Secret of Mana, Turbo - Beta 230822

[Sogeking666]

Finally got to try your hack, tremendous work, thanks man!!!

Just wish there was a way to keep the US music for the intro... could it be included somehow in a future version?

Still, with the MSU soundtrack, makes an amazing fresh experience. Thanks again!

[teahouser]

Finally got to try your hack, tremendous work, thanks man!!!

Just wish there was a way to keep the US music for the intro... could it be included somehow in a future version?

Still, with the MSU soundtrack, makes an amazing fresh experience. Thanks again!

To have the original intro music you must uncheck the "Turbo logo" in the title screen patch options. You won't have the added Turbo logo displayed unfortunately, but the music will be back to stock.

[kethinov]

Next update will have another old nit-pick fixed:
->

Wow, nice find. I always wondered what that glitched graphic was. That looks so much nicer.

[Sogeking666]

To have the original intro music you must uncheck the "Turbo logo" in the title screen patch options. You won't have the added Turbo logo displayed unfortunately, but the music will be back to stock.

Perfect thanks!!

[Hybrid Divide]

Queue Thanks for the fantastic work, but I do have one request, and one bug I can't seem to figure out.

Bug: I left the "Pause" stuff for safe save states and such checked, and when I press start, the game is paused.  BUT on an Analogue Super NT, at least, resuming the game is very touchy.  You have to press start very quickly, or it just pauses the game again.  And on higan, pressing start to pause the game makes me unable to resume the game at all!  The music is still going, but I can't un-pause the game at all.  Help!

And my request: Is there any way to restore the colored buttons on the control menu to their japanese versions instead of the two different shades of purple that we got in the US?  I realize this could affect the colors on the action grid screen a bit, too.  But the option to change those buttons would be nice.

instead of

Thanks!

EDIT: Another small bug I've found is that when starting a game, after you enter your name, when you hit the button to start the story intro, either some patch garbled the sound, or a 2nd sound is triggered at the same time, but it sounds off compared to the original unaltered game.  (Hope I was able to explain that right)
The only audio options I have enabled are the unused fanfares, and attack sounds restarting.  Again, thanks in advance!

[Queue]

Version 2019-05-13:
https://ufile.io/fwiw1x3w

Changes:
- ZSNES MSU-1 support improved, see details after this abbreviated change list
- Slight tweak to PCM renaming batch file (in the readmes folder) to copy song 55 to 63
- Verified and incremented Kethinov's "Magical Herb" and "Neko and Watts in the Mana Fortress" patch version numbers from 1.0 to 1.1
- Added Kethinov's "Different Boss Music for Buffy and Dread Slime" patch
- Added a new [Miscellaneous] category and moved New_Game_Plus, Restore_Kettle_Kin, Restore_Aegagropilon and Revisit_Goblin_Village to it
- Added Graphics\Japanese_Button_Colors (which also reverts the Action Grid purple color)
- Unhid Audio\SFX_Channel_Limit by Mop; it's been in the ZPS file for a while, it's disabled by default
- Split the Turbo title screen song off to its own option under [Title_Screen]
- Added Title_Screen\Override_White_Palette
- Added Bug_Fixes\Tsunami_Scramble_Fix

ZSNES MSU-1 Changes:
- Fixed some mistakes I'd made in v1 support
- Added MSU-1 v2 support (ability to save and resume track position for one song at a time)
- Added support for save states (saving, loading and rewinding)

Still no 'fast forward' / 'slow down' support for MSU-1 audio and still requires ZSNES audio output to be set to 44100Hz. I'm working on it.



Hybrid Divide, I don't have an answer for you regarding safe save state pausing yet, still need to look into it.

For the audio issue, it's probably a side effect of Audio\Restartable_Attack_Sounds (pretty sure the character naming screen tries to spam sound effects). I'll see if I can come up with a reasonable solution but no promises.

I did get the Japanese / Super Famicom-style button colors you asked about working (in the [Graphics] section). It was surprisingly tricky to figure out; the red, green and yellow colors all still existed in the US release, blue was changed to purple and one Action Grid color was changed into the pink-ish button colors. They added a helper function to the code that preps the various buttons for video memory that was recoloring the buttons and overriding their palette color choices (so I disabled said helper function call). Hopefully there aren't any side effects to that. I did revert the Action Grid color when this feature is enabled as well, but technically it's not mandatory for the buttons to get their Super Famicom coloring.

[Hybrid Divide]

Queue Hey, thanks a lot!

I'll look into the audio thing a bit more and let you know if I find anything. 

[Queue]

Version 2019-05-19:
https://ufile.io/rmu9t8hs

Changes:
- ZSNES MSU-1 support improved, see details below
- Slight adjustment to location of MSU-1 patch
- Added Kethinov's "Watts in the Haunted Forest" patch
- Added Kethinov's "Gaia's Navel With the Girl Without Doubling Back" patch
- Added Kethinov's "More Useful Evil Gate" patch
- Added a prerelease version of Kethinov's "Remove Barrels on Run" patch (hope you don't mind)
- Added Bug_Fixes\Barrel_Scramble_Fix; deals with some vanilla animation art issues related to barrels

ZSNES MSU-1 Changes:
- Added support for emulation 'fast forward' and 'slow down' (and non-1x baseline speed)
- Fixed and improved resume support; should now follow the spec exactly

This should mark the first fully usable ZSNES MSU-1 build now that variable emulation speed support is in.

Still requires ZSNES audio output to be set to 44100Hz, and doesn't maintain timing if the 'increment frame' hotkey is used. Audio quality is pretty bad when not at 1x speed.

[darthvaderx]

Thanks for the yellow title option, you are the best ...

[Queue]

Version 2019-05-25:
https://ufile.io/yzk0a2dt

Changes:
- Verified and incremented Kethinov's "Remove Barrels on Run" patch version number from 0.0 to 1.1
- Added Kethinov's "Steal From Matango Innkeeper" (1.1) patch
- Tiny adjustment to Technical\Safe_Save_State, might improve unpause reliability on real hardware / accurate emulators (or might not help)
- Added Audio\Faster_Music_Crossfade; this simply disables the music fade out and is disabled by default because it sucks
- Overhauled Audio\Enable_MSU-1

So, let's talk about music. When a new song is played, if it has a fade duration set, it locks up the game and fades out whatever music is currently playing, if any, then it stalls again as it sends the new song to the SNES sound CPU, then gameplay resumes and the new song fades in. The original MSU-1 patch lacks any music crossfade (I realize there's never a true crossfade since they don't overlap, work with me here) behavior, but does support the asynchronous fade command; I rewrote large chunks of the MSU-1 patch to fix a race condition in said fade code, and added the functionality for vanilla-style crossfade, including the blocking fade out behavior. Then I went a step further and added asynchronous fade out for both vanilla and MSU-1 music. Crossfade also works when transitioning between an SPC and MSU song, and vice versa, which opens up options for future features (random SPC / MSU song selection for example). Async fade out works for vanilla music even without the MSU files (or with an emulator that lacks MSU support), as long as you have the correct features enabled when patching. There's still a pause when the new SPC song starts playing, but you no longer have an artificial wait on the fade out.

I'm among those who think vanilla SNES music is often beautiful (particularly many of Square's games) and that CD audio remakes, orchestral renditions, ambient remixes, etc. are generally inferior, but the Secret of Mana Remaster music is actually pretty darn good; if you can get it set up for use with the MSU-1 patch, I highly recommend you give it a chance (using the alternate tracks for 4 and 12, because those two do kinda suck). You can always remove the MSU files again if it doesn't suit your tastes. A side benefit is faster area transition times / no music hiccoughs.

[kethinov]

Some questions:

For equip 2nd weapon, is it possible to change the key for this or perhaps use a key combination? It's a shame to remap the X button given how useful it is to pause to another character's item ring. Perhaps hold R and press X should do it instead?

Also any idea how difficult it would be to prepopulate the character names in the naming screens?

[Queue]

Changing the single hotkey is easy, but the logic will need a little work to make it handle a multiple hotkey combination. I suspect zhaDe's intent with NGI though was for you to need to access the ring menus less frequently (via quick spells and fast weapon swap), so that X being overridden wasn't much of a hindrance. I know personally, that's how it feels for me once I get spell hotkeys set; I rarely pause except for items, and those I use via my controlled character anyway. Regardless, I'll give it a shot and see how it feels.

Not sure regarding the character names. Actually I'm not 100% sure what you're asking... For my new game plus junk I need to make some sort of adjustment related to character naming (when you name a character it also resets their stats and items, which is not great with a new game plus sort of scenario), so I'm going to be digging into naming related stuff soon-ish.

[kethinov]

What I mean by character names is, for instance, when you get the naming screen for Randi at the very start of the game, it already says "Randi" in the box and you have to erase the name to change it to something else. (Same for Primm and Popoi.) Or perhaps another solution would be pressing start on an empty naming screen and the game auto names him Randi. Sort of like a Final Fantasy game where the characters have default names already. In SoM, they have default names, but you'd only know them if you read offscreen sources.

Regarding the X key, I do agree with the conceptual ambition of spell hotkeys replacing using the menus. Indeed, pausing is annoying and slows down the game. But I don't think this solution scales. There are only 8 possible spell hotkeys and far more spells in the game per character than that. So unless you remap the hotkeys frequently, there will never quite be enough. If you know what monsters/bosses are coming, you can prepare your hotkeys ahead of time, but I'm thinking about new players who won't have that foreknowledge ahead of time. They'll continue to resort to menuing. And having to press Y, then X to get to another character's menus would definitely annoy a new player.

Perhaps another solution would be to leave weapon hotswaps as-is, but to modify how spell hotkeys work to make it so mapping them explicitly is not necessary. Imagine something like this:

• [L] = bring up spell hotkeys (present behavior)
• [L] + [left arrow] = elemental spell 1
• [L] + [up arrow] = elemental spell 2
• [L] + [right arrow] = elemental spell 3
• [L] + [down arrow] = switch to another elemental

Under a system like that, you could cycle through elementals by pressing down while in the hotkey menu. And perhaps we could continue to reserve the four diagonals for expressly-set hotkeys that are staticly-bound regardless of what elemental you're focused on in the hotkey menu.

[Queue]

Oh, while I've looked over the code that initializes the memory that stores the character names (it initializes them as all 0xFF bytes, which was an empty space in Japanese, but is the double-letter "go" in English), and it wouldn't be too hard to hijack said code and initialize them as whatever. However, changing the character naming screen to not start empty is an unknown; as in, I haven't looked at that so don't know how convoluted that'd be. I'm not a purist on official character names in games though, so... honestly not very interested in pursuing this myself. That said, of the two approaches: ignoring the initialization and just having the character naming screen start populated with the defaults, or having initialization set the default and having an empty name entry at character naming be valid and skip overwriting the initialized name memory; the latter is likely the easier route.

I cleaned up the weapon switch hotkey code a bit, but the bad news is most NGI hotkeys work under the assumption that the other NGI features with hotkeys are either there or not; so, for example, weapon switching can't work well with R+X if R is controlling manual block, because manual block puts the character into a looped animation, and looped animations prevent a weapon switch. R+X can be made to interfere with blocking (again, assuming R is block), but then you'd have to hold R+X for a non-zero amount of time to wait for the block animation to end (and possibly other related conditions to end). I gave this a shot, and it didn't feel great, but it also somewhat hinges on if you consider a delay to change weapons a positive or negative. A side benefit of rewriting this a little is now the weapon swap button can be held until it succeeds, so if you're mid-combat it's not quite so finicky.

An issue with the spell hotkeys is that code is pretty monstrously complicated; just changing that system so it didn't require holding multiple simultaneous buttons, and to let you back out of a selection, and to trigger the cast on B press instead of B release, took multiple days of analysis, careful changes and plenty of testing. On top of this, it can only show (sanely) one icon at a time, and even that capability was especially clever work on zhaDe's part, getting all code in place to load and show a given spell icon (and its palette by hijacking the character's weapon palette). If I were to change the spell hotkeys to let you cycle and select among all spells (which I can't say I'm jumping at the task, because it'd likely be a week's effort), it'd still only let you see the icon for one at a time, and if I went that route I'd be dropping specific hotkey binding entirely because it'd be absurdly complicated (for the player); as is, I ignore the diagonal hotkeys personally and only bind cardinal directions, as the diagonals generally require you to hold them as you select, unlike the cardinals, and 4 (or heck, 2) per caster covers my needs in combat. Generally I just use cure water, analyzer, magic absorb and earth slide. -_-

I am modestly interested in also cramming real-time item use (via the boy) onto the quick spell hotkeys, but that's lots of work for less reward than what the system does for spells.




Version 2019-05-30:
https://ufile.io/ts20orud

Changes:
- Added Kethinov's "Alternate Karon" (v1.0, mysterious) patch
- Fixed lack of music when loading a save in the Mana Fortress
- Fixed a volume issue when music switched from an SPC to an MSU track
- Audio\Async_Music_Crossfade promoted out of (Experimental) status
- Added Bug_Fixes\Missable_Spear_Fix; defeating Tropicallo before getting the Spear is now safe
- Code reorganizing related to weapon switch hotkey
- Improvements for New Game Plus:
-- character naming events are bypassed (avoids lots of issues)
-- weapon levels survive the end game to new game transition
-- re-obtaining weapons no longer bugs them (you will have to burn money reforging though)
-- early game enemies can hurt you

[Queue]

Version 2019-06-04:
https://ufile.io/dokmt88n

Changes:
- Added Kethinov's "Overworld Hidden Treasure" patch
- Updated Kethinov's "Early Luna" to v1.2
- Slight fix to Alternate Karon (the mistake was mine and not present in Kethinov's patch)
- Slightly moved Watts (like 6 feet) in the Haunted Forest location to avoid Scroll Hack spoiling his presence
- Fixed and enabled Audio\Random_MSU_or_SPC (off by default); gives a 50/50 chance between MSU and SPC music if you have MSU music set up
- Added Items\Unique_Equipment: Limits helmets, armor and accessories so you can only carry one of any given piece of equipment. Other than causing a difficulty spike for the Pure Land (due to lack of defense), this seems like a pretty positive change for itemization. May warrant an item rebalance to truly flesh out its potential.




Version 2019-06-08:
https://ufile.io/kshklcly

Changes:
- Added Kethinov's "Neko in the Underground City"
- Updated Kethinov's "Watts in the Haunted Forest" to v1.1
- Updated Kethinov's "Overworld Hidden Treasure" ("Treasure in Northtown Woods")
- Slight tweak to Kethinov's "More Useful Evil Gate" to set the Mana Beast to all elements instead of just changing it from Dryad to Shade
- Added Kethinov's "Reverse MP Absorb on Evil and Undead Monsters" (altered slightly for safety, behavior is the same)
- Added code comment to Revisit_Goblin_Village related to re-enabling the hut doors
- Added a "...SHRIEK!" sound to the Goblin Stew event (as part of Revisit_Goblin_Village)
- Map cleanup for Northtown, notably no more stairway chimneys, scroll hack compatibility, and a non-solid shadow (and Mara's house in Southtown's chimney)
- Map cleanup for Northtown Interiors (and Mara's house in Southtown's interior)
- Added Miscellaneous\Revisit_Sunken_Continent; speak to "Girl" in the Tree Palace to re-extend the bridge back down into the Grand Palace interior, then work your way backwards to reach the Underground City
- Added Miscellaneous\Revisit_Pure_Land; walk around the sides of the tree to find a cave

[lexluthermiester]

Version 2019-06-08:
https://ufile.io/kshklcly

Changes:
- Added Kethinov's "Neko in the Underground City"
- Updated Kethinov's "Watts in the Haunted Forest" to v1.1
- Updated Kethinov's "Overworld Hidden Treasure" ("Treasure in Northtown Woods")
- Slight tweak to Kethinov's "More Useful Evil Gate" to set the Mana Beast to all elements instead of just changing it from Dryad to Shade
- Added Kethinov's "Reverse MP Absorb on Evil and Undead Monsters" (altered slightly for safety, behavior is the same)
- Added code comment to Revisit_Goblin_Village related to re-enabling the hut doors
- Added a "...SHRIEK!" sound to the Goblin Stew event (as part of Revisit_Goblin_Village)
- Map cleanup for Northtown, notably no more stairway chimneys, scroll hack compatibility, and a non-solid shadow (and Mara's house in Southtown's chimney)
- Map cleanup for Northtown Interiors (and Mara's house in Southtown's interior)
- Added Miscellaneous\Revisit_Sunken_Continent; speak to "Girl" in the Tree Palace to re-extend the bridge back down into the Grand Palace interior, then work your way backwards to reach the Underground City
- Added Miscellaneous\Revisit_Pure_Land; walk around the sides of the tree to find a cave

Continued impressive quality! Great Fun! 

[Queue]

Version 2019-06-11:
https://ufile.io/smt0ddy5

Changes:
- Updated Kethinov's "Treasure in Northtown Woods" to v1.1 (fixes Southtown merchant palette)
- Bumped ZPS patcher version from v0.18+ to v0.18++
- The ZPS patcher now saves and loads which features you have checked / unchecked, and any changes made to the Advanced Options window
- Settings save to an INI file that matches the name and location of the ZPS patch file; so "SoM Turbo.190611.zps" will wind up with "SoM Turbo.190611.ini" in the same folder
- Migrating settings between updates will require renaming the INI file to match the new ZPS file name
- Settings are saved when you click Apply, and loaded when you select a ZPS file that has a matching INI file; delete the INI file to reset settings to defaults

[maseter]

Could you copy/paste your ini Queue, or are the defaults how you play personally?

[Queue]

The defaults are generally how I play (like, for fun, not when developing / testing). I often flip between vanilla, VWF Edition and Relocalized for text because VWF Edition and Relocalized have the most compatibility fixups to double-check, but that's about it. Because I control the defaults, they're set to what I prefer.

[darthvaderx]

The defaults are generally how I play (like, for fun, not when developing / testing). I often flip between vanilla, VWF Edition and Relocalized for text because VWF Edition and Relocalized have the most compatibility fixups to double-check, but that's about it. Because I control the defaults, they're set to what I prefer.

Could you copy/paste your ini Queue, or are the defaults how you play personally?

Here's the readme.txt I made with the options I use in the game:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5pppc9aiq5mv29u/readme.txt?dl=0