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Total Request ASM: All armor replaced by shoes

Started by pokeytax, January 02, 2011, 10:16:01 am

DuxorW

I had a little bit of time today so I tested ALMA on consoles.

First, I tested a clean ISO on console to make sure it worked fine (Orbonne battle, etc).

Next, I applied all 4 parts of ALMA to the clean ISO (I didn't make any changes to any of the fields in ALMA, so a "clean ALMA").
The game froze when the text "Orbonne Monastery" appeared.
I loaded a saved game to see if I could get into a random battle. Strangely, I had a lot of difficulty triggering a random battle, but when I did, the game froze before loading the formation screen.
When I entered the party menu from the map, everyone's naked HP and MP had been reduced to 1. Equipment was able to add HP and MP to this naked value.

Next I applied only the "clean" attributes hack instead of all 4 hacks. Same result as before. I have not tried applying each of the other 3 hacks individually.

Lastly, since I was only able to access the party menu when ALMA was applied, I tried to see if the ALMA attributes could do anything that they were supposed to in the party menu. I gave monster talk "attribute 50" which I had set to double HP. With equipment, my mediator had 163 HP and it doubled to 326 when I set monster talk as her support ability. There weren't a lot of other things I could test since I could not enter any battles.

Battles were fine if I loaded the hacked ISO (where monster talk doubled HP) into ePSXe, and the hack worked as expected. I hope this is of some help.

3lric

It is indeed good info to have for if Pokeytax decides to fix it. It might be a good idea to move this post to the ALMA thread though.
  • Modding version: PSX

Choto

ALMA also has a problem which makes it lose stat breaks and increases due to where it jumps out of vanilla code. I think it's fixable, but it's down there on the list of things to do for me. Hopefully Pokeytax shows up super motivated for some reason, but don't hold your breath. Real life and motivation are cumbersome and fleeting, respectively.

And yes, it likely has code that doesn't fly on consoles. It needs to be gone through for problems like load delay and word address alignment. Still, thanks for the info. It would be a nice thing to slim ALMA down and make it usable.

nitwit

July 16, 2014, 12:24:21 am #363 Last Edit: July 16, 2014, 12:33:35 am by nitwit
Quote from: Choto on July 15, 2014, 11:14:19 pm
ALMA also has a problem which makes it lose stat breaks and increases due to where it jumps out of vanilla code. I think it's fixable, but it's down there on the list of things to do for me. Hopefully Pokeytax shows up super motivated for some reason, but don't hold your breath. Real life and motivation are cumbersome and fleeting, respectively.

And yes, it likely has code that doesn't fly on consoles. It needs to be gone through for problems like load delay and word address alignment. Still, thanks for the info. It would be a nice thing to slim ALMA down and make it usable.

I really want to use some parts of ALMA but I don't want to use the whole package if I don't need to.  Is it obvious where certain parts of the worksheet are linked to certain modified routines?  Could I trim out what I need without too much trouble?  And it seems that some of the things covered in ALMA are also covered by other hacks and other worksheets.

Choto

Yeh, you could cut out some things. The person to speak to about that is Celdia. She's been able to coax ALMA into behaving, but the previously mentioned restrictions still apply for attributes. I think the skillset hack may work, but perhaps not on consoles. I don't know at all if ALMAscripts work or not.

To tell where a hack jumps from, look for something that looks like this:

<Location file="BATTLE_BIN" offset="120248">
40490508
05000192
</Location>

if you highlight the hex code and pop it in MassHexASM, it'll decode it into ASM commands for you. If it's a j or jal command, it's jumping to the address specified (usually the address of custom code).

if it's not laid out so simply, just paste all the other code in the hack in masshexasm to see if it has those j or jal commands to custom code.


nitwit

Quote from: Choto on July 16, 2014, 10:06:53 pmYeh, you could cut out some things. The person to speak to about that is Celdia. She's been able to coax ALMA into behaving, but the previously mentioned restrictions still apply for attributes. I think the skillset hack may work, but perhaps not on consoles. I don't know at all if ALMAscripts work or not.

To tell where a hack jumps from, look for something that looks like this:

<Location file="BATTLE_BIN" offset="120248">
40490508
05000192
</Location>

if you highlight the hex code and pop it in MassHexASM, it'll decode it into ASM commands for you. If it's a j or jal command, it's jumping to the address specified (usually the address of custom code).

if it's not laid out so simply, just paste all the other code in the hack in masshexasm to see if it has those j or jal commands to custom code.

What's the difference between j and jal?  I noticed that jal usually links to another routine (what's the difference between a routine and a subroutine?) while browsing the wiki.  Also some routines aren't documented on the wiki.  Steal Gil comes to mind.

I want the extra item attributes for sure, but I think I can find some uses for the other ones.  Besides that I'm concerned about any conflicts between ALMA and other spreadsheets and hacks.  I can't do everything I want to do to supports with ALMA, but I think if I use my imagination I can make something fun.

Choto

July 18, 2014, 07:26:22 am #366 Last Edit: July 18, 2014, 06:04:11 pm by Choto
Stand by. Looks like you have a solid base of understanding. When I get home later I'll describe some options and clarify J vs Jal

edit: Looks like Glain already explained Jal vs. J

Check this hack:

<Patch name="Speed Boost">
<Description>
Boosts Speed by 1
</Description>
<Location file="BATTLE_BIN" offset="4d0a8">
004C0508
00000000
</Location>
<Location file="BATTLE_BIN" offset="EC000">
93002292
00000000
20004230
02004010
FFFF6230
01006324
00006224
2C720108
3300422C
</Location>
</Patch>


This gives the unit Speed +1 if a certain R/S/M is equipped. Right now it's tied to byte 0x93, value 0x02

If you look at the data locations.txt. and go to 0x801924cc, then go to byte 0x93, you'll see which R/S/M this hack is referring to. This hack jumps from vanilla code where ALMA should jump from vanilla code. So you can this jump location and then hack in whatever type of stat manipulation you want based on the equipped R/S/M.

It's like a hardcoded version of alma that doesn't load the information from a big table or anything. At it's core it just says "Is this R/S/M active?" "Then perform this stat manipulation.

I'll try to explain this better later on, I only had a second to sit down and post it.