ROM Hacks: Final Fantasy Hasted 1.0 Release

[RHDNBot]

Update By: mentil

October, 2022: After a long year of fruitful ROM hacking, Mentil decided to take a break by making another attempt at replaying Final Fantasy 1 for the NES with an all-Black-Mage party. He'd recently found out the game had a built-in map screen (darn cryptic brooms!) and decided for this attempt to try an interesting-sounding hack called Final Fantasy Restored.

Aah, a much better experience... wait, why is the game still so tedious and slow-paced?! Well, someone would have to do something to fix that! And so Final Fantasy Hasted was born.

Nearly four months later, after two playthroughs testing the hack, fixing multiple bugs found by doing so, the fruits of his labor have been released.

While being compatible with many other hacks such as the aforementioned Final Fantasy Restored, it contains many new features to make the game faster and more streamlined to play, such as:

• Substantially faster transitions and combat animations.
• It's now shown in shops who can equip which items. In weapon shops, it's also shown if that weapon has higher or lower attack power than what's currently equipped.
• Actions in combat now automatically switch to the next enemy or ally instead of giving an 'Ineffective' error (although this can be disabled if desired.)
• Pressing Start + Select in combat sets the whole party to Run. Pressing Left or Right when selecting an enemy now lets you change columns.
• The map screen now renders faster, is more readable, and is more accurate with regards to water.

In addition, this hack's archive also includes a completely-optional antigrind patch, which increases enemy rewards 2-3x, and rebalances spell costs.

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link

[jabedoben]

This is awesome! Everything you changed is a list of reasons that I can't play the original anymore. If you don't mind, I'm going to bring this up over on RetroAchievements and see if we can get this hack added to their database.

[mentil]

This is awesome! Everything you changed is a list of reasons that I can't play the original anymore. If you don't mind, I'm going to bring this up over on RetroAchievements and see if we can get this hack added to their database.

Thanks! Go ahead.

[dinkledaberry]

So I created an account just to say: The loss of ineffective attacks and showing equippable shop gear is all I've ever wanted from a FF hack since I found out hacks existed. So thanks for that! It's also great because having the characters use their crouching/cheering sprites is such an easy, intuitive fix. I'm surprised no one else ever implemented it. Also the hacking notes! More people should be more open about their hacks like that.

My only criticism: I had issues applying this patch to your listed rom with SHA-1: c9cfbf5455085e198dce039298b083cd6fc88bce. It's just not compatible. When I looked into it it seemed that's the headerless version while the headered version with SHA-1: e8f34d93576048528be4cb736f292edb431083e0 did work with the patch. I guess you might want to look into that or change the ROM/ISO information on the hack page. That's all. Good work. You're awesome.

[mentil]

Thanks a lot! I include hacking notes with all my hacks, to help others trying to use my code or to learn from what I learned; I agree other ROM hackers should be more open about what they learn and produce (although I understand not wanting to support usage of their tools.) Considering how many hacks there are for this game, I'm also surprised some of these modifications have never been done before; perhaps the remakes caused people to lose interest.

This hack (all versions) expects a ROM with a 16-byte iNES header; the reference one I had RHDN scan was the standard game, often named 'Final Fantasy (U) [!].nes', which (with the stated hashes) does have this header. If you have an unheadered ROM for some reason, you should be able to add one in most emulators. I patch with Flips, other patching programs were untested.

[brownmunde]

So I created an account just to say: The loss of ineffective attacks and showing equippable shop gear is all I've ever wanted from a FF hack since I found out hacks existed. So thanks for that! It's also great because having the characters use their crouching/cheering sprites is such an easy, intuitive fix. I'm surprised no one else ever implemented it. Also the hacking notes! More people should be more open about their hacks like that.

My only criticism: I had issues applying this patch to your listed rom with SHA-1: c9cfbf5455085e198dce039298b083cd6fc88bce. It's just not compatible. When I looked into it it seemed that's the headerless version while the headered version with SHA-1: e8f34d93576048528be4cb736f292edb431083e0 did work with the patch. I guess you might want to look into that or change the ROM/ISO information on the hack page. That's all. Good work. You're awesome.

True, they should look into this matter. Even I face similar issue while playing this ROM

[Millie1]

So I created an account just to say: The loss of ineffective attacks and showing equippable shop gear is all I've ever wanted from a FF hack since I found out hacks existed. So thanks for that! It's also great because having the characters use their crouching/cheering sprites is such an easy, intuitive fix. I'm surprised no one else ever implemented it. Also the hacking notes! More people should be more open about their hacks like that.

My only criticism: I had issues applying this patch to your listed rom with SHA-1: c9cfbf5455085e198dce039298b083cd6fc88bce. It's just not compatible. When I looked into it it seemed that's the headerless version while the headered version with SHA-1: e8f34d93576048528be4cb736f292edb431083e0 did work with the patch. I guess you might want to look into that or change the ROM/ISO information on the hack page. That's all. Good work. You're awesome.

Developers should be able to fix compatibility issues with ROMs that are already installed on the device. It's incredibly frustrating because there's a great hack that sounds great, but it's crucial that it works.

[mentil]

Developers should be able to fix compatibility issues with ROMs that are already installed on the device. It's incredibly frustrating because there's a great hack that sounds great, but it's crucial that it works.

Hi. Could you please detail the steps to reproduce any problems you're having? In particular, which ROM and patch file(s) you're using? Thanks.
By 'device' I assume you mean the NES Mini?