Aleph

I didn't get that save, but I did figure out how to force the transfer data menu to always be enabled. Too bad it doesn't actually have any items to send in it if you simply enable it. The data for what items are in the menu actually comes from the bonus disc and is put on your save. In due time I'll have a hack that allows use of the transfer data items without needing someone else's save.

Doesn't the emblem seal give a different bonus based on your tactician affinity? But I always get Thunder affinity with the settings I use, so the bonus is always 10% avoid for me. That reminds me; I need to figure out how to unlock the Transfer menu for emulator users...or has someone done that already?

I remember my Gamecube got struck by lightning while I was in the middle of saving my beastly SSBM file. Scared the shit out of me, fried my cube and made a big red flash on my TV. I spent a good couple of weeks waiting for a replacement, scared that my months of SSBM play had been lost. Come to think of it, I think it was lost after all. I seem to recall getting the Master Sword trophy right before the crash and having to get it again later, and how much I loathed seeing it for the second time when I did...

For the record, I likely have under 50,000 hours (10,000, even!) of gameplay logged for all the games I've played since I was 7. I doubt you played a GBA game for 100,000 hours (which is over 11 years, by the way). Supposing the battery life had run out from that, there shouldn't be a shock like you experienced. No, I'd say the shock was some sort of hardware phenomena resulting from some mysterious build up (static?) within the console itself. You were seriously shocked by this thing? Crazy, to be sure.

100 hours?! I have 114 hours in just a single FE 8 save file. It's more like 100,000 hours I'd guess. Actually, I may have read that somewhere... Anyway, there's a slim chance your data is still there if you didn't save over the slot that was erased yet. The shock may have overwritten some of the SRAM but not necessarily all of it. If you had a Nintendo DS, an Action Replay for it and at least one DS game that the AR can train with a code list long enough to hold the code I made, you could recalculate the checksum and recover the file. But even then, since it will have been corrupted, your save will have garbage data and things like inaccurate stats and random items with random uses will appear in your file. Not to mention I have no idea if my code recalculates checksums for other slots but the first (it works for Resume data though). The shock may have fried the SRAM completely though. Try saving in a slot that you're not worried about being unable to recover and if it is there when you reload you might stand a chance.

Like I said somewhere else, the game uses the same seed to start with each time you reboot the hardware (pretty sure soft resetting accomplishes the same thing since the RNG memory is wiped during the soft reset as well, and in any case the executable is restarted so the seeding code will be called again). This is why the Lagdou Ruins tricks for getting Boots (Swiftsoles, my bad) and the like in FE 8 are possible. The game doesn't use its rand() function appropriately. The hashing algorithm uses data that isn't changed by functions but the hashing method itself, is called predictably and most importantly, generates the same values when given the same seed two different times as it will be in the event of powering off the game/soft resetting. My hack attempts to remove this exploit by using the game's clock as part of the algorithm. For reference, the method for obtaining Swiftsoles in hard mode of FE 8 is to enter the Lagdou Ruins, intentionally waste exactly 3 RNs and then exit/re-enter 6 times. Upon re-entering the ruins for the last time, an enemy near the starting points will have a droppable Swiftsoles. Only re-entering twice will net you three droppable items worth a total of 9900G, easily collected in a single turn if you have all of your units with 15 move like I do.

How would I know? I've never fought them. :P Anyway, you actually can make a reliable turn by turn. You just have to follow some rules like - Hard reset between chapters - Don't accidentally trigger an RN use when moving your units - Hard reset before playing the chapter over if you have to reset for whatever reason - Document all RNG abuse you do to a T if you do it If you do all that I don't see why you wouldn't be able to make a turn-by-turn that works.

I made a hack for this that used a lousy "compression" to store the difference between stats and bases instead of the stats themselves to get around this. It didn't work out for FE 8 (yet, anyway), had some restraints you had to be wary of to avoid screwing things and still had limits, but it was a decent solution. There's nothing else you can do, really...

Forgot about Nini's grace. Didn't get any pure waters; for some reason I kept thinking this was a melee chapter (hurf! Not even close!). Chokepoints are fine, but when I was using them the long range magic users weren't being deterred well enough. Of course, I had some crummy units with me. For one thing Raven is still unpromoted (and so is Erk and Priscilla). I guess instead of using chokepoints or dropping tanks in the middle of the sea of magic users I should just get all my high res units (who are mostly also healers) in a small block and not bring my loser units. Or? OR? I could just restart HHM AGAIN and maybe play it right. Which brings me to my next question... ...has anyone made a turn-by-turn walkthrough for HHM? I don't mean like "these are the turns I made; you're welcome to copy them but the RNG will eventually keep you from doing it any more", I mean an outright "Copy this exactly and you will get the exact same results" walkthrough. The one on GFAQs doesn't take RNG abuse into account and therefore can't be copied reliably. However, I and probably many of you (looking at you, Rolan) know enough about the RNG to make a real turn-by-turn walkthrough that can be reliably mimicked for ultimate lulz. So if there isn't one...who wants to start one? :D

Zag and I are doing a run through our fixed stat hack. I've passed him because I've missed a couple of gaiden chapters and have more free time. I don't know what chapter he's on, but I'm at Cog of Destiny and it SUCKS, despite arena abusing 4 of my units to 11/0 that were behind back in chapter 21 (at least one of which I ended up not using anyway :/) and using mines on chapter 20 and 26 (I'm still terrible at this game). I can PROBABLY tank it with the barrier staff and uber spear (no worries about using the uber spear; not saving it for an arena team!), but I don't want to bother if the rest of the game is just going to be harder. Is it? HHM for both of us, of course. Edit: I just want to confirm the information others have posted about chapter 17: - Yes, the Silver Sword remains undroppable if the Knight Crest is stolen from the thief - Blocking the doorway is much more effective - Rescuing a soldier has always been my method of choice; it's the only way to keep the rascals from going off on their own (I like to save just one thief because I'm terrible and need all the mines I can get) - Sending Oswin as far left as possible worked wonders for me. I just used javelins. Merlinus was untouched. - Having lots of mounted units IS good. I brought Kent, Sain AND Lowen with Marcus; Marcus blocked the thief and the other three plugged the reinforcement stairwell. Funny Zag even made a thread for this chapter considering it was pretty easy and he's better at this than I am. Now, if he had made a thread for Lloyd or Vaida's chapter where Lloyd bum rushes your team and Vaida's incessant reinforcements do the same then I would understand. Except my solution for Vaida has always been "mine the bitch and take her spear".

inb4 we make a regular expression that describes all used variants of your name and use it to make said spy network

That is seriously ironic (or is uncanny a better word?) that you, someone I find notorious for not being around or handing out these particular tools just popped in and handed them out within a couple hours of this thread's posting. You got some sort of "your name was in a post!" alert system? Anyway, yeah, I would recommend FEditor for editing text but the damn thing just keeps growing new bugs despite not having been worked on in months. It was working fine for a good while, then my buddy started refactoring it some more to get the code cleaner without setting up the unit testing stuff he planned to. That, coupled with a series of bugs sprouting from the removal of a key graphical system feature and something I had apparently overlooked in the text editing system led to my complete demotivation. You should still try out FEditor and see how you like it though. The bugs are minimal and when it works, boy, does it.

Wow, that was random. For the record I was talking about FEditor there.

If we're talking about that joke of a Paladin that joins in 17x, I usually take him out with Lyn or Hector easy.

My Oswin is 19/12. I think he's done enough boss killing

I just threw Hector and Lyn out there in turns or something and hoped for the best. Decent EXP and it's not like I couldn't have just abused the RNG in the actual game to accomplish what I did with save states (the original RNG seed is reset to the same value each time you hard reset, so you can actually make turn by turn strategies for every chapter...this hack makes that insanely difficult).

Eh, I'm doing an HHM playthrough of this (up to ch. 26) and I'm sucking hard. Already used a mine (abused, more like), arena abused AND reloaded some savestates back in 17x to get all that nice exp off of killing the more difficult pirates. I'm terrible at these games. >.> Even with all that I still missed the member/silver card (forgot where they were >.>), the chapter with Geitz (for some reason the Lyn fanboy in me crapped out and only leveled her to 17) and had to abuse the new RNG system at least twice to save a unit (which isn't really cheating as it's a lot less versatile than the now obsolete RNG abusing tricks the original game has, but the fact that I still needed it...).

Sounds believable, but if that's the case then whatever DOES control Merlinus' growths should probably be looked into. For one thing it might be related to enemy level ups (IIRC enemy stats are calculated randomly using their growths too, hence why their stats even vary to begin with), which would be great for making fixed stat ups for both allies AND enemies.

I wanna guess the reason it's so hard to find is because not only is the creator somewhat of a recluse, but these tools of his he likes to keep to himself have bugs that tend to cause unavoidable grief. I could suggest an alternative, but its nature suggests to me I'd receive undeserved negative attention as a consequence. Edit: And I don't really think it's worth it anymore because it has its own share of bugs which ironically resulted AFTER a period of time in which there were none. The idea of an application growing worse is...detestable. In summary, the parser is the greater of two evils. There be dragons.

That's what's up. Ugh I love this game. Also, if anyone cares, I hacked an infinite ammo code. Edit: Damn, I forgot the black hole has a limited sucking range. I wonder if I could have used it to pull that one starite closer...eh, I just used a lasso. Oh, by the way, my personal favorite way to get around is the jetpack, but the dang thing can only propel you up a limited distance before you must land to use it again (and it shorts out in water mad easy). I remember using a "Hole" to drop a police officer out of the way so I could lasso a starite out of a museum... I have half a mind to RE this game and get a dump of the names of all possible objects that can be spawned in the (U) version, but if the devs used a dictionary to store everything like I'm sure they did, they may not have stored the keys to check for collisions. Except there's a spelling suggestion system, so...

That's part of the hack. You read the first post, right? And there was some other post later explaining what the side effects of "improved RNG" means. Edit: In addition to promoting at level 19, I also suggest you resume a chapter where a unit has died (might want to hard reset first or something) and make sure they die the second time as well. If you restart without checking you may potentially miss a chance at your unit being saved. You can also turn hits into criticals this way if you're lucky, but you only get the one chance. Either be happy with what you get the first time or be happy with what you get the second time - after you resume once the result will be the same as what it was the second time from then on. This is the only way to abuse the RNG now unless you frame-by-frame the game.

*shameless plug for Nightmare 2.0* Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Whoa. The two are pretty independent; I suggest getting both: :/ FEditor, bro and Zahlman broke :D ...:( Mappy is indeed it. Mappy can be used with some tilesets NL dumped to create maps that can be exported as MARs that can be inserted into the game in the correct format using NL's MAR Array Inserter. I don't like any of them so I can't recommend them. Ewww that thing's old. NL released this doohickey called "GBA Graphic(s?) Editor" that seems to be rather exhaustive in the ways of graphic editing, and is at least superior to unLZ-GBA. Incidentally, GBA GE is an evolved form of the intentionally similarly named NLZ-GBA by the same dude. Confirmed. Also confirmed. FEU has a stickied thread or three (some of which I pinned myself!) containing links to and descriptions of all you need.

It does look pretty sweet, but it just makes me jealous that they have people willing to cooperate on such extensive things when everyone I know is a lone wolf and sucks at participating in team projects (including myself).

What the heck is PEXP? Also, any hack of a game is going to be a binary hack.

At the moment I don't have the resources I'd need for any of that. I know a bit of 65816 and can learn assembly languages in 2 seconds given a link to an instruction set's documentation and an assembler to play with, so it's only an issue of resources. I also am not familiar with the tools that would work best for debugging/disassembling/assembling 65816 code (if I was I'd probably have them and then I'm sure you can guess what the last piece of the puzzle would be).