Tales of Phantasia SNES (Enhancement) (Slow WIP)

[StorMyu]

Hard mode is awesome, don't take that away from me =p

[justin3009]

Not planning to remove it, just planning to alter it.  This 'Hard Mode' is a pretty cheap thing as is.  Rather have it be a bit more difficult and not outright 1 hit death.

Also in some other news, I found out how to allow every directional movement!  The issue is.. uh.. well solidity gets destroyed going in diagonal directions and what not.  Otherwise it's a fully functional thing.

Also fixed a few clips of Brambald's voices up.  'Kokuusen' is still an ass but a few others sound MUCH better.

Edit: Decided to start and see if I can shuffle a horde of the text around.  I want Item Names/Descriptions to be completely separate from everything else.  Doing so would free up about.. 150 pointers or so I think.  Huge empty area actually for whatever other text I needed.

In doing so, I'm going to COMPLETELY redo how the game handles that bit.  For some reason in the item menu, it was loading the pointers from RAM (Really unneeded.. Actually frees up about 250 bytes of RAM!).  Have it now loading from ROM but it loads pointers based on the item #.  I'm going to change that so it loads the item #, loads another table to dictate WHICH pointer # to use, then use that to load the correct pointer.  Meaning I can have the same item descriptions/names share the same thing while not taking up extra pointer space.

When doing that, I should be able to actually USE Atlas now and not corrupt the entire damn menu because of how the game originally handles it's pointers.

[justin3009]

Welp, just another slight update and such.

1. 'Hard Mode' and all that as you saw is in.  Haven't gotten around to actually altering it yet.
2. Re-did partial routine of menu drawing.  I had to move the automated black box drawing to be a separate routine due to extremely obnoxious restraints.. But by doing this, it's more dynamic now and easier to customize on layers.  Works very nicely as well.  Fixed every menu bug with that.
3. Fixed numerous bugs on palette issues in the save menu.  There's still one exceptionally odd one that I honestly don't know how to fix.  I'll have to experiment more a bit with it.
4. Got a couple Brambald sprites imported.

I'm actually pretty unsure on where to go from here.  There's a million possibilities essentially but I'm trying to get the basis setup for characters first which is limiting me heavily.

[TheZunar123]

Sounds like you've gotten a ton of progress done, which is great! I'm thinking about trying this game out, but I'm not sure if I should play the original version or wait until you finish this enhancement, since there seems to be a ton of new content. What do you guys think?

[ChronoMoogle]

I decided to buy the original version and play this one once it's done 
Nice workaround, huh? 

[justin3009]

Not much visual changes still.  I reverted back to an older version of my ROM before I edited the item locations.  It was a waste of time to do it that way and caused a lot of issues.  But I added in all other changes I did and am now going to try and get that done today.

In the mean time, here's what I did for a few days out of boredom and suggestions from a couple people on spells.  Some of them are never going to be used (Or so I think), but they're there nonetheless just in case.

Though, if I get bored enough, could always re-import all PSX voices into SNES without any spell changes just for 'quality' sake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXOhnG_c5Q8

[StorMyu]

I love you Justin !

[justin3009]

Magic data is now set and ready to go inside the menu.  Item names as well.  Those are all working flawlessly and have a large amount of room, but ONLY inside the main menu.  Outside of the menu, only the item names work and work on battle victory.  Otherwise, in the actual battle menu, everything is bugged for now.

Figured out the Battle Menu graphics!  It actually used the same data as the main menu but for some reason it was split into two (Not sure why this is?)  But now the Main Menu and Battle Menu are now completely decompressed and available to edit with ease.



Edit: I lied.  I brought back the old bug I had when I started over on the item movement.  The reason is because it's all still using bank EF instead of 62.  I was trying to see if I could split the data between those two banks.  Apparently the game doesn't like that.  So I'm going to have to bump every bit of menu text into bank 62.  Not a big deal as that leaves a huge section of bank EF empty now.  Just a hassle to move everything.

[TheZunar123]

Is it just me, or does that say "Gald" on the left side? I've never played the game so I don't know for sure if that's a typo for Gold or not.

[DarknessSavior]

Is it just me, or does that say "Gald" on the left side? I've never played the game so I don't know for sure if that's a typo for Gold or not.

Gald is the Tales series currency.

~DS

[TheZunar123]

Okay, thanks DS.

[justin3009]

Welp, haven't worked on anything really big except bug fixing galore. 

1. Found NUMEROUS bugs that crashed the game because of me removing the 'Menu Drawing' routine.  Apparently certain screen caps use that for whatever reason.  So I restored some of that to fix those issues.

2. Fixed many bugs in the menu with item names, spell names, tactics, etc.. Since I moved them to a new bank and added a pointer system, things got weird and caused some bad name overlap issues.  Fixed them.  Both bank EF and 62 are being used for certain kinds of text now.

3. Fixed a rather annoying Tactics menu bug with the X/Y coordinates.

The only bug left is in the Save Menu.  For some reason, Chester's darkest blue palette color is a black solid line.  The palette is stored correctly and it's even reading correctly from what I'm viewing.  It ONLY happens on him too, which is extremely weird.  Not sure how to fix that.  But beyond that, all the visual aspects of the menu and some background stuff is ready and I can finally start working on something else.

Edit: I did figure out how to make most of the main menu use a VWF.  Only issue is that it's NOT writing the updated strings to VRAM.  Not sure why it's not doing so or how to fix that because even initializing everything doesn't seem to work.

Edit 2: Actually found out something interesting.  7E2037 is the main point for the hand pointer's X/Y coordinates.  But 7E202F is used for a 2nd hand that won't be moved to display on screen.  More fun is that 7E2031 and 7E2033 are also used as well!  So you can have 4 hands on screen at once without any extra editing

Edit 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5ZSX6oVDqE - Video progress.  I really have to alter some code in the character swap menu.  It's disgustingly horrid.  Also have to import the palettes for their status menu portraits and complete Brambald's portrait.  (Each PC is going to have a new portrait so that's going to be awhile before that gets done).

[justin3009]

- Big menu update to come!  There's still a couple kinks to work out.  Mainly VRAM needs to be wiped before it writes new data to it as it causes extraneous tiles to appear (As you can see).

But this will be the new menu look soon enough with full length everything.  I HOPE to be able to do this with Item names and such as well, but we'll see!

[Nightcrawler]

Looking nice.

I have some words of wisdom: Don't wipe VRAM, wipe the tilemap instead. There's no need to spend time writing gobs and gobs of data to blank an area of VRAM. Instead, just toggle the tilemap values for that small area to point to a blank tile. The only VRAM writing should be when writing new useful data. This is especially true for the item scrolling and what not.

Also, for any text that is one the screen always, or most of the time, consider drawing it once beforehand and storing it statically in VRAM  so you don't have to waste time redrawing it every single refresh or frame.

It's real easy to end up with laggy menus on the SNES if you ignore this kind of stuff when dynamically drawing it like this.

[justin3009]

 The game actually does do that for the VRAM  from what I saw,  which is why  'Formation'  stayed there before hand which cuts my work a bit.  I'll definitely do what you said,  that'll save plenty of time and issues too.

[Neil]

If you want, Satsu made a Tales of Phat Asia title screen a number of years ago. There is a not insignificant chance he still has it.

On a serious note, this is definitely turning into an awesome hack. Looking forward to playing around with it.

[FlamePurge]

I'd be willing to draw you up an 8x8 proportional font that matches the one I did for the Schala Project way back in the day. Interested?

I'd, uh, also need the Schala Project font again, too. I don't have it anymore, I don't think.

[justin3009]

Edit: Inserted Vivify's font and finished the main menu!



And yeah.  It does take just a slight bit longer to load the main menu now with all this VWF text.  (Though it's mainly from HP/TP/Next since I have a routine that checks each PC that's available on screen).

I found a nice slot of 40 bytes not used in RAM at all to store their names with the VWF table.  I'm keeping the old 8x8 names as a proof of concept to get this to work.  I may remove the entire 8x8 letter for PC names and just purely use VWF.

Did I mention at all that I'm extremely excited to get this going on the battle screen?  I can't wait to see how much room is there!

[ChronoMoogle]

Beautiful!  Which parts of the menu are left so far?

[justin3009]

I have every other menu to do.  I'm really.. scared to do the item names and spell names.

I'm planning to do the status menu next to officially see if I can port the VWF code to other things besides what's on screen.

Also, I'm going to use the ugly cheap method on the main menu for 'HP, TP, Level and Next'.  It's not worth the wait time for those so I'm going to use 'pseudo tiles'.  Same effect, less VRAM, less lag, overall better.  (I really effing doubt I'd be re-doing those string names to anything else)

Edit: Done and done for HP, TP, Level, Next, Gald, Time, Food, Battles.  All are pseudo VWF tiles and the menu loads MUCH quicker this way.  Also does the same thing on the Status menu c:  So that'll cut down a mass amount of work, lag and everything else!

- Working on pseudo tiles here.  Just have to do the equipment area and voila.