If I can do the zoomed in at all, I'll try it out. I think I'll have the sound test be pressing start while paused, then B+Select will do the mini maps... Or maybe start the overworld zoomed out and A zooms in. Something!
Does CR's translation use different DTE tiles? I need to check it out... is there a full script available? Will be a good time to finalize--or try to--the tiles for text. Like in the intro I have a tile that's just .' and is only used there... but if it needs to be, I could see about making it in the normal text tiles. I'm also picky about ellipses being only three dots, so I fiddled with the DTE to make that happen.
Also with the new list of common strings, town names and other important bits that are re-used a lot can be compressed in dialogue strings! But the important thing is to see how they are decompressed, to know where to put line breaks.
Dialogue box is 28 wide and 7 high, if we keep a border of space between the box and text. 30 wide and 9 high if we squish things in.
Bank 09 is story text--all the bridge scene stuff and ending as well, I hope.
Bank 0A is items, enemies, magic, battle messages, spell descriptions.
Bank 0E is item descriptions, might need to shuffle things around to make those fit.
Bank 10 is environmental text; graves, wells, treasure chests, altars.
Bank 11 is NPC talk.
I AM A GENIUS

Next up, getting the coordinates right. Then, think about the colors some more. Right now I'm going with:
; 0 = floor
; 1 = wall
; 2 = treasure / things to talk to / water
; 3 = other / trees / pillars
; 4 = exit / shop
But maybe for towns, its okay to use the wall color as floor?
I also have to go through all the tilesets in FFHackster and adjust the LUTs; each tileset has its own. So if that's something you want to tackle, Vanya, lemme know before I do it. xD I might do the castle one just so I can make sure rooms aren't messing up.
The background is a bit bright, but I was thinking of using the sprite CHR as the top and bottom, to kind of make it look like a map...
Bad Photoshop:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/505736168659353601/711397706660053002/unknown.png

All better!

Looks like we're gonna need to edit some maps though... Why IS it shifted over like this? This is a map data issue in the original, not my minimap code breaking!
Coneria Castle 1, Sea Shrine B1 (might be okay), Sky Palace 4F (shift 1 up and 1 right)--those should be the only problem maps... Unless it would be better to shift EVERY map over so its more centered! There is enough ROM space for it.
May 17, 2020, 03:07:06 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)

In the interest of making this fully modable, I'm taking out the animation of the overworld minimap. And because its slow.
Since the minimap fills ocean tiles with title and dragon-emblem tiles, any major changes to the world map will get screwed up. I don't want that! So the map itself must take full control over the background pattern table.
To have more than just the map graphics on this screen, a special VBlank routine needs to have full control over scanline processing to swap between sprite and background pattern tables. And to draw the map while that routine is going on is beyond me...

Too bad I can't put anything on the sides of the actual map space...
Gotta keep fixing sprites not being in the right place, work on making sure that the loading and unloading is smooth (I can't find where its turning the screen on before its done drawing the map!) and then add in swapping functionality to the overworld.
The world map loading is still taking a few seconds even with the screen off. I'm really not sure how to speed it up any. I guess it could animate while the map color is in full screen, then just... switch the new VBlank routine on to slap on the edges and title in after? But that's gross...
One idea is to scroll to another nametable while loading, then just have a little "Loading..." message until its done, then swap, or scroll over?
Can you switch mirroring modes mid-game so it can scroll up from the bottom of the screen?

The zoomed in overworld would have looked like this, but... it doesn't load into RAM the way I expected. I suspect its loading the whole row... or 4 rows? I'll sleep on it, hopefully no more fever dream coding. See if I can think of a way to somehow decompress the world map in another way. A counter for how many tiles each row was decompressed into, so it can skip to the next row...?
Otherwise, I think its pretty much done! The tile-to-pixel tables still need doing, I'll probably do that soon.
I really wish FFHackster was updated for modern computers with their giant screens, so I can actually see the whole map in editing. And a "shift entire map and wrap the tiles around" command would be wonderful. Wonder if there's any map editors out there that will do it alright?