Changing/Removing character dialogue portraits from Final Fantasy V Advance?

[RageTwister]

Hello there all. I came here because I am very desperately looking for a particular hack. Since this is a community of hackers, I thought I might have some luck here. The past few days, I have kind of been wanting to replay Final Fantasy V, and while I have the GBA version of the game, which is fantastic, it has one major flaw in my opinion: the character portraits that come up whenever a major character talks are ugly. Like... super ugly. Especially Lenna's. I know some people like Amano's artwork, but... I'm just not one of those people, sorry. I'd really like to be able to play the game without these portraits, so I was wondering if a hack exists that can change or even just remove them. I've already searched around a bit, but the one and only link I could find to any such hack was dead.

Can anyone here help me find the kind of hack I'm looking for, or if no such hack exists/can be found, then (and I know this is a long shot) I don't suppose anyone here would be willing to try to make one?

Here's the dead link I mentioned earlier, just in case it might help with tracking down the hack that was once there: slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=1657.0 I think I actually saw this hack once a long time ago, and the portraits resembled the character sprites. Hopefully that sounds familiar to someone.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!

[xjamxx]

mmm...
I don't have the game, never played the gba version, but i searched the web and found:

For what it's worth, I played around with it for a while and was able to find where the avatars are stored. And since they were compressed using the standard bios LZ77 routine, replacing them with blank ones was a cinch...
For the record, the pointer table for the avatars is stored at 0x1465A0 (for the European rom). Each avatar is prefixed by 0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x14 0x00 0x00 0x00, followed by 640 bytes of tile data.
I was hoping to also move the text 3 tiles left so as not to leave blank space where the portraits used to be, but ran into some strange problems with write breakpoints not triggering in no$gba. I have some notes if someone is interested in doing that part.
Anyway, here is a quick and dirty patch (ff5.ips), if you want to try it out. Just apply it to the European rom. Needless to say, this hasn't been extensively tested.

Wait, now I've noticed that the link sends me right into the IPS's text. Downloaded it, I wonder if it would work with the US version.
Edit: Tested the maneuver. Didn't work. Worked for the european version as you said, though.

I was doing some small research with the guides FAST6191 gave here. Though I didn't succeed in making the patch, Darthatron from Final Fantasy Hacktics helped me and ended reproducing Mziab's patch on the US Version. I'll check the patch and tell you the results.
Edit: It works.
Also, Dart allowed me to post the link to his patch (FFVA_PortraitRemoval.ips). Like Mziab's, this patch is a replacement, still unsuitable to make it to the database.

mziab, I just copied your hack over to the US version. The pointer table is at 0x1446E8 in the US version.
I, initially, was going to do it a different way; that is just stop the functions that call the data from firing, but it was causing graphical glitches for unknown reasons. As you've said, this is a dirty hack, but it's doing the job, so let's just leave it.

To apply IPS patches you could use Lunar IPS, just search the web for it...

Also from where you wanted to get the patch it was this:

Why don't play the SNES version instead? Better graphics, better music and no portraits, and the new "Legend of Crystals" translation is almost as good as the GBA.

Still my IQ is zero...

[RageTwister]

Oh, thank you! I did stumble on that thread during my search, but the link didn't work, and everything they said about doing it manually was just gibberish to me. I downloaded the zip file you provided and gave the hack a try. The portraits are indeed gone. Played it up to the end of the Ship Graveyard as a test, and everything seems to be in working order. There's a bit of blank space on the left side of the dialogue boxes where the portraits would go however. Not really a problem, it just looks a bit odd. If there's no (easy) way to fix it, I think I can live with it.

On another note, there's actually two ips files in the zip folder you gave me though. Do you happen to know what the other one, the one that's just called "ff5", does?

[xjamxx]

It is for the european rom.

[Nyzer]

Thanks, xjamxx. I did a brief search myself but only found some dead links. It's good to know someone was able to help!