Expanded ROM in FEditor

[fuzz94]

So I'm working on this project with a team of people, and we expanded the ROM to 32 MB in WindHex. We inserted a tileset from FE8, a map right after that, and the prologue events right after that, and all of this works fine, no errors at all.

The problem comes in when I open the ROM in FEditor and insert a different mug in most slots (All of the Lyn slots worked fine and so did Dorcas, but Eliwood and Batta's made this happen when ever one of their mugs was supposed to be on screen.)

However, it could be fixed if I got to someone else's stat screen.

And when I put some text in this and it gets to a certain length, this happens

I assume that it has something to do with where FEditor saves stuff that might have been displaced with the expanded ROM, but I'm not certain as to why this is happening.

[shadowofchaos]

Pointers. Screwed up pointers.

If you expanded the ROM to 32MB, did you fix the checksum? Are you sure FEditor isn't expanding the ROM any more? Because if it is, past the 32MB portion, you are screwed. Because pointers don't work past the 32MB mark.

If it's not that, they try looking at the pointers to the text you're doing. You have to manually fix it.

As for the graphics, same deal. Use GBA Graphics editor if you don't know where the graphics were saved and do a search for a pointer to it, or a pointer CLOSE to the location.

[Jubby]

you can also expand right in HxD which very few people seem to have caught onto

[CT075]

don't expand it all the way to 32 MB

you can always just fill it in later

[zahlman]

FEditor provides tools for managing free space (i.e. keeping track of unused places in the ROM) and if it can't find any, it appends stuff to the end. You don't generally want to pre-expand the ROM if you use FEditor and definitely not to the full 32MB because FEditor wants to put stuff at the end (book-keeping information that says where the unused places are) even if there is room internally. But if you do pre-expand it then you need to use the freespace manager to tell FEditor about it, so that it knows that there's all this unused space available. Otherwise it... won't use that space.

Probably what happens is that you write stuff past the 32MB barrier in the file, and then VBA ignores that part (because GBA carts can't hold more than that) and then pointers to your data basically "wrap around" to the beginning of the ROM and you get garbage data from nonsense places (like inside the ASM). The address space is "mirrored", which is kinda hard to explain in a forum post if you're not already very technically minded but yeah.

Edited December 24, 2012 by zahlman

[fuzz94]

way late, but yeah.

zahlman, I understand what you're saying, but I do not know how to really work with the free space manager. Could I PM you or whatever to get some help?