Increasing Rom File Size in FE8

[Will Bill]

Hello Everyone. I was wondering how I can create more space in a FE8 rom. I’m getting dangerously close to the end of the rom and I don’t want to run into the issue I had last time, where the beginning of the file was screwed up. I tried adding new offsets to the very end of the file in my Hex Editor, but it didn’t do anything.

[Will Bill]

I’ve also used a patch on the rom and edited it quite a lot. I need something that’ll work with lots of edits in place.

[shadowofchaos]

I'm pretty sure can just add your data at the end and expand the ROM.

I believe the GBA can handle pointers up to the 0A's but no more.

[Will Bill]

But will doing this mess with my extorting data. There is still a lot of stuff I’ve got after the 0A’s, so won’t moving it down screw with the rom, since it’ll be looking in the wrong location for moved data?

[Kirb1337]

Have you used the in rom free space? There's quite a bit of free space at $8E80000(remove the first 8 for the file offset.), and some other locations.(more info at http://feuniverse.us/t/free-space-ranges/112)

 

As for expanding the rom size, the rom is mapped in ram from $8000000 to $9FFFFFF, which is 32 mbs of rom space.(what is stored after that is copies of the rom.) Essentially, that means you have up to offset $1FFFFFF in a rom file to work with. You're very unlikely to hit that limit(unless you do stuff like inserting music as uncompressed wav), so I'd say you're safe with appending all your new data to the end of the rom.(in fact, that's what most tools(FEBuilder, FEditor, Emblem Magic) do when repointing data.)