Basic Music Hacking?

[Joerachi]

Is there anyway to go into the data and have a song play X Instrument instead of Y instrument with little hassle?

I remember Arch doing this with the FE4April fools joke, so I do know it's possible.

[Crimson Red]

http://forums.feshrine.net/index.php?showtopic=954

Here's a quick guide on how to do it (if you need more instructions I can consider putting this in the Ultimate Tutorial)

1) Rip the song from the game as a MIDI (gba2midi, Sappy 2005, Sappy 2006 fix, etc.)

2) Open it in a program such as Anvil Studio and find the track you want. You'll also want to find the number of the current instrument and the number of the instrument you want to change it to (the topic I linked to above has a list in hex of all the instruments, IIRC, so use that to find your hex).

3) Now find the song using the Music Array Editor (it's a Nightmare Module) or Sappy (it should say the offset somewhere...), go to that offset in a hex editor.

4) Skip the first 8 bytes as they aren't relevant ATM. Then go forward one less pointers than you have tracks. Say you're trying to edit the instrument of the 3rd track. A pointer is 1 word (4 bytes) so you'd go (3-1)x4 = 2x4 = 8 bytes forward.

5) This is the pointer to your track data. e.g. if the 4 bytes here are 12 34 56 08 then the offset for the track data is 0x563412. Go to this offset in your hex editor.

6) Look forward a few bytes. You should see the byte "BD" and then a byte after it. BD sets the instrument, the byte after it is the instrument value. If you're using a range of instruments that has all instruments, just use the hex you found earlier and replace the old hex with the hex of the new instrument (since you also found the hex of the old instrument, use that as a double check to make sure you're editing the right thing). If you're editing an existing Fire Emblem song and haven't changed the instruments it uses, however, only some instruments will be usable, and it's up to you to decide which you want to use (I suggest using Mariobro's FE7 instrument data in this case as most of the instruments work for it).

7) Save your ROM in the hex editor and test your song. Enjoy.

[shadowofchaos]

What he's saying is:

Once you find the header (you can find it in Sappy) "XX 00 YY ZZ"

XX = number of tracks, YY and ZZ = I don't know.

But after that, there's a pointer to the instrument map, and THEN a pointer to each track.

You could change the instrument number when the command BD MM (MM being the Instrument number) after you set the instrument map pointer to MarioBro's Native FE7 instrument map, since if you don't use it, you'll just get beeps.

Edited August 19, 2011 by shadowofkitty

[Crimson Red]

lol simplifying things for me, ouch, I guess I'm not concise but at least I'm detailed... lol

alternatively you can use the All-Instrument patch instead of Mariobro's, depends on your purposes, both of them should be somewhere on this forum (good luck finding it though)

[Joerachi]

What he's saying is:

Once you find the header (you can find it in Sappy) "XX 00 YY ZZ"

XX = number of tracks, YY and ZZ = I don't know.

But after that, there's a pointer to the instrument map, and THEN a pointer to each track.

You could change the instrument number when the command BD MM (MM being the Instrument number) after you set the instrument map pointer to MarioBro's Native FE7 instrument map, since if you don't use it, you'll just get beeps.

T'is a bad day to be among the FE8 hackers D:

Suppose this information is useless to me?

[Crimson Red]

The instrument map might work on FE8, and if it doesn't, then you could still try and find a matching instrument already in the game's data or use the All-Instrument patch for FE8 that Shadowofchaos made, the music format is the same so it shouldn't be a problem.