Author Topic: Breath of Fire GBA palette restorer. (Read 9895 times)

vivify93 · « **on:** March 13, 2012, 05:32:34 pm »

Hello everyone! With the advent of gukid's release of his Breath of Fire II palette restoring patch, I thought back to Asaki's projects - he was doing the same thing for a bunch of GBA ports. Breath of Fire was one of those, and I was looking around for it today, but to no avail.

I was wondering: does anyone have this still? I mean, I sure as heck don't have it, and I don't know anyone who still does; I'm the only one in my circle who's really into the Breath of Fire series.

Thanks in advance, and have a lovely day!

Dahl · « **Reply #1 on:** February 12, 2013, 03:30:07 pm »

Sorry revive this old topic, but this is something I've been looking for awhile, but without any success.
I know the .zip file was named "cr081122.zip", but it appears to be lost on the Internet.
So I'd like to second vivify93's request. Does anyone still have this patch?

Granville · « **Reply #2 on:** February 13, 2013, 11:01:28 am »

I'd love to hear if anyone can find it as well. I used to have it myself but I lost it in a hard drive failure years ago. I managed to track down his other hacks for Mario World and Mario 2, but I just can't find Breath of Fire as all links i've found are dead online.

Even if anyone only has a copy of the rom itself with the patch already applied, you can still recreate the patch file my I believe using LunarIPS when you also have a copy of the original unaltered rom. I was able to do this with his Mario 2 hack when no other links for it were available online. Just saying this in case anyone has an already patched version of the rom but not the original patch file itself, and doesn't want to post it due to being a violation of the rules.

MathUser2929 · « **Reply #3 on:** February 13, 2013, 01:06:37 pm »

These colorization restoration hacks should be archived on RHDN. Submit them if you have them.

FAST6191 · « **Reply #4 on:** February 13, 2013, 05:37:52 pm »

I saw this last night and tried my hand at a search and had a look around my machine (got to love http://www.voidtools.com/ ) but no joy.
If it is a fairly simple hack (read I do not have to spend five hours pondering the merits of 50 different palettes and choosing what to put where and it otherwise does not use dynamic palettes) the GBA and SNES palettes use the same format if memory serves and I have not done a proper GBA palette hack before so we could always recreate it.

Rodimus Primal · « **Reply #5 on:** July 10, 2013, 01:26:40 pm »

I would hope SOMEONE has it. I prefer the SNES palette on ports.

ThegreatBen · « **Reply #6 on:** March 14, 2016, 09:50:58 pm »

Started working on remaking the palette hack, don't know if I'll get every palette but so far Drogen looks pretty nice.

Granville · « **Reply #7 on:** June 17, 2016, 07:39:52 am »

I'm bumping this because someone apparently found Asaki's old palette restoration patch and uploaded it. I downloaded it before I end up losing it again. Here's a link to it if anyone wants it-
http://filetrip.net/dl?nkciDNfpNP

Kallisto · « **Reply #8 on:** June 19, 2016, 05:35:55 pm »

Makes me wonder how many stuff like this is lost.

Chronosplit · « **Reply #9 on:** June 19, 2016, 06:42:53 pm »

Quote from: Kallisto on June 19, 2016, 05:35:55 pm

Makes me wonder how many stuff like this is lost.

A lot of times it's because the filehoasting site and all mirrors expire, and the uploader lost the file/doesn't care to reupload. Megaupload did that to a lot of older things when it shut down for example.

These days we have places to put expired things like here and ModDB, but some stuff is just lost in the sands of time.

FAST6191 · « **Reply #10 on:** June 19, 2016, 07:06:18 pm »

Quote from: Kallisto on June 19, 2016, 05:35:55 pm

Makes me wonder how many stuff like this is lost.

Usual story is/was people do something, simple blogs and file hosts did not exist and hosting is a significant chunk of change in a world where you are probably not earning a lot* so they went with ISP hosting, university hosting, geocities, nice fan forum hosting, lycos, rapidshare, megaupload... for their work. It will be fine for the near future but that unfathomable time 5 years in the future came sooner than they realised and 5 years in internet world saw a change in ISP, them leaving university, geocities being removed from the internet, their fan forum failing to renew the domain/being hacked into oblivion/losing things because migrating and upgrading is often a complete pain and starting afresh is easier, lycos booting them both for inactivity and not following some arbitrary rules, rapidshare almost imploding, the US government taking a swipe at megaupload, the teaser rate running out on hosting and then deciding that they have not done it for 5 years so why bother bleeding money and so on.

*or you made it for you and a couple of mates on a forum and did not expect it to become a gold standard for some particular aspect or otherwise enjoyed later on. I have had similar things a few times for 10 minute guides to hacking a specific game/file format I have written get referenced somewhere else on the internet, often times even though I made a far more prominent version that did things considerably better.

It is why sites like this and all the news sites for hacks came to pass and make efforts to rehost things, or provide hosting in the first place. I quite frequently have had to go out onto the internet to find such a thing, most of the time if it was on one of those it would be on enough that I could still find it* and host it somewhere, or people so used to sharing things automatically rehost/bundle and allow me to claw it back in some manner. However the start of this thread was one of those times my search skills and personal archive failed me. It is better these days than it was but I imagine people of 2002 said the same thing, and I can all but guarantee that there is a bunch of stuff done for the 3ds that is already lost.

*no secrets really. Just knowing search operators ( https://bynd.com/news-ideas/google-advanced-search-comprehensive-list-google-search-operators/ ), looking for the file name of the archive and searching for that, seeing if the author posted on other sites (I am quite good at skills otherwise seen in doxxing and online tracking, not to mention most people are not that secretive), checking news sites (including those in other languages -- I probably know the word for download in about 50 languages and if not it is usually obvious), checking search engine cache and archive.org, seeing what other people might want it and seeing if they have it (N64 video plugins and PS1 sound plugins did well for certain games, when they got lost to time and new versions were perhaps not all they were cracked up to be I found another game fanbase also liked it but had actually kept it around). Also if you can find an email then people might not keep an old aol email but gmail was launched 12 years ago and people tend to hang onto those.

Granville · « **Reply #11 on:** June 19, 2016, 08:51:32 pm »

The hack now has its own page here-
http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2900/

Very glad to have found this again, I lost it a long time ago in a hard drive crash. Now all the game needs is a sound restoration and it will be at least as good if not better than the SNES version. Bregalad said if he ever did another sound restoration, he might do Breath of Fire. Maybe someday!

The GBA port actually has a number of nice improvements to the user interface and menus. They also increased the experience and gold you get from battles, and it feels like the random encounter rate was toned down a bit as well, plus the run button is nice. I felt the pacing was better in the GBA version due to these minor alterations. There's also a hack that cleans the translation up slightly (not a massive retranslation but it still makes some nice improvements), wonder if someone will take a crack at a more fully blown retranslation in the future.

MathUser2929 · « **Reply #12 on:** June 19, 2016, 11:11:42 pm »

You added the date you found the patch as the patch release date. I checked the file and it was created 2008 sometime so I edited the page to add that as the patch release date. That's probably when the hack was really released.

Chronosplit · « **Reply #13 on:** June 19, 2016, 11:26:36 pm »

Quote from: MathUser2929 on June 19, 2016, 11:11:42 pm

You added the date you found the patch as the patch release date. I checked the file and it was created 2008 sometime so I edited the page to add that as the patch release date. That's probably when the hack was really released.

Thanks for this. For a little bit after I saw it, I thought it was recreated from scratch.

Quote

wonder if someone will take a crack at a more fully blown retranslation in the future.

I remember when a BoF1 retranslation was being kicked around after BoF2's, Ryusui mentioned wanting to use the GBA version for various reasons.

I'd like to see a sound patch first though. Though it's better than most GBA jobs, the game is still weaker in that department.

Axiphel · « **Reply #14 on:** June 20, 2016, 02:46:57 am »

I'm dumb and didn't think to check the file for the creation date so just put the date I uploaded it here. lol

I don't know what reason you would want to retranslate the GBA version. Does it require less work to hack than SNES? Aside from the increased xp/gp, ui, and dash button the GBA version has nothing going for it. Most of that could be hacked into the SNES version like in BoF2.

Even a more indepth stab at unshortening the items and spells would make the game much better without even touching the plot translation.

vivify93 · « **Reply #15 on:** June 20, 2016, 03:12:24 am »

I think Ryusui said he wanted to do it simply because of the text-based menu rather than the SNES version's graphical-based interface. But it looks as though he was going to work with Myriakitty on the SNES version anyway.

Thank you for uploading this by the way!

Asaki · « **Reply #16 on:** June 26, 2016, 07:31:11 am »

Gosh, you guys could've just emailed me or something

I've still got everything, I just need to re-upload it. Keep in mind that I never considered these patches to be complete, so I could really use some feedback from players. For most of the games, I just pasted over the data from the SNES ROMs, so there may be parts I missed, or there's a lot of "new things" that I would like to find a sensible solution for. I think if I could find some simple color matching utilities, that would be the easiest way to do it, and could possibly undo a lot of other games.

Anyway, here's the files.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/127j90okeodc8k6/cr081122.zip

^ Here's Breath of Fire (U), Super Mario Advance (UE), and DOOM (UE)

I think someone might have uploaded my old SMA patch as "author unknown", but I haven't gone through and compared them yet: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/2124/

Here's a bunch of other patches I grabbed while I was at it:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/3rwafqg653ym646/cr160626.zip

Final Fight One (J)
Pitfall - The Mayan Adventure (UE)
Super Street Fighter II Turbo - Revival (U)
Super Mario Advance 3 - Yoshi's Island (U)
Super Mario Advance (UE) (Super Mario Bros. 2)
Breath of Fire II (U)

I'm just going to paste the readme file:

Final Fight One is quite the surprise, I really don't remember working
on this one. Needless to say, I have no idea how complete it is. I would
assume it's a straight, easy copy'n'paste job like the BoF games. I
didn't fix the U or E ROMs because I don't have the time or skills
required to uncensor them.

Pitfall, SSF2, and Yoshi's Island were abandoned early on, but I thought
I would include them here anyway. Pitfall just isn't as good as the
Genesis/CD version, and might be a little -too- dark. SSF2 had most of
the original backgrounds replaced, so fixing just the character palettes
wouldn't improve much. Yoshi's Island, like SMB2, has the palettes
randomly strewn throughout the ROM, so it's very time consuming to fix.

SMB2 is almost a year newer than the 081122 version, but still pretty
far from complete. One day!!

BoF2 is similar to the first game; I copied'n'pasted over the SNES
palettes and tweaked the text boxes a little. I don't have time to
playtest, so any feedback is welcome.

Quote from: Chronosplit on June 19, 2016, 06:42:53 pm

A lot of times it's because the filehoasting site and all mirrors expire, and the uploader lost the file/doesn't care to reupload. Megaupload did that to a lot of older things when it shut down for example.

Yeah, FreeWebs closed down my site for some reason (inactivity?), and I never bothered to re-upload anything.

Granville · « **Reply #17 on:** June 27, 2016, 05:09:55 pm »

Cool to see you online again Asaki, and thanks for your work on these hacks! I've been using your Mario World and Mario Bros 2 palette restorations for years now and they're fantastic! Was glad to see someone found the BoF1 hack as well after years of it being lost, been playing it lately.

Someone else recently created a palette restoration for Yoshi's Island GBA by the way. There were a couple of things that couldn't be fixed entirely, but it's still 99% complete. While I enjoy the GBA ports of World and Mario 2 thanks to your hacks, I stick with the SNES version of Yoshi's Island as there are still too many issues with the port even with the palette and sound hacks (transparencies flaws, removed Fuzzy effects and other botched things).

Someone actually created their own palette restoration for Breath of Fire 2 GBA, inspired from your hacks of other GBA ports. I haven't really played much of it but it seems solid. Again I stick with the SNES version for this game, the retranslation hack (which also added a run button) makes it the definitive version for now.

Good call skipping Pitfall, it's an awful port of the SNES/Genesis versions. Not just visually and sound wise (which are awful of course) but the physics and hit detection is ruined. It's similar to the problems with the Earthworm Jim 1/2 and Sonic Genesis ports...

A nice handful of the more popular GBA ports now have palette restorations. There are still a few left that could use such treatments, but your hacks inspired others to create their own palette hacks.

MathUser2929 · « **Reply #18 on:** June 27, 2016, 05:16:42 pm »

Well, I didn't read through your post thouroughly but it seems the hacks complete enough were already added to the site. I did update the SMB2 hack tho, I also submitted the FFOne hack. That will probably be added soon. I wish you'd unretire and do more ports tho. They couldn't be appreciated back then cause it was still current gen and the hacks couldn't be hosted here. Now that they can be you could reach alot more people with your colorization hacks.

On that topic, I'd like to see a Aladdin palette port. That game is great and had alot of fun playing through it on GBA.

Granville · « **Reply #19 on:** June 27, 2016, 05:30:08 pm »

Quote from: MathUser2929 on June 27, 2016, 05:16:42 pm

On that topic, I'd like to see a Aladdin palette port. That game is great and had alot of fun playing through it on GBA.

You may not be aware of this, but Aladdin actually has a brightness setting in the options menu at the title screen, or on any pause screen. I think the darker option is called "type 2". It seems to replicate the SNES brightness perfectly, I looked at both versions side by side and it looks 100% identical.

Some of Capcom's other GBA ports also had similar options- the second and third Magical Quest games included (not the first game unfortunately). LTTP also has such an option (though it's kind of tucked away on the file select so a lot of people miss it). I recall that they were also fairly accurate to the SNES colors. I wish developers had built all the GBA ports of SNES games with brightness settings (heck I wish the original GBA had a backlight).