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Can a ROM hack play mp3s? (and some other stuff)


BurningCandy
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... Or can it only play MIDI? I'd like to replace the OST with a ton of mp3 songs and stuff for my hack.

Also,

1 Does the text before a chapter, like the chapter intro kind of thing where they say 'Dude went to the next castle but the princess wasn't there, etc', come under event hacking? Or does it come under something else?

2 Is there some kind of FE spriting resource? Like one that helps you create portraits and stuff?

3 [noob question] What is FE Editor and how do you use it? I understand Nightmare but not FE Editor.

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I guess it might be theoretically possible, although I wouldn't say it sounds remotely easy to do. The problem is space, a decent quality mp3 track is pretty much the same size as a rom so space is a massive issue. For your level, it's way more practical to stick with MIDI's. There are all sorts of tutorials in the hacking resources, they should be able to answer your other questions.

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Theoretically if you converted MP3s to WAVs you could play them in-game. You do would do this the same way you create a new sound effect.

But you'd be lucky to fit in any more than 3-4 songs this way, so no, you can't really play MP3s.

In addition to that, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of small functions like how the map music resumes after battle music plays, etc.

FE7 (and almost any other GBA game) can only play sequences converted from MIDIs, and at a limited capacity at that.

1. Yes.

2. There are resources with existing portraits, but none that do that sort of thing for you.

3. FEditor is a program that allows you to edit certain aspects of the GBAFE games, including but not limited to text, battle animations, portraits, and spells.

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Ah I see. Thanks guys. I have another question - I use a Mac, so do these* have Mac .dmg downloads, or are these Windows only? I know I could get Wine, but having it as a .dmg already would really help.

*by 'these' I mean FE editor, Nightmare modules, etc

Edited by BurningCandy
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Well some programs are witten in Java so they should work with OpenJDK or Oracle's Java runtime. (FE editor, Nightmare)

(Run the main .jar file with: "java -jar /path/to/file.jar" in a terminal/bash/shell)

For the C# (.NET) programs you should use Mono. http://www.mono-project.com/ (Some of Nintenlord's tools)

(Run the .exe file with: "mono /path/to/file.exe" in a terminal/bash/shell)

I don't know for Mac, but many of them works under GNU/Linux. (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora... etc)

Edited by Naughx
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FEditor had issues with mac last I checked; I'm not entirely sure what causes it because it works fine on some computers but not on others (and none of them are actually mine so I don't know the specifics about the hardware/OS spec)

I can confirm that all utilities (Mono included) work on my installation of Arch Linux

Edited by CT075
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I hope I'm not a buzzkill here, but I thought Macs couldn't even load emulators. My brother tried getting it for his friend's Mac and it would not open...maybe things have changed. But overall, I'm thinking Mac might be a bit risky for FE hacking. Just make sure you do all of the testing you can possibly think of. It took me around 3 and a half weeks to figure out every problem I came across. Check out my post history if you want to see some of the problems others have solved for me. I'm not sure how experienced you are, but based on you not knowing what FEditor is, you probably don't know too much--which is okay. Always ask questions for things you need help with.

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Avril Lavigne: Macs can load emulators, I think they just took forever to get it converted to Mac's format. I'm pretty sure there is VBA for Mac now. But I have an emulator on my phone, some I can just download my hacks to that and play them there.

CT075: Ok, thank you. I'll keep that in mind.

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MP3@128 is too big for GBA ROMs. Cart-based systems generally used MIDI or heavily compressed music. No one used MP3 even back then because it's lossy crap and CD systems like Sega CD and beyond could run dual mode CDs with Redbook tracks which sounded a lot better than lossy compression, as they were uncompressed.

MP3 is a shitty format that was only necessary because of old shitty internet connections. Nowadays there's zero reason not to use lossless compression. Maybe if you own an iPod with low capacity or some device which can't read FLAC files, but Apple offers lossless compression too (ALAC) so MP3 is pointless. I like to have the full data.

MP3@128, which is the only way you could fit many songs in a GBA ROM, is very easy to discern the lost quality. MIDIs will sound better across a wide range of systems and use far less space.

I hope I'm not a buzzkill here, but I thought Macs couldn't even load emulators. My brother tried getting it for his friend's Mac and it would not open...maybe things have changed. But overall, I'm thinking Mac might be a bit risky for FE hacking. Just make sure you do all of the testing you can possibly think of. It took me around 3 and a half weeks to figure out every problem I came across. Check out my post history if you want to see some of the problems others have solved for me. I'm not sure how experienced you are, but based on you not knowing what FEditor is, you probably don't know too much--which is okay. Always ask questions for things you need help with.

RetroArch, darling: http://www.libretro.com/

Developed on purpose to make emulators system-agnostic. The cores run on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. There's a Nestopia, bsnes, VBA-M and Desmume core (which is all you'll need for FE games). As a bonus you can apply various filters and shaders to the image to achieve cool effects.

No reason to use anything else than this.

Edited by Cerberus87
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