ASM Hack question

[Knight Lord]

Hi! Been a long time since I've posted, but I'm working on a small mod that is being used as an educational experience for me in the realm of FFT Modding. I've had an idea, but I've also hit a roadblock. As there is extremely little documentation on PSP version ASM hacking and I'm too stubborn to just move to the PSX version until I feel this project has completely defeated me.

I'm using Valhalla as it appears to be the best tool that I can find for ASM hacking, but as I'm still very new to all of this, I don't entirely know how to create an ASM hack in the first place and I'd like to start somewhere simple, but the lack of documentation means I've got no guides to work off of. All I want is to take the property that makes the Materia Blade work with Clouds abilities, remove it from the Materia Blade, and apply that property to every polearm in the game. The idea is after this hack is applied, checking the "Materia Blade Required" box with skills in FFTPatcher will result in those abilities only working with polearms. Essentially I want to move the Materia Blade check to pass on all polearms.

I do not want someone to make this hack for me so much as I want someone to tell me how I can make this hack happen myself.

[Xifanie]

Tzepish is our resident PSP ASM hacker.
You can find him on our discord server. He's fairly active and very helpful!

[Tzepish]

I've also been known to very rarely visit these boards!

Check out my PSP notes here: https://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=12994.0

For my mod, I modified the materia blade flag to work with any weapon equipped, so I have the ASM for the materia blade flag documented in there. Just control+f search for materia blade.

As for "how to make an ASM hack", you'll want to open up one of the Valhalla ASM files (such as default-cust-hacks.asm) and add a new entry that contains the ASM you want to write. Then when you use the Apply Patches button in Valhalla, it will patch your ISO with the specified ASM.

Feel free to message me on discord if you want more hands on help, I'm not sure how familiar you are with ASM in general.