Secret of Evermore Scroll Hack

[Josephine Lithius]

You know, it's funny how even just a little adjustment – like changing the horizontal scroll boundary from 0x48 to 0x60 – makes such a huge difference.

Spoiler

[close]

I (accidentally) made the camera bounding box a near-perfect square.  And, it feels fantastic!

Super-big thanks, millanzarreta, and to you, dejan07!

(And no.  No patch.  You can do this, yourself, using millan's info.  Took me all of a whole minute.  Hee hee~)

[LightBaneX]

Secret of Evermore deserves a lot more love hack-wise TBH. Not just in button swaps and scroll hacks (though both would be fine and appreciated additions) but some quality of life stuff like merchants who sell finite alchemy ingredients, each kind of gear including those unobtainable, call beads, etc Maybe increasing the max item limit too and maybe making the drop off in levels after 40 less staggering, perhaps by decreasing the amount of exp required. I dunno, I felt Evermore was highly underrated. The guy that composed Skyrim's soundtrack did Secret of Evermore's ffs but people were just too butthurt that it wasn't Secret of Mana 2. It's sad.

I absolutely agree. I have recently discovered the world of SNES hacks, and have been playing Secret of Mana turbo. It made me want to check out Evermore and I was pretty disappointed to be honest. I would love to see some hacks for this game. I don't know a single thing about hacking or computers so I don't think I could try anything personally. But I think some really cool hacks would be a button combo to cast alchemy without a menu (like L+face button). Make alchemy spam impossible(like lower its damage, raise it's xp, and put a cooldown between each cast). It would also be cool to see a mod that replaces the dog with another character, even if it was just a palette swapped marty mcfly, so the 2-players mod could allow the second player to use weapons and alchemy just like you. Personally, for that mod, I would remove call beads, and give all those as alchemy to the second player. Increasing max item limit would be amazing too. There is so many cool possibilities.

As far as this scroll hack though, I really loved the Secret of Mana version. I am going to try this later for sure.

[Bregalad]

Any chance of Secret of Evermore getting a hack to globally swap the A and B Buttons? Because I know you can swap Attack and Run in the field, but menus will still use the B Button to confirm and the A Button to cancel. It's maddening when every other RPG I've played uses the inverse...

I have the same request. Although you can eventually get used to it. After all for most Sony game they made O accept and X cancel in japan, but reversed it in the western world. So if you're used to western releases of playstation games you can get used to Evermore control.

SoM allows to swap the buttons and saves it, SoE you need to swap them every time you load a saved game (that is, if you don't use savestates obviously).

And I completely agree with all that has been said, SoE is so much underrated. It's probably because it's first level is average, and it's first boss really hard so this has probably discouraged a lot of would-be-players who didn't like the begining. Myself I only played the first couple of hours, and only years and years later I would actually play the game, it was a huge surprise how good it was, this wasn't excepted ! The developers being in their early 20s and being inexperienced only makes this a further surprise.

It's funny how Jeremy Soule would eventually become famous, for music in a style totally different that that from Square's games. He is really good at ambiant songs, or hybrid music/sound effects, which works incredibly well in-game ! But he's wasn't that good at writing actual music (no sound effects) at the time of working on SoE. The game was released a couple of months before his 20th anniversary, so he probably worked on it being aged 18 or 19. I wonder whether he was a SoM fan at this time

Comparing it with Seiken Densetsu 3 is unfair, as to be honest both of them are gems and improved on SoM in many ways. SoM still have the best soundtrack of the bunch, though.

[FlamePurge]

I have the same request. Although you can eventually get used to it. After all for most Sony game they made O accept and X cancel in japan, but reversed it in the western world. So if you're used to western releases of playstation games you can get used to Evermore control.

SoM allows to swap the buttons and saves it, SoE you need to swap them every time you load a saved game (that is, if you don't use savestates obviously).

mziab has us covered.  https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4580/

[Spooniest]

In a perfect world, the Evermore Universe crossover with Final Fantasy IV (in Ebon Keep) would be built further upon.

This is something that SE has never seen fit to even try with any of their IPs (with the exception of Dissidia, but the 'story' in that game is so completely devoid of any investment or coherency that I don't think it really counts), and I, for one, think that creating something akin to the MCU for Square-Enix games (The Dragon Quest Series, The Final Fantasy Series, The Mana Series, Evermore, The Chrono Games, et al) would be akin to ... well, to dropping a meteor on the current state of the JRPG market.

FF7 Remake is finally out (episode 1 of it, anyway)... I think, if they're going to make banking on nostalgia their entire deal at this point, then they might as well bank on it full ham, if you get my meaning.

Imagine the possibilities. It'd be a heck of a writing job (I don't even know where to begin imagining how to tie all this ridiculousness together), but at least they own the rights to all the characters, and it would beat the dumb gatcha mobile crap they've been doing with them, any day of the week.

[MysticLord]

mziab has us covered.  https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4580/

The hashes in the readme for that patch don't match those of the one which works with assassin's patches or the European one, both of them with or without a header. Can someone contact mziab and ask him to clarify which rom to use?

- Apply this patch only to a headered "Secret of Evermore (USA).smc" with the following
   specifications:
     Hashes: CRC32 - 8229628D
               MD5 - 6BD8AC9CBF2408883D9E2E5793E8C5B4
              SHA1 - 3C0A372C0734B8C77CB79C90AFAEF543C68B2262

In case anyone else has this question, the 2013 Gameplay Rebalance/Hardmode hack by Ninakoru uses the Sheath bugfix and both bazooka bugfix patches. If you're using that and assassin's patches, you don't need those three.

edit

I revive this old thread with some new information, maybe it could be useful to someone.

- Offsets of Margins in the different ROMs:

Code Select Expand

              USA,    Spain,   French,  Germany,   Europe
Left  -> 0x108EC0, 0x108EC5, 0x108EC5, 0x108EC5, 0x108EC5
Right -> 0x108EC7, 0x108ECC, 0x108ECC, 0x108ECC, 0x108ECC
Up    -> 0x108ECE, 0x108ED3, 0x108ED3, 0x108ED3, 0x108ED3
Down  -> 0x108ED5, 0x108EDA, 0x108EDA, 0x108EDA, 0x108EDA

- Original Values:

Code Select Expand


L -> 0x48
R -> 0x48
U -> 0x68
D -> 0x38

- This margin values are loaded in memory in these addresses (all ROMs):

Code Select Expand

L -> 0x7E240F
R -> 0x7E2411
U -> 0x7E2413
D -> 0x7E2415

- Known margin value limits (upper values trigger a "screen shake bug"):

Code Select Expand

· General enviroment:
0x80 -> Left and Right
0x6F -> Upper and Down

· [Scripter movement] Entering Fire Eyes hut first time:
0x80 -> Left and Right
0x6F -> Upper
0x54 -> Down

· [Scripter movement] Transition entering final boss area:
0x80 -> Left and Right
0x6F -> Upper
0x38 -> Down

A small gif with the "screen shake bug" here if someone wants to see it.

I have not done more tests in other scenarios (only in this pair), but at the moment the most global, adjusted and safer value is 80-80-6F-38 (L-R-U-D), but I need do more exhaustive tests to confirm this. Unfortunately, when the "screen shake bug" starts this doesn't end until other map screen is loaded. In a normal scenario, a 80-80-6F-6F is the most adjusted value that don't triggers the bug, but in other special cases (as some scripted movements) this bug is triggered for these values. I have tested the minimum values that can be established for some of these special cases, such as when you enter the Fire Eyes hut for the first time or when you enter the final game boss room. At the moment it seems that the only value that causes problems in this cases is the inferior margin (but as I have already commented, to affirm this I would need do more tests), and the worst problem is that this value cannot be modified upper the original 0x38 value (with 0x39 value the "screen shake bug" is triggered at least in one of these cases).

The ideal solution would be find a way to prevent the screen from shaking, or at least, get it to stop shaking without the need to leave the area to force a new map to be loaded (for example, executing some fix-function periodically or something similar, I don't know...).

This is all, I will try to continue investigating how to solve this....

For future reference in case anyone searches this thread for answers, these values (at least the USA ones) are for a unheadered rom.

[FlamePurge]

i helped him develop the patch (testing and submission basically) and i was the one who ensured it was compatible with assassin's patches. i play SoE with the button swap + assassin's patches, in fact. it's fine. just combine the patches using an ntsc-u rom and start a new game.

[MysticLord]

i helped him develop the patch (testing and submission basically) and i was the one who ensured it was compatible with assassin's patches. i play SoE with the button swap + assassin's patches, in fact. it's fine. just combine the patches using an ntsc-u rom and start a new game.

Thanks for the feedback, I applied the patches anyways and it worked fine so I figured the hashes were some other issue.

Here's the output of the conflict checker:
https://pastebin.com/4SG870z6

Here's a short version with just the conflicts.

Code Select Expand


Advanced Patch Conflict Finder v1.0 by 1337|<37C|-|3|2
5 patches scanned, 4 conflicts found
2 patches in conflict - marked with (*)
249 areas of memory affected

List of patches:
Bazooka-Two-U.ips (*)
LEVEL-U.IPS
soe_us_bal_1_1_header.ips (*)
SpdTim-U.ips
StaDie-U.ips

0x0DA721 - 0x0DA724 (2)
Bazooka-Two-U.ips
soe_us_bal_1_1_header.ips

0x0DA9D7 - 0x0DA9DA (2)
Bazooka-Two-U.ips
soe_us_bal_1_1_header.ips

0x0EA69D - 0x0EA6A0 (2)
Bazooka-Two-U.ips
soe_us_bal_1_1_header.ips

0x0F8257 - 0x0F827D (2)
Bazooka-Two-U.ips
soe_us_bal_1_1_header.ips


edit

I got a reply back from assassin, the author of these patches.

all of my patches should coexist with each other.

for detecting patch conflicts generally, i recommend mblock129's/Zephyr's Patch Conflict Finder (command line):
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1268/

or Leet Sketcher's Advanced Patch Conflict Finder (GUI):
https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1386/

as for ninakoru's Balance Patch, he already includes 3 of my bugfixes (see Readme).  as for the other 4:
1) Overeager Speed timer fix is super simple, and should combine with anything.

2) Unsaved stat boosts fix is more complex, but i don't think he edits the same area, so it'll probably be fine.

3) i suspect Erratic Levelling fix will work; ninakoru says it doesn't.

so i see two steps you can take:
a. test the patches together, and be an appreciated Guinea pig.
OR
b. Erratic Levelling actually fixes two bugs.  one fix is very simple, and the other complex, with the latter also relocating the former's edit.  if you want to implement only the simple one, i can get back to you with the lone byte to change in a hex editor.

to follow up on that, change this instruction:

Code Select Expand

8F/82F6: 30 04        BMI $82FC
to this:

Code Select Expand

8F/82F6: 90 04        BCC $82FC

so in a headered ROM, you're editing file offset F84F6h.

4) as for Death-defying Stat Boosts fix, ninakoru actually implemented his own fix for this (see #2 in his Readme).  so no need to apply mine; i don't recall whether the two patches outright conflict, though.  now, my fix should behave better in more circumstances, as my Readme explains.  however, barring hypothetical hacks, his should be more than good enough.

----
note that #1, 2, and 4 hadn't been released when the Balance Patch was last updated, which mostly explains their absence.

[assassin]

the Unsaved Stat Boosts fix and the Balance Patch have no conflicts per the utility, so i'm reasonably confident that those will coexist.  but as usual, testers are welcome.

[MKnightDH]

This is naturally late, but I did find relevant coding for values determining when the screen scrolls. As copied from my editing on Ghidra aside from cutting out a bit of inconvenient formatting:

Code Select Expand

          108ebf a9  48  00       LDA        #$0x48 =>LAB_108ebf+1                            West
          108ec2 8f  0f  24  7e    STA        !>$DAT_7e240f
          108ec6 a9  48  00       LDA        #$0x48 =>LAB_108ec6+1                            East
          108ec9 8f  11  24  7e    STA        !>$DAT_7e2411
          108ecd a9  68  00       LDA        #$0x68 =>LAB_108ecd+1                            North
          108ed0 8f  13  24  7e    STA        !>$DAT_7e2413
          108ed4 a9  38  00       LDA        #$0x38 =>LAB_108ed4+1                            South
          108ed7 8f  15  24  7e    STA        !>$DAT_7e2415

So the values you'd want to edit on the ROM would be 108EC0 for West, 108EC7 for East, 108ECE for North, and 108ED5 for South. Of course, just make sure the West and East values don't exceed 256 and the North and South don't exceed 224.

It would be nice, of course, to have the values higher for more kinetic gameplay from the easier scrolling and improved forward vision, so this was worth the trouble.

Oh, and if you're asking what I'm doing with LTTP, RL issues forcing me to have dead time where I'm back to handling SoE.

[lexluthermiester]

Since the OP has not been heard from since 2017, it this project should be considered a community effort.