8th Playable Character Possible?! (Updating!)

[Mauron]

Anyway, welcome to the Compendium!

Around here we welcome people tot he party.

Anyway BakedBad, Welcome tot he party.

[BakedBad]

Anyway, welcome to the Compendium!

Around here we welcome people tot he party.

Anyway BakedBad, Welcome tot he party.

Thanks!

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

Yeah, I messed that up. Welcome tot he party is totally the correct venacular. Please forgive me!

[TheMage]

yeah the other link had expired but i dont know how to navigate the new link xD

[Mauron]

Which link isn't working?

[IHBP]

He's talking about my Dropbox link. Not sure why I deleted it but here is a new one.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7t0h5953e3zwjl6/8thy%202021.ips?dl=0

Just click to download.

[justin3009]

Not sure if it's the wrong patch or of it's being applied wrong, but it doesn't seem to work on start-up. On a headered ROM, of course, it black screens. On a non-headered ROM, it shows some sort of garbled type graphics in the top center of the screen then 3 enemies in a triangle formation on the top left and top right.

[pseudonymous_traveller]

Is there a similar possibility of an 8th playable character on the DS version? The DS version also natively has a higher string length limit for player character names (instead of 5 I believe it's 6).
If nobody knows, I could try to take a crack at it. I'm not an amazing reverse engineer, but I can understand what most assembly code (most architectures) are doing.

[Mauron]

Probably, but it hasn't been explored. A lot of the data structures are the same, or similar. The issue is locating all of them, and modifying the DS assembly code where needed.

6 character PC names has been hacked on the SNES version.

[Vehek]

I did some experiments with memory hacking on the Japanese DS version last night. I didn't find the memory address for the active party at first, so my first experiments were done by editing the loaded location events to add the 8th character to the party. I've attached an image of what it looks like without any other adjustments.

• Name is Epoch
• Default stats are zeros
• Sprite in menus is Crono's menu portrait
• Save portrait and menu icon are palette-swaps of Crono
• Blank, black full portrait in menu

Hacking a LoadPC command to load the 8th character produced a black screen.

For reference, memory addresses in no$gba's debugger:
~207293B: Character stats, starting with Crono. 0x60 bytes each, possible differences in layout to SNES.
21C2000 Location event data
21D0980: Active party

[SnakekillerX]

Curious if this is still being worked on.  This would be a pretty big deal if completed.

[Mauron]

I am, just slowly.