[PheonixMMKC777]

Yo this is a neat project!

I noticed that there is a B button dash in this hack, but is there a patch just for the b button dash?
Reason being I'm working on a FF2 Randomizer and it would be an almost essential feature.

[lan-vuhoang]

If only there was some kind of way to change equipment mid-battle or even just allow you to access items directly without having to go through the mess that is the "Item" slot...

[AwesomeHairo]

I noticed that there is a B button dash in this hack, but is there a patch just for the b button dash?
Reason being I'm working on a FF2 Randomizer and it would be an almost essential feature.

It should come with Chaos Rush's English Translation patch (https://www.romhacking.net/translations/2656/)

I have a question concerning what's possibly seem to be unused text, which could potentially free up space to add more dialogue to other messages. I don't feel I should make a whole post about it, and thought this could be answered here. Is this unused?

まあ [SLOT_4]！ すがたがみえないと おもったら！！/[ゴードン]のさくせんどおり [18][EC]たちが てきの/ちゅういを ひきつけますから そのあいだに/あなたがたは [フィン]じょうにせんにゅうして/てきの しれいかんを うちとってください。/[フィン]じょうは いりぐちから まっすぐすすめば/おおひろまにでます。/てきは そこにいるはずよ。 きをつけて。

Bank 1, Message 27. Message offset 0x18c97, Bank offset 0x18210. Said by Hilda. Just before Liberation of Castle Fynn.

[redmagejoe]

I noticed that there is a B button dash in this hack, but is there a patch just for the b button dash?
Reason being I'm working on a FF2 Randomizer and it would be an almost essential feature.

The standalone one in the Chaos Rush Translation patch isn't in the same addresses in Final Fantasy II Restored, so we couldn't really rip a standalone version of ours for you. Best to get the standalone IPS from the Chaos Rush Translation.

It should come with Chaos Rush's English Translation patch (https://www.romhacking.net/translations/2656/)

I have a question concerning what's possibly seem to be unused text, which could potentially free up space to add more dialogue to other messages. I don't feel I should make a whole post about it, and thought this could be answered here. Is this unused?

まあ [SLOT_4]！ すがたがみえないと おもったら！！/[ゴードン]のさくせんどおり [18][EC]たちが てきの/ちゅういを ひきつけますから そのあいだに/あなたがたは [フィン]じょうにせんにゅうして/てきの しれいかんを うちとってください。/[フィン]じょうは いりぐちから まっすぐすすめば/おおひろまにでます。/てきは そこにいるはずよ。 きをつけて。

Bank 1, Message 27. Message offset 0x18c97, Bank offset 0x18210. Said by Hilda. Just before Liberation of Castle Fynn.

I'm afraid it's been too long since I've looked at this for me to be able to tell you off the top of my head. I'd have to find time to sit down and look through this again. If abw is still around, he might be able to shed some light since he dove way deeper into the game than I was able to.

[abw]

Is this unused?

まあ [SLOT_4]！ すがたがみえないと おもったら！！/[ゴードン]のさくせんどおり [18][EC]たちが てきの/ちゅういを ひきつけますから そのあいだに/あなたがたは [フィン]じょうにせんにゅうして/てきの しれいかんを うちとってください。/[フィン]じょうは いりぐちから まっすぐすすめば/おおひろまにでます。/てきは そこにいるはずよ。 きをつけて。

Bank 1, Message 27. Message offset 0x18c97, Bank offset 0x18210. Said by Hilda. Just before Liberation of Castle Fynn.

No, though it is an easily missed bit of dialogue with a short window of opportunity for seeing it. This is one of Hilda's possible lines while she's located in the camp; in order to trigger it you need to go back and talk to Hilda after Leila rejoins but before liberating Fynn.

[AwesomeHairo]

Great. Thank you for both of your responses. I have another question regarding Chaos Rush's CastleFynn tool.

It seems for Battle Messages and Misc 1 (and etc), whenever I try to click "Compile Selected Bank" after editing, it doesn't do anything. Whenever I try to click "Compile Single Message", it would work but then the proceeding messages would get messed up (they'll either get deleted, partly deleted or fuse with other messages).

Assuming I don't try to go crazy with filling the 16 character boxes for each one (messages displayed at the bottom left screen in battle), how can I make it so I'm able to edit anything slightly longer? For example, if I were to edit Message 25 (Battle Messages) "You won!" with "Won the fight!!", how would I go about doing it and not messing the proceeding messages up? I'm assuming it's a pointer issue rather than a space issue, because the program would simply say "Can't compile. No space" or something like that. I noticed in his Readme that the description for "Compile Single Message" doesn't mention that the program repoints, unlike "Compile Selected Bank", either.

Also, it seems if I add a squishy character, the "Compile Single Message" wouldn't work at all.

Thank you in advance for reading my plight.

[redmagejoe]

While trying to touch up the Chaos Rush translation, you may have seen from its update history that I ran into a lot of issues because I assumed that the program Castle Fynn worked flawlessly. It does a fairly good job, but it unfortunately has some "quirks" which can make working with it a bit of a headache if you don't know those quirks in advance. If it is unable to fully compile, rather than reverting the changes, it will have already attempted to make the changes up to the point where it ran into the issue and it automatically saves the ROM rather than giving you a temp copy or the like. This means that you have to keep your own backup, and if you run into a space issue as is often the case, you have to load up your backup and try again lest you run into some unforeseen issue caused by trying to shove items into another bank or pointers being messed up.

Honestly if you're going to work with Castle Fynn, try to have a Hex Editor with the Translation Tables up to keep tabs on where the banks start and end, and how much space you have to work with at the end of each bank (how many "unused" bytes are available at the end). That's what I had to do to get the translation into the state it is currently in, and it's why some choices were made which not everyone may agree with, but I felt gave the most verbose translations while at sometimes not looking the "prettiest" or "most polished". Ultimately I opted for verbosity over universal consistency (as the Demiforce patch did relying on 4 character spell names and the like), since that was the philosophy Chaos Rush seemed to use. I merely saw opportunities and space available to expand what we had to make some potentially vague lines of text more clear wherever possible.

Also bear in mind that "squishy" characters don't apply to dialog. They're only for battle and interface messages. Dialog uses a different font and supports DTE, but not "text sprites" as the text for interfaces and battle messages does. I may not be as versed in the terminology or the concepts, but I know that at the very least they're using two different kinds of text. I already tried shoving "squishy" characters into dialog before, and I can tell you it doesn't work without changing more than the hex values in the lines of dialog.

[AwesomeHairo]

Okay, I know what he did, and I understand why he did it. Chaos Rush couldn't fit the last five enemy names under the bank "Enemy Names". He had to place them in the "Battle Messages" bank, and they appear right after message number 116.

Under the "Battle Messages" bank (bank offset 0x1738d), including the placed enemy names at the end, there are 92 free spaces.

My course of action to edit the battle messages is to delete those five enemy names (IrnGiant, Tiamat, Be[el]zebub, Astaroth and Emperor) in the Battle Messages bank, update the pointers (I'm not sure if these enemy names correspond to the pointers in the Battle Messages bank or the Enemy Names one...), do my battle message edits, and insert the enemy names at the back of the edited messages.

...Or something. I'm very new to this, but I have to eventually do something similar for FF8 PSX. I'm guessing the pointers for Battle Messages is above 0x17367, judging from your reply in Chaos Rush's post about changing Mana to M.Power (based off his patch). I'm not sure where the pointer header starts or if it works the same like with the dialog banks.

Any help would be appreciated.

Great news: I can find the pointers using an untouched FFII rom. As the program is able to still compile the whole bank with it, I was able to find the pointers by comparing the modified and the unmodified non-patched JP roms. Although it is annoying that I have to manually update the pointers, I'm glad I'm still able to edit what I want.

I haven't gotten to the remapped enemy names yet, but I'm sure the pointers for those are still in the Enemy Names bank.

[abw]

If it helps any, looking at the enemy names in whatever version of the translation patch I happen to have here shows that it missed some DTE opportunities (e.g. "Sasqutch" could be stored as "S[as]qutch") and stores multiple copies of "Emperor" instead of making both of the Emperor pointers point to the same string. Making full use of DTE and combining pointers shortens the list enough that it fits into the original space (with 1 byte to spare!), thus avoiding needing to steal space from somewhere else in a fairly cramped bank.

For reference, the monster name pointer table is located at 0x016C54-0x016D53 with monster names from 0x016D54-0x0170CA, immediately followed by the spell name pointer table from 0x0170CB-0x017156, spell names from 0x017157-0x0172A2, 2 bytes that I'm pretty sure are unused, and then the battle message pointer table from 0x0172A5-0x01738C and the battle messages from 0x01738D-0x01770F. After that are tables of monster battle ranks, drop list indices, the drop lists, and then code starts again at 0x017A10.

[redmagejoe]

If I had the time or inclination to go back and clean up the way it behaves, I'd definitely take abw's suggestions, but I've been so swamped and out of ROMhacking for so long I'm not sure I could find the energy any time soon to get back to it. If someone wants to upload a new version of the Chaos Rush translation that would be just dandy.

[abw]

Apparently I was indeed still using an older version of the translation patch, and v2.2b has changes that invalidate most of my earlier comments.

If the Castle Fynn utility is giving you problems, you could try using something else... I haven't really been focussed on text for this project, so there might be some errors or missed sections here, but I've uploaded a copy of my extract/insert scripts, which should give you greater editing freedom. You're still constrained by the available space and existing code, but if you want to update the squishy tile usage or move some monster names around or play with the DTE compression (3B was left unused for some reason and choosing better letter combinations would save 700+ bytes over the entire script) or whatever, it might be helpful.

Regarding the squishy tiles, I notice that some of them are only used once or twice, so a couple of minor script tweaks would free up a few tiles that could potentially be put to better uses.

"B{re}{a}{th}" -> "B{re}a{th}"
"{Ba}{rr}{ie}{r }" -> "{Ba}{rr}{ie}r"
"A{tt}ack" -> "Fight"
" Eq{ui}pment" -> "Equipment"

For reference, here are the usage counts for each squishy tile:

Spoiler:

      1 {a}
      3 {ai}
      4 {Ba}
      1 {cl}
     12 {'d}
      9 {el}
      2 {enc}
      3 {hundr}
      3 {ie}
     12 {il}
      2 {ima}
     36 {'l}
      7 {la}
      5 {le}
     12 {li}
      8 {ll}
      3 {lt}
     32 {'m}
      2 {pt}
      2 {r }
     38 {'r}
      5 {rd}
     12 {re}
      4 {rr}
    174 {'s}
      7 {se}
      2 {sn}
      3 {st}
      5 {suna}
     68 {'t}
      8 {te}
      8 {th}
      6 {ti}
      1 {tt}
      1 {ui}
     36 {'v}
      2 {zz}

[vivify93]

Is green your edit? Because Lizard is spelled with one z

[abw]

Is green your edit? Because Lizard is spelled with one z

Heh, so it is - I've removed that from my earlier post, thanks for the catch! I blame continual sleep deprivation for this obvious error, which is also one of the reasons why I'm not making any edits to the script myself .

[ScarabEnigma]

Pardon me. But I was thinking about finally giving out the bugfix patch a try but the specifications as to how to apply the patch are confusing. do you apply the patch onto a base jp or chaos rush patched rom? or can you do demi force version via patching that onto jp rom that got the bugfix patch? I cannot tell what its saying clearly 

also given certain videos, its come to attention that a bug that allows equipping of tomes in battle which can result in disastrous effects in multiple ways, is a thing.

[redmagejoe]

Whichever patch from the Restored page you use should be applied first before any translations. You can then apply the Chaos Rush Translation over it, but it is not required to use the Chaos Rush Translation if you decide you prefer DemiForce. I cannot recall if there's anything that pertains to text specifically in our bug fixes, but it was done with Chaos Rush in mind, so we may have overlooked something which may or may not cause minor text-related bugs.

[ScarabEnigma]

I suppose another question I have is regarding the 'bugfix' to the damage formula of tsunami/quake/cyclone. It says you changed it to doing greater or no damage to certain monster types? Pretty much from gameplay of both nes and later ports, their damage formula simply seems to be basic damage only ignore target magic defense and element resistance (absorb still acknowledged though). Though the m def ignore isn't a concern due to how low the potency of enemy magic is.

I think for customization purposes, the m def and element resist ignore may be more preferred. but idk if that's still present in the bugfixed version or not.

Edit: I probably should've bothered to replay the later ports before posting the above as I now am seeing the whole ineffective vs certain monster types bit in action. seems like each of the 8 elements matches up to each of the 8 monster types to determine if the spell lands or not.

[AwesomeHairo]

Once again, I thank you both for helping me. I've since finished editing almost everything regarding the other banks that are not able to be compiled with CastleFynn, to my satisfaction, and have successfully changed the pointers. In the end, yes, I did change five or so squishy tiles (I changed the item icon, the 'e' meant for S[il][e][nc] and made [nc] into a standalone, among other things upon abw's suggestions). For example, due to items not really needing an item icon, I replaced it with a more useful squishy tile (like [in]). I've even better organised the tiles.

My only wish is for the boxes as big as the ones in FF1 and 3 (have the battle message box at the bottom go from 16 char limit to 22, enemy name box 8 to 10, and "attack" box 4 to 6). Although space is very limited as you've said, the battle messages and "attack" ones would not pose too much of a problem because I can put some of the names in another bank, like how Chaos did with the last 5 enemy names (I have 8 in total placed at the end of the battle message bank, with spaces to spare). Perhaps there's a way to remove the unused songs to make more space?

I have one thing left I need help on. In FF1, I've found the strings correlating to what is said at the end of battle("Monsters defeated" or "[Lead player's name] and co. defeated"). Each actually two messages linked into one, as you know. By editing 0x2D970 in FF1 JPN from 04 to 09 (or anything higher than 08, it seems), I'm able to take out the "fetching" of the lead player's name so I can make full use of the 22 spaces and edit it to make it something like "Party's been wiped out".

Is there a way to do the same with FF2 with Firion's name? Instead of "[Whatever you named Firion] lost.", I would like to make full use of the 16 spaces in message 24 of the Battle Messages bank (something like "Party's wiped out").

[abw]

also given certain videos, its come to attention that a bug that allows equipping of tomes in battle which can result in disastrous effects in multiple ways, is a thing.

I haven't had time to look into this, but it sounds interesting. Do you have a link?

My only wish is for the boxes as big as the ones in FF1 and 3 (have the battle message box at the bottom go from 16 char limit to 22, enemy name box 8 to 10, and "attack" box 4 to 6). Although space is very limited as you've said, the battle messages and "attack" ones would not pose too much of a problem because I can put some of the names in another bank, like how Chaos did with the last 5 enemy names (I have 8 in total placed at the end of the battle message bank, with spaces to spare). Perhaps there's a way to remove the unused songs to make more space?

This would take a little bit of work, but maybe not too much. Aside from ROM space to store the extra text content, you'd also need to update the window width/height/address values (see $05:$AC02 - $05:$AC1F for those), update the hardcoded string length limit of #$11 at $0F:$FDBD (and that code is shared by many things, so be careful), and possibly the entire endeavour would be sunk by RAM constraints if $7D58-$7D5D are used for anything (the battle message text buffer starts at $7D47, and the turn order indices start at $7D5E).

Note that the battle messages are all in bank 5. All Chaos Rush did was move some of them around to free space elsewhere within bank 5; moving them to another bank would require adding code to decide which bank to read each message from and then swapping that bank in and out again.

Is there a way to do the same with FF2 with Firion's name? Instead of "[Whatever you named Firion] lost.", I would like to make full use of the 16 spaces in message 24 of the Battle Messages bank (something like "Party's wiped out").

The code that adds Firion's name starts at 0x033F24/$0C:$BF14 in the original ROM (bank $0C underwent a lot of changes in Restored, so I'm not sure off the top of my head where it ended up there). I haven't tried it myself, but probably the smallest change that would achieve this goal would be to update $0C:$BF14 from CMP #$17 (labelled in my disassembly as "Battle Message ID #$17: たちは ぜんめつした ( lost.)") to e.g. CMP #$FF (anything over #$73 should do since that's the last defined battle message).

[ScarabEnigma]

I haven't had time to look into this, but it sounds interesting. Do you have a link?

I don't have a link, but its possible to see for yourself in game by equipping a tome to a character's belt slot then switching it into either hand midbattle, and select ff2 speedruns that simply break the game into pieces with all its manners of glitches without care use the tome glitch to do huge damage.

[zombie343]

When I patch FF2j with Neo Demiforce + Chaos, I get the best of both worlds. However, when I add the B-Button Dash patch, the awesome Neo Demiforce title screen, with fixed fading and everything changes from a Black background, to a glitchy white one.

Is there a way to make these patches work together? (Basically, Neo Demiforce ff2e_103 + ChaosRush Translation + B Button Dash).