8th Playable Character Possible?! (Updating!)

[justin3009]

Alrighty, I'll get to work on this ASAP then.

Edit: Once I'm home from school that is.

[Vehek]

Some things I found today:
3FCC84-Crono's save portrait palette.
The 8th character uses data at 3FCD64 for its save portrait palette.

$C2/D49D 69 84 CC    ADC #$CC84 //Start of palettes
$C2/D4A0 AA          TAX
...
$C2/D4AF 54 7E FF    MVN 7E FF

$C2/D23B 69 E0 05    ADC #$05E0

This is used in the save menu to get the amount of gold in a save game. After some testing, I changed the value at 02D23B to 35 and got the gold to show up correctly in the save screen (but not the time, apparently that's not copied to the same place).

[justin3009]

Strange, changing that value didn't do anything at all to help the gold when I tried.

Edit: Another Strange thing.  I cannot get the magic graphics to repoint to the end of the rom now, yet I was able to before?  Weird.

Edit 2: Got the 8th portrait to load, but apparently I have like, 3 copies of the save portraits somewhere...Gonna have to recheck that once I get home.

[Vehek]

Whoops, wrong address; I changed the value after that (making the number added $535),

[justin3009]

It shows part of the save potrait graphics next to the "1" "2" "3" in the Tech Menu.  I can't really screenshot right now, i'll do that once i'm at home.

- I think I can fix that one easily by changing the hex areas around the numbers.

[Vehek]

Yeah, I know about that problem. I typed in C01D at 02FC9F (changing the VRAM address to 1DC0) and placed the 8th character's portrait before Crono's so I wouldn't have to change all the values at 02D4B4. Hopefully, that space in VRAM isn't used by anything else. (It was empty when I was doing tests earlier.)

[justin3009]

Okay, i'm having the strangest thing going on.  All trace of the save portraits were completely removed from the rom, I checked via hex/tile molester, and they're not there.  But they STILL appear...This is really weird x.x

- Yay

[justin3009]

Double post, Ugh.  It is NOT allowing me to save games now.  It freezes when i attempt it.

Edit: Wait, you didn't have to alter the values?  I still have to, otherwise the portrait won't show up.  It'll still be the stupid lightning thing.

[Vehek]

This is why we need to know more about what the data its loading does. I moved that (portrait tile #) data elsewhere.
Well, I only changed the value for the 8th character too.

[justin3009]

Yea, I just did what you did.  I removed the old spotholder for the save portraits at 3FE55C, moved them to 41D51C, then changed the pointers for that to 5CE5FF and added a "DC" after F8.

Edit: I CANNOT change 02D23B to 35.  If I do that, the save portraits will dissappear and the values of the gold still don't really work...Maybe I forgot to change some values?  But I double checked what Mauron posted and found nothing minus the 00 00 that was corrupting the rom whenever I tried changing it.

PS: I think i'm going to reorganize all the data at the end of the rom for easy viewing.

[Vehek]

As I said, wrong address. I meant to put 02D23C as the place to change. I can't reproduce that save portraits disappearing problem, even when changing 02D23B to 35. The save menu change worked fine for me with the last patch you uploaded.

[justin3009]

Woops, sorry.  Didn't see that.

I found out, if you try saving in the last slot, the menu goes kinda funky. 

[Vehek]

I don't know if I should put this in another topic or not, but we might be able to give the 8th character its own techs in the future. (Edit-And this is obviously useful elsewhere).

$C1/D546 BF EB 1B CC LDA $CC1BEB,x

X in this case is attack/tech index * 0B. What it gets is multiplied by 3.
The result is used for...

$C1/D55E BF 9F 24 CC LDA $CC249F,x

This gets what PCs are used for a tech group.

$C1/CBA0 BF EB 1B CC LDA $CC1BEB,x
$C1/CBAD BF 9F 24 CC LDA $CC249F,x

Similar, but used when entering battle. I think this is used to determine under which PCs double and triple techs go.

[justin3009]

Awesome.  That's good to know.

[Mauron]

$C1/D55E BF 9F 24 CC LDA $CC249F,x

This gets what PCs are used for a tech group.

Do you know where that data ends?