Three simple hacking questions

[Krox]

Well I'm new here, so hi and all that!

I'm having a go at putting together my own hack, starting this summer, which is going fairly well so far, considering...

But on to business, I've got 3 questions I'd like some help with here.

1: FEditor Adv. I cannot seem to get anything here to work. For example, I want to change the objective text in the prologue for "Seize the ger" to "Seize the ship" (my hack may or may not heavily feature pirates).

So I run the run.bat file, select my FE7 ROM (that runs fine beforehand!) , select text editor, go to 65D I think it was, and change the text, then apply. And save after. This causes the ROM to freeze and make a constant beeping sound whenever it tries to display the text. This even happens when I delete the text and replace it with the exact same text! I remember reading something here about saving being wierd, but I've tried just about every combo of saving before/after etc. This may sound ridiculous, but can anyone take me through the exact sequence of button presses needed here?

2: About prologue things, I get the feeling it would be a lot easier to avoid a mess if I could rig the game to start at 11H instead of Prologue, but I can't for the life of me work out how. So that supports will work, and I get the feeling something horrible will happen after chapter 10 if I try to just cram everything into Lyn mode. I've tried repointing things in Nightmare but it doesn't seem to do much. This is also because I'd prefer to have Hector as the lord, since he's most like my half-assed plan for a lord! I know I could bundle the patch with a .sav file and just tell people to play HNM, but that doesn't seem very professional!

3: Importing map animations. I've been messing around with Leila in order to have a female thief. I've got Thief(F) promoting to assassin so far, and I'd like to have her Thief(F) class with the Thief(F) animation from FE6. Of course then I'll have to work out how to make an Assassin(F) battle animation, but that's a problem for way down the line!

In short, how does one import Thief(F) map animation from FE6 to FE7?

And get the class to use it since Nightmare only seems to change the standing frames?

One other little thing, I've noticed people here going on about how horrible event hacking and ASM are here, but so far I prefer it to Nightmare and FEditor. (totally nothing to with spending a year doing ARM in college) I'm guessing I haven't gotten to the hard part yet!

So thank you to anybody who decides to help me out here, maybe some day I'll actually release a hack for you to play!

[Jubby]

1. I'm guessing it has something to do with checksums and whatnot, so make sure you go in Feditor and "delete" (basically allocate) some free space for FEditor to put stuff. Then save, and try reopening it. It might be checksum, too, in which case you'd go in HxD, delete the last four bytes in the ROM, go to checksums and run a check for Checksum-32 (or whatever the terminology is) and then reverse the blinkytes and put them at the end of the ROM.

2. There's a patch that might interest you here

3. Map animations are graphics, so use GBAGE. Import to free space and make a pointer to that offset in nightmare. (might wanna check out some tutorial stuff if you've never used it before)

Also, events are not too bad. Nightmare is just tedious as hell. FEditor's fun cause pretty animations (GBAGE for this too)

ASM is, for most people, brutal, but that's because they're starting it with (most of the time) no coding experience whatsoever and going straight into it, as opposed to doing it right like Cam and programming in less basic languages and then moving down to ASM.

Most people just give up right away.

Edited May 16, 2012 by Jubby

[Krox]

That patch is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

The fix for FEditor worked, but to be honest I have no idea what I just did so I'll have to go read up on that as well as a GBAGE tutorial. Thanks for your help Jubby.

And giving up? Pfft, I've got nothing better to do this summer and I gotta do some coding to keep in practice!

[CT075]

asm hacking and programming from scratch in straight ARM are two different things; the latter is (by far) easier

if you know what you're doing with C you can get into it pretty easily - iirc hextator even has a register control header file that takes care of things like "this register has an important address and we don't want to lose it".

the main concerns are that the ROM's current routines take up exactly as much space as they need to and for the most part you'll need to either split or (imo the better way) rewrite bits of the routine to make space; the range of a bl call probably gets in the way more than anything else. that and using THUMB sometimes can be a bitch

Edited May 17, 2012 by Camtech

[Jubby]

That patch is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

The fix for FEditor worked, but to be honest I have no idea what I just did so I'll have to go read up on that as well as a GBAGE tutorial. Thanks for your help Jubby.

And giving up? Pfft, I've got nothing better to do this summer and I gotta do some coding to keep in practice!

By most people I meant the ones with no experienceee

If you have some you'll probably do quite well, like Cammy says :3

Ehhh for FEditor it's like, the checksum does sooomething with the game; I believe it's kind of like a header type thing, not that I actually have any idea. But it does an analysis on a case by case basis, so Idk. The free space allocation is pretty straightforward though XP

GBAGE is fun, lol.

[Krox]

Honestly I can't come up with anything I want to implement with a custom ASM routine yet! Not that I'm saying I'd have no problem doing it or anything... I suppose I should familiarise myself with the basic tools first etc. The main problem is just getting my head around how ROMs work at a basic level.

I should probably stop trying to learn everything at once and just concentrate on one thing at a time. I got bored a while ago tried my hand at splicing... It wasn't exactly pretty!

Also, try programming from scratch in straight ARM on paper by hand under time pressure. Fun times!

Thanks for the help/comments/encouragement. I'll probably be back in a while with more questions!

[CT075]

i'm actually stupid and said that programming from scratch is harder - asm isn't easy per se but writing a standalone is easier than hacking into one

physically writing code with a pen is stupid and doesn't really teach anything

there is literally no realistic situation in which one would ever need to code without a ref manual somewhere nearby

it's less a "how am i gonna make this algorithm work" problem and more of a "how am i gonna make this algorithm fit" issue; for the most part there actually is a hard lower bound on how short you can make a routine (in thumb at least idgaf about arm) and more often than not that's still too much

all i really do is utility patches anyway though; doing an asm thing to be called from an event code (for example) would be way easier since there's no space constraints

there's no reason not to learn everything at once if you already have ground in asm, the learning curve consists of learning a ton of numbers (since if you dislike how the game runs something you can change it).

[Jubby]

Honestly I can't come up with anything I want to implement with a custom ASM routine yet!

wanna try and remove a gradient effect for me?

[Krox]

@Cam

That's exactly what I tried to tell them! But yeah I can see that being a problem. I think I'll leave the utility patches to you for now!

@Jubby

Hahaha! I'd love to help, but I'd really rather get to grips with it on my own first before worrying about getting involved with other peoples projects. Maybe some other time!

[Jubby]

;P I was just kidding, but lol if you want to help later, sure :3 I've given up on it for the moment and am just randomly commenting about it everytime somebody doesn't know what to try ASM-ing XD