4-bit vs 8-bit, Final Fantasy retouched.

[adosorken]

I have all the character sprites but it's somewhat of a messy collection and needs to be put together properly. I can do it but if you wanna take care of it yourself then go to http://www.planetnintendo.com/ff1/ I think it is. That's where I got the monsters, the character sprites, the movie, and they have the complete collection of MP3s from the PSX version of FF (which I'm slowly obtaining). The character sprites I do believe are scaled...or they could just have been scaled in HTML, I'm not sure as I've not been able to get the files to my dev computer yet to check em out (I saved entire pages to get the stuff, hehe). The only missing link here so to speak is the tileset...I've yet to find a WSC version of the tileset. Not like that matters much anyways because there's a ton of great tilesets on the internet and someone could always make a great one anyways that far surpasses the WSC set (it's not uberimpressive but it's far better than the NES one, of course).

I'll keep going with the string tables and data if you'd like...I don't trust information found online because it tends to be riddled with inconsistencies and errors...I'd rather extract the data from the game itself and know it's going to be accurate.

Oh...I modified a copy of the ROM and made a version which has every magic shop in Coneria, a shop that sells Ribbons, ProRings and Masamunes, and has a door that leads to the final battle with Chaos (who I recolored to red and called "Satan"). I also made it so that the Fighters could learn every magic spell and could use 16 spells of each level...and would gain levels every 1 experience point. They also start at 255 HP and insane stats. Ya, I was kinda bored.

[1000101]

heh, anything you want to do to help would be great.

I've been working on taking those maps you uploaded and converting them to work with the new graphics.

I've discovered a few things just working on these maps on how they did the game, and it's quite clever that they didn't bother with a trigger list for things, they just used keyed tiles, etc.

[relsoft]

Virtually every game used different storage/retrieval methods, there is no singular way to do it for all ROM images. For Final Fantasy, I have a specialized tool designed to do this kind of stuff. In the emulation scene, there are people who dedicate their entire "scene life" to reverse engineering old games and creating utilities to manipulate and modify them. You can try searching google for hacking specific games, or try an emulation central such as zophar.

a better idea is just to Read the Vram which means you can use savestaes. :*)

[1000101]

That doesn't help when you are trying to extract a tileset since you don't know the order of the tiles.

Don't consufe the words 'better' and 'easier' ;P

[adosorken]

While doing some research online for this game, I came across an interesting challenge...beating the game with a single character. So, being the self-abusive glutton-for-punishment I am, I decided to try it out. I started the game with a very strong party: Fighter, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage. But then, I only equipped the Fighter, and put him in the back row...and went out into the world. The other thee were quickly put down by Imps, leaving nothing but my Fighter to battle everything...and I do mean EVERYTHING, by himself. Three days and one million experience points later, I'm happy to announce that beating this game with a single Fighter is indeed possible...but very difficult. However, I even managed to wipe out a WarMECH atop the Floating Castle...if that gives you any indication of how powerful the Fighter gets in high levels...

Anyways, I have some more information compiled and I'll get it to you as soon as possible. I really hope you go through with this...it's more work than it appears at first but it's well worth the effort.

[1000101]

I understand a Black Belt is more powerful then a fighter after the class change (also, get the change at as low a level a possable so you get more for more levels, but, you already knew this, right?).

Also, I've been working on adjusting the maps for the new tilesets and the tilesets themselves. Everything is going well thus far.

[Diroga]

if the game was origanaly done in 8 bit gfx would there have been enougn room on the cartridge?

[1000101]

As I said before, they are only 4 bit graphics, however, one of those 4 bits specifies which tileset loaded into the VRAM to use. So, it's 2 active tilesets and an 8 colour palette for each tileset. The tiles themselves are only 2-bit (4 colours) which get converrted to 4-bits when loaded to VRAM.

The CPU is an 8-bit CPU with an 8-bit memory BUS (with up to 16-bits of memory), 8-bit VPU (Video Processing Unit) programmed through 8-bit ports.

So, it's an 16-bit memory in an 8-bit machine with 4-bit video using 2-bit sprites. hehe

Now you know why the graphics are so limited on an '8-bit' machine. Because it's the CPU they refer to when they talk about how many bits it is.

[KiZ]

he realises that the graphics were done in 4bit, but he is asking would the graphics have physically fit *if* they were done in 8bit.

[1000101]

Sorry, my bad.

Well, you have 64K of address space so...