Compressed Graphics in Seisen Savestates

[Duchess of Freege]

After running FE4 through every graphics editor/viewer I could find, I discovered an interesting tidbit about compression - namely, portrait compression. Thanks to Peekin's sprite viewer, I've found that the normally-compressed portraits are actually uncompressed in savestates. For example, after creating a savestate of Chapter 6, I found Skasaher's portrait and frames. I'm assuming this was because I had the cursor on him at the time; having the cursor on Celice and creating a savestate might result in different frames.

What I'm wondering now is, could the graphics in the savestate be used in a roundabout way to locate and edit the graphics data in the actual ROM? The weapon and skill icons can be edited in a Tile program, but since portraits can't I'm hoping that this might be a step in the direction of portrait editing.

[Celice]

If you're using ZSNES, it stores the entire RAM as a savestate. Most games will store the decompressed graphics in the VRAM while the game is playing--so you can usually find the graphics you're wanting by looking the the RAM when they're being used by the game.

On the binary uploader, or whatever it's called ( febin.so.land.to ) are some compression tools for the graphics across the three SNES games. I haven't used them in a year or two, but the tools are fairly simple. You can edit the portraits to your heart's content at this point, inserting whatever you want (along with a bunch of other graphics, such as weapons, and battle animation frames).

Edited April 13, 2011 by Celice