind having some of the sprites to tinker around with. Any chance of getting dumps or the ability to dump sprites?

Hehe, I made a major discovery with maps last night. One that left me feeling stupid, kept me up until 3:30 am, and made me come in 45 minutes late at work (well, "late", not late. We can set our own schedules - being a programmer is awesome.)

There are no packed tile structures.

Everything I have right now is the ENTIRE map data. Right down to the last tile.

The map data has packets of information like this...
xx 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08
...where whenever a bit in xx is set, the following item at that position will be a single tile, and whenever a bit isn't set, it'll be a 2-byte value that looks like a pointer. Tycoon Meteor has, for instance, one such "pointer" set to 0xD0 0xFF (0xFFD0.)

I figured this was a pointer because the values steadily (but irregularly) increase (say, 0133 0166 0194 01AF 0201 0233...) And since I had one as far as FFD0, I figured an entire bank was dedicated to this and I could just find it by tweaking a few bytes at that offset and refreshing the map. So I give it a shot - the banks just go from 0xC0 to 0xE7 so that's not exactly a time-consuming test.

Nothing. Kinda left me annoyed. Whenever I'd mess with the values, the map would break horribly, too. Then I tried something. I had this...

xx yy yy (xx: a single tile, yy: a "pointer")

I changed the single tile's value, expecting the tile right before the back-then-assumed-to-be packed tile structure to change so I could identify them better. Every shrub on the map had become a piece of the meteor's surface. ...Zomg, curious!

Extensive testing revealed that when a single tile is followed by one or more 2-byte values, the map is defining multiple positions to lay the tile down on. Exactly how it does this, I don't know yet...

I felt pretty dumb because I can't quite think of any banks where Caesar and I haven't found at least one thing in (most of them are almost entirely completely decoded, in fact!) so there's no way it could've been a pointer to a complete bank of tile data.

--- END TECHNICAL MUMBO JUMBO

While Caesar may've found spell animations, I found weapon animations. I sent him the info and, let me just say, it's quite cool. Weapons are split into 2 sections: the swing animation and the slash animation. And you can mix and match them as much as you want, change their palettes, or even the graphics loaded and used by the script! Really neat stuff.

@Rangers:
No problem mate - I suspect I'll have the map format cracked within a few days (I thought I HAD it cracked but it turns out... no. ) Next time I bundle stuff up for Caesar, I'll also bring maps along (and some FFIV data I owe you for Almighty Bob knows how long...) and send them your way.

@Kaijyuu:
Most, if not all, of the sprites are available online on rip sites. I myself have a few bitmaps with all of the jobs' sprites and frames sitting on my PC from one such site. Give your favorite search engine a whirl.

If you can't find anything, I'll send what I have when I can (no internet at home yet - but I've begun the long and unintelligent process of signing up. Their support answers my questions about their service at the rate of 1/10th of an answer a week. I rather wonder if I shouldn't just find another more expensive but less of a hassle service. :x Anyone in Montreal knows of a good ISP other than the $800 a month Videotron or the "we can't make a coherant website but hey at least it's flashy" bell? I might go with Bell if this one doesn't work out...)

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

SilverLance:

I quite enjoy your technical mumbo jumbo when you post it. I actually also used to love reading your dev log on your site that is no longer around. So any times you feel like sharing more info about discoveries, or even just info in general like that, feel free! ^-^

Well, the sprites I'm looking for are rather obscure, and I'd like to view ALL the sprites as well, not just a few job animations

Wonder if tile layer pro works...

Yea, TLP works. That's chiefly what I use when looking at sprites and such. I found that most of the enemy graphics are in 4bpp, as well as the Job sprites, and it's a little easier to see if you use the fourth (?) built-in palette there. That is, when you load the ROM, go to the palette window and click right (or up...or down, idr) three times. It's like a blue/purple/tan palette. It doesn't hurt your eyes as much when you look at sprites that way.

And if all else fails, go to The Shyguy Kingdom. We are not going to dump every obscure sprite from the ROM for you, so if you can't find it with TLP, in the game itself, or on that site, that's unluck, unfortunately.

This post has been edited by Caesar on 9th February 2007 04:27

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Is PJ

Thanks for the palette suggestion :)

Sigh, it appears as if the sprites I'm specifically looking for are encoded. Or I just overlooked them.


Now that I think about it that was a rather huge request from me. The only ROM I've hacked before would be Earthbound, and there's a really advanced editor for it, showing all the sprites and things. I guess I'm spoiled :)
Course I dont expect you guys to make a really advanced editor; the one I'm talking about for earthbound took like 5 years to make.


Anyway, if you happen to come across the ending credits sprites, with them riding on chocobos (the diagonal ones, specifically), I'd appreciate it if you lead me to where they are or something :)


*goes to make some more jobs look better*

Edit

Auto-emoticons are my bane. Also, begining every paragraph with yeah, or anyway, or stuff like that isnt good xD /stab self

This post has been edited by Kaijyuu on 9th February 2007 05:31

This is a week behind, but here goes anyway.

What if, for the Bare class, instead of inheriting passives or obliterating them altogether, had certain passive abilities that got unlocked just like the jobs? The abilities would of course be significantly less powerful than those for other jobs, and you would only find them by accident through class leveling, but it would add a bit of spice to the job.

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I shall now return to my cave

So, little map update.

It turns out I had a bug in my decompiler. Mainly, it pertained to how the B "sub"-register and instructions that operate on it (namely XBA - eXchange B and A) came out wrong. Decyphering the map code was impossible. Furthermore I forgot to handle long jumps (the BRL instruction) and bits of the code came out looking broken because of it. All fixed now - I just tweaked a few simple things and changed the way it outputs the faulty commands.

So I spent nearly 3 hours elbow-deep in the map routine last night (this includes finding it ) After much swearing and cursing, a beer, a few lines of coke, and a dead hooker, I managed to get some serious progress done and isolated the exact place where the compressed tiles are unpacked.

The map code is funky. Since maps cover 3 banks it has to check if it has to increase the bank pointer every time it increases the map data offset. And this means it can only work with it one byte at a time. Which is especially funky when it loads 16bit values - it has to reassemble them in the accumulator manually. :x Also, it appears that maps are built using some backup "shadow" location in WRAM (7FFF7F IIRC) where tiles are written and read back when the game hits a packed tile structure. The 16 bit packed structures are what still holds me back, but now I know the lower 5 bits are the length and the upper 11 bits are the offset in the "shadow" WRAM where tile data is reloaded and transferred into actual map WRAM from. I don't know exactly how it works yet, unfortunately. The exact loop is a tight, short bit of code, and I've got that one figured out no problem. What I need to figure out is how the map's shadow data is written - it's somewhat of a copy of the data the's normally written to the map but a quick command line C++ test gave me a messy, weird map. :/ So... close, but no solution just yet.

@nyxojaele:
I tend to get carried away and start ranting about stuff sometimes. A simple "hi guayz i gotz teh map codez but its noet finished yet almosat there tho lol" would've been enough, I suppose. The dev log and, indeed, the website as a whole, will be back once I regain my internet access - until then I can't keep it updated so it's best closed. Wouldn't want people to associate Endless Saga with "sloppy unmanaged junk."

@Kaijyuu:
Most sprites are 4bpp, but there are a few 3bpp sprites (some animation graphics) and even 2bpp sprites (mainly fonts and such.) Try fiddling with the mode.

Editors don't equate to hacking - there's no understanding of the game's mechanics and any thought (other than design-wise) involved in the process. Neither Caesar nor myself are very fond of do-it-all-for-you editors, so an FFV editor is highly unlikely (maybe if I were paid for it or if it would bring world peace, and I'm not too sure I'd be motivated enough by the latter anyhow ) We do plan on writing a few tools for our own private use (editing text by hand in a hex editor is a horrible pain, for instance) but nothing major. And what we do produce will probably be majorly user-unfriendly - dev tools are, after all, dev tools. ;P

If there are any specific sprites you want, I can have a look for them. But I'm not going to dump every sprite in the game. That's not very feasible. Some are compressed, others are broken up into tiles and reassembled in-game (enemies mainly), and dumping any sprite would involve writing a program to do it since the SNES graphic format does not include a palette with its graphic data. Grabbing map tiles, for instance, would mean loading the map palettes and the map headers and finding a header which includes the desired tileset to load the palette and dump the tiles.

@Lurker:
Are you suggesting to unlock passives for Bare as part of certain jobs' abilities? I'm not sure I understand your suggestion... (sorry! :x)

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

I was suggesting that you unlock certain innates for the bare through combinations of job levels, much like you would unlock the jobs themselves, if I understand that system correctly.

Edit

Gah! Innate, not passive. I knew the word was wrong, but I couldn't think of it.

This post has been edited by Lurker on 11th February 2007 01:44

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I shall now return to my cave

I'm not sure I get how that'd be any different from the way it works currently though. You unlock passives through job level ups - generally passive abilities unlocked by a job are already applied to them if Bare gets them innately, so it basically amounts to the same (unless I missed something - it IS monday, after all. ;) )

Well, some dev news. Good ones. Very, very good ones.

I spent most of the weekend with my cousin and playing Dirge of Cerberus (surprisingly good - I didn't think it'd be worth the $50 but, hey, $50 is what I usually spend to resupply my bar so I didn't really mind.) So I could just work on this sunday, and by that I mean sunday afternoon (after recovering from the rest of the weekend - I snorted a line of coffee on a dare. I do stupid stuff, and never really learn my lesson. ;) )

I figured I'd get the big guns out. No more messing around. I went ahead and wrote a 65816 emulator (and added support for the math coprocessor for obvious reasons), shot the map unpacking code through it, and followed a trace of what it was doing. That's right - I went as far as writing an emulator for the SNES processor. This either makes me crazy, determined, or drunk. Given the past two days, I'd say the last with a hint of the first. But it worked, and I figured out where I had been going wrong (it was so simple too!! I silently dropped the upper 8 bits of the accumulator during an 8 bit LDA instruction when I should've left it intact...)

After patching up my map unpacker, I practically wet myself staring at the Tycoon Meteor map in unpacked hex. It was absolutely PERFECT! :D

So that's done. What's next? Map headers. Gotta grab the necessary info to pick the right palette and tilesets if I'm going to write a dumping tool.

Five minutes later, I was busy figuring out how the headers were stored. :)

Long story short - I didn't do any dev work this weekend but I did find maps and map headers - pretty much the only thing left to find (though we still have a thing or two left to make sense of - and animation headers.)

I'll try to write a dumper tonight. Might take a day or two though. Valentine's day present, I suppose. At least one good thing will come out of that horrible, sickening day. ;)

Edit: Update. I have most of the map header decoded - just missing one byte, and I think I know what it is. I need to figure out the format of a few things but with my 65816 emulator it won't take too long.

The map dumper is probably going to be ready in two days if all goes well. Right now it loads the ROM and the headers, and I wrote some code to load SNES 4bpp graphics and palettes. If I can get tilesets (found) to load and figure out how they're pieced together, then tomorrow I'll just have to unpack maps and throw the tiles in there.

If someone has access to an FTP I could upload maps to, it would be well-appreciated. Wouldn't be for a few days though. Otherwise, R-51 wants 'em, I can email them to him and anyone else who wants them. Can't say it'll be anytime soon because there are 512 maps at an average size of 64x64 tiles. That's 512 images at around 1 meg uncompressed each. Probably a few hundred k in gif format. You do the map. ;)

(Fake edit: math. Proof-reading pays off. Talk about a slip though. :P )

(Real edit: NO I DO NOT WANT TO DISPLAY GOD DAMNED EMOTICONS! STOP MAKING ME LOSE MY POSTS OVER SOME STUPID SMILY GIFS! God what a useless feature!! :x *kills the emotes*)

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 13th February 2007 18:28

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

It's been awhile since we updated so I suppose I'll post here and let everybody know what's going on. It has been a relatively slow past week since RL and I both have had our hands full with our jobs, but we have made some progress.

RL discovered a new block of animation data that we hadn't found before. We're not exactly sure how to use it yet, but we do know that it deals with sprite graphics, which is a big help. That means that with the discovery of animation headers, if they even exist, I think we will know where everything in the ROM is, except for a few map/tile things that RL is sorting out right now. There may be other minimal things, but if we find those two things, we will be 100% ready to get this underway.

Speaking of map/tile data, that is the only thing missing from a map editor. And I believe RL almost had it figured out last I talked to him about it, so we will probably have that to work with in the next few days. Which means we will have a debug room in a few days. And then maps shortly after that.

I had a few new interesting ideas with animations last night after I woke up halfway through the night with a sudden burst of energy. Red Bull is really bad, don't let anybody fool you. Anyways, I'm going to wait until RL confirms that it is possible to do before I ask for input on the idea, but it would add just another level of strategy to this game.

That's all I've got for now. Haven't heard from RL yet today (hasn't come into work yet, I don't think), so he will probably just post here with whatever he found. Maybe it's a map editor, maybe it's a huge glitch in his dev program. I guess we'll see.

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Is PJ

Hrm, no wonder my ears were burning this morning.

There have been a bunch of minor discoveries lately (for instance, the pattern through which an enemy sprite is removed when they die, or some tile formation pointers I can't quite use yet), so I'll just sum it up.

Currently, the main area we're focusing on are animation headers. I stumbled on some interesting stuff two nights ago but neither Caesar nor myself are quite sure what it's for yet. Seems to be some animation graphic index, but nothing's quite certain yet.

I also found something I was missing: NPC conditional scripts. These scripts determine, for instance, wether to display the proper item obtained or a "Empty!" message when opening a chest. Or if an NPC says something different the second time around - that too. I've decoded that structure entirely overnight, which makes it pretty cool. It's easy to work with.

Maps, I'm missing the bit that tells the game how to assemble tiles together. Tiles are 16x16, but broken down as 8x8 graphics in the ROM. Something tells the game how to pack the tiles together, but I don't know what yet. I know where the data is though (not that there are a lot of places to hunt around for data left - maybe 2-3 banks in total) so it's just a matter of time.

Once I get the map editor working, and once we get that debug room up, I'll start implanting classes. Mainly the new commands. It'll rock.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

An ETA on a hack like this is pretty darn impossible to ask for, so...

Screenies once you get some new spiffy stuff done? I'm quite interested in this, as I've always wanted the generic FF battle system to have a bit more depth to it.

Most of what we've done so far involves changes to the mechanics. It's hard to illustrate these things through a screenshot, though. I suppose seeing someone at level 10 with 1000 HP might give you an idea just how much levels have been "compacted" or maybe screenshots of people with different job screens, but it's nothing outright cool at the moment.

Right now, our focus is on getting a debug room up. My map editor is missing tile-related junk, though I have a fairly good idea where to find it now. An ETA for the debug room would be 1-2 weeks starting monday, tops. We may have a few working classes by then with any luck, too. And assuming we find the info we're looking for, maybe a few new animations by then.

I'd estimate the ROM 85% decoded. Most of the missing stuff is...

- Graphics
- Stray bits of code
- Encounter-related
- Animation-related
- Tile related
- NPC related.

Most of them are unimportant, too. But figuring them out would be useful. Oh yeah, we're also missing sound data entirely, though I know of a few instrument tables so we aren't clueless about those entirely. And we're still a little uncertain about a few animation and music script commands, but we know enough to do our own things.

Bear with the thread for about 2 more weeks and screenshots will start coming in. Once Caesar and I have a few tools up and running, we should be able to give a better estimate of how long this will take. My half-guess, half-opinion would be early fall 2007. We should have enough to make this into a playable hack by early summer, I think, though it's very hard to tell right now.

I also have Endless Saga to keep me busy, so... y'know... got my hands full

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Ok everybody, we have good news to share. Well, more like I have good news regarding what RL found but can't post because he posted last. I'll try to be brief: RL found the animation headers! This is the missing puzzle piece to our beginning to make animations. I didn't want to change any scripts because I didn't know how they were called. It seems that we now know this. I found the address he pointed me to and the structure looks workable, but we still don't know how exactly they work yet, so we might have a day or two before animations commence.

Just beat me, too, RL. I woke up in the middle of the night and had a few ideas for where they were. I'll just email you instead of going about it here, though. Great find!

Since animations are very visual, and since I now have time and motivation after having just completed Seiken Densetsu III, I will likely have results fairly soon after figuring out how this works. Assuming RL has no objections with me making animations before the mechanics of the spells/commands in question are made, I may have screenshots as soon as by the end of this week. Don't count on it, though.

Anyways, that's all I've got as far as updates are concerned.

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Is PJ

Quote

someone at level 10 with 1000 HP might give you an idea just how much levels have been "compacted"

You now if you're not going to go all the way up to 99 levels you could think about replacing the numerical values with greek letters pr something else of the sort, just to mkae it interesting.

for some reason a lot of people get confused when you can't level up to 99
removing numbers from "level ups" will show that Butz Beta is superior to Butz alpha

especially since level ups don't directly increase their stats, the stats stay the same through out the game (except for passives from mastering classes) and their level just acts as a multiplier.

well unless you're planning on changing that aspect of the game. I just think the greek alphabet would bring more closure. Even 99 is an arbitrary number (and wasn't it 50 in final fantasy)
while Omega actually implies being the last or final value.

This post has been edited by Cloud_Strife510 on 27th February 2007 05:18

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

Good news, all. I was feeling smarter than usual today and after having found where the animation headers are (correction, after RL found them), I proceeded to figure out the entire system in just a matter of minutes. And it actually handles the code for almost all the missing pieces to the animation scripts that we needed. Takes care of all of that in 5 concise bytes. Just the way I like it.

Anyways, I can begin making animations as soon as tomorrow, depending on how much time I have and how organized I feel like being before making any changes. If I want to be really careful to not run into trouble later, I might want to wait a few days, but I couldn't help but post here after finding all this out.

Hmm...even if I don't make any permanent changes to the game yet, there's nothing wrong with a few teasers showcasing what I can do, now is there? We'll see what develops this week.

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Is PJ

I think we've already mentionned that levels were capped before 99, but that was a while ago. It's due to the fact the game won't be as long as the original game was, so reaching 99 would either be tedious as heck or (if we reduced the exp requirements to level up faster) would make levelling a joke.

Levels also play a part in nearly every damage algorithms, especially physical attacks with pretty much any weapon class. They don't just boost your HP/MP.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Exactly RL
I'm just saying that instead of an arbitrary number as the level barrier, use some other from of notation, such as Greek letters.

this is just stuff I'm throwing out there. it really wouldn't make much different what notation you used for levels.

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

I think you guys might've said something about it being level 40
oh, and keep up the good work. Although i dont understand this technoligically game stuff. It may be just cause im technoligical handiccaped.

The problem with that is that new characters means substituting old characters - a byte is 256 possible values. Expanding text to take 2 bytes is unfeasible and replacing some of the existing ones impossible (though I think the japanese font could go - dunno if what's left would be enough for 40 entries though.)

For technical reasons I think it would be best to stick to something people can recognize. Someone unfamiliar with the greek alphabet (like me ) would probably have no means of identifying just how strong a character at level theta is. And handling L.x spells (L5 Doom, L2.5 Squid...) would no longer be possible anyways. Thanks for the suggestion though.

I mentionned maps a week or so ago. Unfortunately I'm still stuck on how to load tilesets. I have the headers figured out but I'm still unsure how tiles work. More importantly how the 8x8 blocks are assembled to make 16x16 blocks. As soon as I figure it out, expect map dumps and other cool stuff. (Just thought I'd tie up that loose end.)

Caesar has been busying himself with animations, while I've been digging through the remaining unexplored data for new stuff. I found some command-related structure I was sure was being handled solely via code, and might work on some classes if I get bored of going nowhere with maps. Yeah, I think that's what I'll do tonight. I'll implant a few classes... Potential friday screenshots ahoy.



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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Quote

And handling L.x spells (L5 Doom, L2.5 Squid...) would no longer be possible anyways. Thanks for the suggestion though.

true how could i have forgotten about that.

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"