8th Playable Character Possible?! (Updating!)

[Mauron]

I also had a couple where the eighth character would start an attack, and Crono would move, but it froze after that, or just froze Crono.

I'll have to look at it more when my eyes aren't sore from staring at a hex editor.

[justin3009]

Here's a patch of what we have for the 8th char so far.  I added an object in Millenial Fair, Crono's house, Guardia Forest, so that it loads up the 8th character onto the map.  I ALMOST have the 8th char's walking graphics perfected on the map.  I rerouted Ayla's sprtie assembly to 07 (which points to the end of the rom for the SA for some reason...) and changed the 8th chars to 05, so we can edit Ayla's SA.  BUT!  There's more SA then I anticipated that didnt' copy over in 242300.  Somewhere in that first huge paragraph of hex is more SA for the characters.  I'll single them out later.

Edit: Hm...I think I might have accidentally overlapped animation data to cause some odd side affects when going below that.  That's probably what I hit.

Edit 2: Seems to be that I remember someone saying that there's other assembly that we missed for it to fully coopoerate with character data at the end fo the rom...Only issue, no one's ever listed anymore pointers for SA on the characters.  So I'm at a halt atm.

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[Mauron]

I tried installing your patch, and in battle it loads one of your custom sprites instead of Ayla's normal one.

[justin3009]

It's suppose to.  I have all ayla's sprites mxied with custom ones at the bottom.  THat's showing that it's actually picking up the data meaning that's the 8th characters sprite data.

[justin3009]

Double post, i'm hosting up a beta clip of the 8th character.  I'll edit this post once it's done.

Edit: Vid's up!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suzjhy3dGfU - Sorry about low quality.  Snes9x recording is a bitch..

[Mauron]

Nice.

I hope some other people see this topic. With the video posted they might be more inclined to help.

At D44D0 there's a section of zeros, and I think that range is still attack related. It's worth experimenting with.

I'm going to try and track down what causes the number instability

I can't help but think that there were plans for an eighth character at one point in development, based on the way some things are coded.

[justin3009]

Yea, i'm pretty sure there was an 8th char planned...

Edit: Well that area has smoething to do with Crono's attack, after I set the whole block to FF, when he attacked the screen freaked out.

Edit 2: I think there's some empty space for brand new techs that could be used.  D4902 TO D4924

[Mauron]

Awesome. What do you think you could fit in that area?

Did you fiddle with the non-zeros in between the two larger groups?

I tried playing with the pointers for names, but the behavior is a little screwy. Do you know what the ASM to call the name screen is?

Think it's worth putting the video in a new topic to get it more attention?

[justin3009]

Well that area is just the pointers to techs, and what graphics to load.

Yes, I kinda put FF's throughout the whole 00's, and that's what it destroyed Crono's attack.

I'm not really sure for the ASM to call naming screen...It's different for each person but all I know is that the hex for them is

C0 = Crono
C1 = Marle
C2 = Lucca
C3 = Robo
C4 = Frog
C5 = Ayla
C6 = Magus
C7 = Epoch

But...I'm not really sure.

Edit: I don't think making a new topic would give it more attention.

[Mauron]

I was just wondering in case the topic was getting ignored because people were thinking it wasn't possible.

That will make things a little trickier, but hopefully I can repoint the naming screen to separate the Epoch and eighth character names.

[justin3009]

Forgot to mention, there's another naming screen on C8, but it's completely jumbled data pretty much.  maybe we can somehow bump epoch to there and put 8th char in epoch's place, or vice versa.

[Mauron]

Just what I was thinking about. How do you track down the event data in the ROM itself?

[justin3009]

No idea.  You'd have to export the event data VIA temporal flux and edit it with a hex editor.

[Mauron]

So that's the trick. It should be simple enough to get started.

[JLukas]

Just what I was thinking about. How do you track down the event data in the ROM itself?

If you mean tracing the code in a debugger, the easiest way is to open an event in TF that contains an event command you want to study.  Then note the offset next to it in the tree.

Events are decompressed to RAM starting at 7F2000.  If you set a read breakpoint on the address you noted above, +7F2000, it'll put you at the start point of loading the event command routines.

Ex: if you see the following in an event

[0123] SpecialDialog NamePC Crono

The read breakpoint is 7F2123