AzimuthFE

Knew what this would be before I even looked at the video. Good choice! I'm going to have to go with FE4 Prologue: Birth of a Holy Knight. Also reprised in FE8!

I believe bookofholsety was going off the modern logo when he designed the one for the patch. I can say that trying to use the one from Thracia would have required messing with the palette which may have had a detrimental effect elsewhere. There are a lot of graphical effects involved in showing the title screen at the end of the intro and I wanted to mess with it as little as possible for fear of breaking something. To edit the graphics I used a debugger to pinpoint when the graphics were loaded into RAM. I then dumped the RAM, isolated the graphics within and edited them using TileMolester. Hope this helps!

No. this is one of the biggest differences regarding promotion. When a unit promotes in this game the level does not reset. If a unit promotes at level 23 they will still be level 23 promoted. Another thing to consider is that the stat caps for a promoted unit is the unpromoted stat cap plus the amount they get on promotion. Put simply, if a stat is capped before promotion it will be capped immediately after, so you aren't losing out if a unit gains levels after lv. 20 without promoting.

Tilemolester REALLY hated those text graphics when I was trying to import them. I'll look into cleaning them up a bit.

That's strange. The first thing I can suggest is making sure you are using the correct version of the patch for your ROM (headered or unheadered). You should get a white "checksum ok" message on boot. If you're sure you're using the correct version, try downloading the patch again. If it still freezes then are there any saves on your machine from old patches/clean ROMs? If so you could try moving/deleting any old saves to make sure the emulator doesn't try to load them.

Yes, we did. I once tried expanding the ROM in compatibility mode early on. It booted up but still crashed.

No worries! Good luck!

Now that Prjoect Naga is in open beta I am considering playing through again and going for an A rank. I think that quite a few others will be replaying it too so it might be good to have a thread for such a difficult task. Anyway, I notice that to achieve an A rank you have to beat the game in less than 400 turns and get more than 100,000 exp. How is possible to get all the terrible units up to snuff AND get the desired love pairings all within 400 turns? it just seems impossible. Can anyone help?

Have you tried this? http://www.snes9x.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6798

I'm afraid we simply couldn't get this patch to work in zsnes. We think it might be because of the expansion from 4MiB to 8MiB. I can only suggest switching to an emulator like Snes9x or Higan/bsnes. Sorry.

I wouldn't say that it's treated as wrong and creepy. Sure Dierdre is kidnapped and brainwashed but there's no stigma attached to other characters who pair up with relatives. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Ares says to Nanna (if paired) "Aren't we cousins?" and her response is basically "lol yeah". NoA would probably remove ALL references to incest in the game and have Julia and Julius born through immaculate conception or something. We are faced with the possibility that NoA will either cut the story to ribbons or not bother with it at all. That was my point. I'm fully aware of the idea of privilege. I was pointing out that saying "check your privilege" is just a cheap way to attack and discredit the other person. If the poorer person replied "check your privilege" to the rich person, are they going to think "oh shit, that remark has really made me think about my life and circumstances"? I doubt it. Like I said before, it's designed to derail and shut down discussions. As for the Kana thing, NoA changed that because sex with children is against the law. If they left the dialog in unchanged then people might think that Nintendo are encouraging illegal behavior. Making a character gay isn't in response to any laws. They are only changing that character because either they like gay people and think that this character would be better as a gay person regardless of what the original creator intended, or they are just trying to show how progressive they are, which in disingenuous.

This is a good example of changing a character to fit an agenda. They deliberately changed a characters straight romantic pairings to "lifelong friendships" to make her appear lesbian or at least bisexual. Fine if that's what you believe, though I stand by my assertion that a person's age/sex/money/etc. is not suitable grounds for judging their life experiences. When you say "check your privilege" to someone you're basically saying, "based on this immediately obvious aspect of your person, I feel suitably equipped to judge that you have never experienced true hardships in your life". It simply isn't a valid point in a discussion. If Raven and Lucius were actively trading saliva in the original JP version then fine. If they decided to make it obvious because "LOOK HOW PROGRESSIVE WE ARE GUYS" then that's an issue. It's unnecessary and disrespectful to the original work. I'm glad we can agree on something. The ellipses (and typos) are a major issue. Are people ignoring the other localizations? It isn't really a good counter to criticism of one game to say "but these other games are really good!" To get back to the OP's topic, AlertCircuit said that NoA take out things they deem "creepy". It is the consensus that incest is considered creepy, and that's the crux of FE4's plot. If you take all the incest, hebephilia and other things NoA considers "inappropriate" out of FE4 then what are you left with? An Advance Wars game, that's what.

My point was that as NoA cram agendas into their localizations, the line between Nintendo and tumblr is becoming increasingly blurred. Personally I don't think "check your privilege" is a valid discussion point. It immediately implies that the other person's views are invalid because they grew up white/straight/rich/whatever. In other words, it's designed to shut discussions down, not start them. Besides, I was just using it as an example of the type of thing NoA has been putting in their games recently. The fact that neither character is gay in the original? I was poking fun at the way NoA's changes characters to fit their agenda (I didn't make that quip about Julius being proud of his blood idly, when NoA are putting shit like this into their localizations). Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with ellipses, but when they start that's a problem.

BAHAHAHAHA! Seriously, though, I can see it now: Julia: That day Manfroy brought the book of Loptyr here, you became a demon! Julius: How dare you! I am a proud and noble Loptyrkin! I am proud of the blood that flows in my veins. You should check your privilege! Julia: You are correct. I should have realized that I was not treating you with the respect you deserve. Please forgive my microaggression. THE END Either that or they replace all the dialog with ellipses and have Seliph and Lewyn kiss.

Yup. Changing the world map isn't that hard. The issue is that the slightest change to the map graphics mean it doesn't compress down to the same size, so you have to expand the ROM to make room etc. etc. For some reason, the developers left a bunch of empty tiles at the end of the map tiles, so adding new graphics is as simple as replacing the empty tiles with new ones. The hard part is changing the tilemap because the game uses meta-tiles and... I should probably write some notes or something :S

I'd love to help in any way I can. Please let me know, either through this through this thread or by PM (whichever you prefer), what you need and where to go from here. Also, not being a nuisance. I'm happy to help

Sorry for the lack of updates on this. After working on this for so long my brain was kind of rejecting it heh. I spent a couple of weeks doing other stuff and a fresh mind coming back to this is really helping. Lamia is correct in saying that my tiles take up more room. This is for two reasons: a) changing tiles messes with the compression; a set of tiles that has been altered may not compress down to the same size. b) certain parts of this patch required adding additional tiles. This is mainly true for the map. This is almost certainly the issue. I'm guessing I will need to alter the tilemaps to fix this. I'm sorry, but I have to disagree here. There isn't that much free space (at least not for what I'm doing). Besides, the lack of space isn't the issue; it's the fact that a lot of the data is stored continuously in the ROM. It is impossible to replace a block of data with one that is larger since it would overwrite the start of the next block. As for the patch itself. The in-game stat menus are done, as are the chapter titles. I haven't yet updated the patch yet since the new graphics look very rough atm. I'm currently working on the intro text and title screen (nailing down the intro text is surprisingly hard and may take a while).

Ugh, Sylvia's a nightmare. She is a unit with massive amounts of utility but simply having her on the map can screw your pairings. Honestly the hardest thing about the LewynxFerry pairing is not having Lewyn shack up with Sylvia.

Haha. Just when you think you have everything... a wild kana appeared! As far as I'm aware, the to-do list in the OP contains everything that I could find. I'm kind of toying with the idea of reverse-engineering the Jugdral Chronology section. I like to think of myself as a fast reader but I find myself struggling to keep up by the end. I may see if it's possible to slow down the scrolling once everything else is done.

Ooh, That's actually a much more plausible explanation than I had. Pretty much what I was thinking. It *should* just be a case of changing the tilemap as you said.

Thanks for the shots guys. Considering I was working blind it looks about as good/bad as I could have hoped for. I am currently trying to edit the chapter titles atm and it's quite involved. When that's done I will make the blood wheel look nicer. Also, Bookofholsety, your blood wheel is excellent. I particularly like the custom font on the banner and the letters that aren't in the original (the 'v's for example). I take it this will be in Project Naga?

First of all, thank you for trying it out. Check out this let's play by Wind God Sety and scroll down to Julius' blood wheel. It seems to occur in the original ROM. The 'Hol' is even stored separately in RAM. Screenshot: Kind of hard to see in the image, the 'Hol' is in the center of the screen while 'Holsety' is in the lower right. I'm sure they had a reason but I can't figure it out for the life of me (starting to sound like a broken record here). Come to think of it, I am still nowhere near Ch. 10-11 on my save. I've never even seen the 'Loptyr' graphics. Could I trouble you to post your save or at least post a screenshot of Julius' blood wheel. I'd appreciate it.

Heh, I have figured much of the 'What?' when it comes to the graphic routines but not the 'Why?'. Any tutorial I wrote would basacally be me going, "The game copies this value here and multiplies it by 8. Why does it do this? Who the hell knows, but it does." The upshot is this: Most of the graphics are stored compressed in the game's ROM. I haven't figured out what kind of compression it uses but the game has a decompression routine that it uses to decompress the graphics into RAM. Once it is finished it copies the graphics from RAM into VRAM using DMA. It doesn't always copy it all across in one pass. Sometimes it is copied in chunks. No idea why (See?). I alter the graphics by setting the debugger to break when it writes to VRAM (specifically the address where the graphics I want to change are stored). At this point I find out where the graphics are stored in RAM when they are copied to VRAM and where in the ROM they are decompressed from and dump that part of RAM. I open the dumped file in TileMolester and make my own alterations. I then recompress the graphics using the fe_45comp tools (found here) and insert it back into the ROM using a hex editor. The compressor I am using, for whatever reason, does not compress the graphics down to the same size as they are in the ROM, Also, in order to finish the map graphics I had to add several tiles so they wouldn't have compressed to the same size anyway. The only way I can insert them into the ROM without overwriting stuff is to expand the ROM and put my graphics into the new section. This is why the ROM needs to be expanded. The final step is finding the part of the code that points to the old graphics and change it to point to my graphics. Ta-da! The game loads my graphics instead of the old graphics and they are copied to VRAM as normal. That was a lot more wordy than I had orignally intended but hopefully it gave some insight into the process I am using. To answer your last question the game doesn't specifically need to be 8MiB, but when I first started I had no idea how much extra space I would need. I have tried expanding the ROM to 6MiB. If I just straight expand it with Lunar Expand it does not start in ZSnes. If I expand it to 6MiB using compatibility mode it starts up but breaks during the prologue intro. Phew. Like I said, that was a lot longer than I intended. If you have any questions please ask!

^This. From the start, it was never my intention to force people to use (or not use) specific emulators to play this patch. I have tried every method of applying my patch, but ZSnes either won't start or messes up soon after starting. Unless I can find a fresh insight into the way ZSnes runs games, a compatible version simply isn't happening. Sorry about that.

http://twilkitri.fewiki.net/FE4/trans/ Download boo-ref.2002.10.03.zip. It contains a folder with .srm files at the start of each chapter.