- •Downloads:
- •Update Log:
- •Table of Contents:
- •Prologue: Bare Basics
- •Chapter 1: Key Terminology & Abbreviations
- •7Zip Archive – Supposedly the best file archiver there is, but not used as much, and thus less convenient. Requires 7zip or winRar to use.
- •VisualBoyAdvance – most people’s emulator of choice, almost always referred to as “vba” for short.
- •Chapter 2: Using Nightmare Modules
- •I upload anything that I think might be useful to someone on that site. Just use the menus and search until you find it.
- •Chapter 3: File Management
- •In order to be a successful hacker you need to have a lot of good management.
- •Chapter 4: Pointer Tables
- •Chapter 5: Battle Animation Editor
- •Chapter 6: Character Editor
- •Chapter 7: Class Editor
- •Chapter 8: Item Editor
- •Item icon – obvious
- •Chapter 9: Spell Association Editor
- •Chapter 13: Movement Cost Editor
- •If the value next to a type of terrain is ‘255’ then it is uncrossable because a unit won’t have 255 movement points.
- •Chapter 16: Battle Palette Reference Editor
- •If you want to know how to actually edit battle palettes’ colors, you can find that in a later chapter that I will make.
- •Chapter 17: Arena Class Editor
- •It’s a bit of work, but making cGs is quite rewarding, and it’s easier than some stuff, that’s for sure! Good luck with your cg making!
- •Chapter 20: Lyn’s Ending Editor
- •Chapter 21: Tutorial Editing/Getting Rid of the Tutorial
- •Part 2: Downloading the Programs
- •Part 3: Preparing Your midi
- •If you still have more than 10 tracks, you should find another midi. Sorry but, there are limits in life.
- •Part 4: Applying Blazer’s Beta Music Insertion/Instrument Patch
- •Part 5: Converting Your midi
- •Part 6: Making Your midi Repeat and Transferring it to Your rom
- •If the b1 and bc are next to each other then I can almost guarantee you want to replace it, so hit “replace” and do that with every instance and once you’re finished you’re good to go.
- •Part 7: Track Pointers & Repointing
- •Part 8: Finale- Assembling Your Song & Profit
- •If you don’t have this module, you’ll have to use this outdated way of doing it. Do check to see if you have the latest Nightmare Modules in general, but otherwise… well, sorry I guess. Xp
- •Part 9: Possible Errors & Wrap-up
- •Part 10: Documentation and Stuff
- •Atrius’ Notes:
- •Charon’s Notes:
- •Part 11: The Music Hacking Run-Down (Shorter Version of Tutorial & Walls of Text)
- •Part 12: Credits & Thanks
- •Chapter 25: Music Editing with Zahlman’s Song Editor
- •If you actually do type in help and press ‘enter’ on your keyboard, it’ll give you a list of commands, and tell you some stuff. Here’s the important stuff:
- •It worked! Great! I know how to import a song!
- •Chapter 26: Exporting Music with gba2midi
- •Chapter 27: Battle Background Graphics
- •If it doesn’t, I suggest double-checking all your settings (everything should be compressed) and make sure your width is set to 30 and your height is set to 32.
- •Chapter 28: Music Array Module
- •Chapter 29: Sound Room Editing
- •Chapter 30: Chapter Unit Editing with Nightmare
- •Chapter 31: Death Quotes
- •Chapter 32: Event iDs
- •Chapter 33: Battle Conversations
- •Chapter 34: Triangle Attacks
- •Chapter 35-36: The Animation Modules & Repointing Tutorial
- •It should look like this:
- •Chapter 37: Support Editing
- •Chapter 38: Miscellaneous Nightmare Modules
- •In this chapter I’m going to quickly run through what some other nightmare modules do.
- •Vendor/Armory Editors – edits the contents of vendors and armories.
- •Vulnerary Editor – edits the amount of hp restored by a vulnerary. (Default: 10)
- •Vulnerary Editor – edits the amount of hp restored by a vulnerary.
- •Chapter 40: Text Editing with fEditor Adv
- •Chapter 41: Portrait Formatting & Preparation
- •Chapter 42: Portrait Insertion with fEditor Adv
- •I wouldn’t mess with the palette editor (the colorful boxes).
- •Chapter 43: Locating Palettes
- •Chapter 44: Editing Palettes
- •I don’t exactly have a color I want to use for this title screen background, so I’m just going to show you how to get the rgb of some random color on a portrait.
- •If something didn’t work right, make sure you:
- •Chapter 45: Working with gbage
- •Chapter 46: Chapter Data Editor
- •Vision Distance is for Fog of War (fow). If it’s ‘0’, it’s assumed there is no fog of war.
- •Hold it! (Unless you aren’t hacking fe7!)
- •Chapter 47: Map Creation
- •I’m tired of writing this tutorial. Honestly. So from now on, I’m going to stop making so many wasteful comments like the one I am typing right now.
- •Chapter 48: Map Insertion
- •If you’re looking to make a totally new chapter (instead of being limited to the old game’s exact same scenes with exact same events) then read on, because I’m going to hack events next!
- •Chapter 49: Event Assembler Basics
- •I would just always add end guards since it’s not something you need to worry about too much.
- •Chapter 50: Events – The Layout
- •Including the stlb
- •Chapter 51: Events – The Event Codes
- •Items is just a list of items with a max of 4 starting items. I prefer to use the 3rd method of writing them, with the brackets and all. Each item is separated by a comma.
- •Chapter 52: Event Construction
- •VillageGate: // name of tile data group
- •Chapter 54: Chapter Creation Finishing Touches
- •Chapter 55: Importing Tilesets
- •Part 2: The First Frame
- •Part 1b: Palette Preparing
- •Part 2: Testing the Foundation to Your Animation
- •If all goes well, your guy should be standing, kinda like this.
- •Part 3: Making the Rest of Your Frames
- •Chapter 58: Custom Battle Animations – Scripts
- •I just pulled a Xeld. Had to do that at least once in this tutorial.
- •If you don’t know what a sound sounds like, just test it out with your animation and find out. Experiment with the codes if you need to.
- •Chapter 59: Custom Spell Animations
- •0X85 command count for this spell: 10
- •It’s true! It did work! It’s still very much a work in progress, as you can see, but the point is we got he test frame working. The rest just takes time, patience, and the attitude that you can do it!
- •Chapter 60: Weapon Icons
- •If you did, you are successful. Despite the odd format of the icons, you have spotted them, and that is what is most important, in my honest opinion.
- •I have this show up:
- •Chapter 61: Map Sprites
- •Chapter 62: Proper Betatesting
- •Chapter 63: vba’s Tools
- •Chapter 64: Other vba Options
- •In this chapter I’m going to detail some of vba’s semi-obscure but not totally obscure options. Knowing how to use vba will help you test your game in various ways.
- •Chapter 65: Recording Videos & Sound
- •Chapter 66: Fixing the Desync with VirtualDubMod & Video Rendering
- •Chapter 67: ips Patching & General Patching Information
- •Chapter 68: ups Patching
- •I suggest you read the ips patching tutorial (at least the beginning) if you haven’t done so as I will not be as thorough with this chapter as I was the previous.
- •In an extremely similar manner you can apply patches. Take a look.
- •Chapter 69: jfp Patching
- •Chapter 70: xDelta Patching
- •Chapter 71: Nightmare Module Format
- •It is recommended (for reasons of readability by humans) that a newline
- •Is unused ("null") for editboxes.
- •Chapter 72: Miscellaneous Information Archive
- •Chapter 73: Useful Links & Websites
- •Chapter 74: Bonus – Assembly Hacking
- •Preparations:
- •Part 1: Background Info
- •Part 2: Inserting an Assembly Hack
- •Part 2: Breaking Down Your First asm Hack
- •I digressed a lot, but back to the point:
- •Part 3: Second Example – More Codes, More Fun
- •Read other people’s doc.
- •Part 4: More Examples – “Speed-Analyzing”
- •It’s thumb. Write to offset 0. Start with label “Initial”. Push 5 registers and the last register, then start a loop counter in r2 with starting value 0x00.
- •Ifat *Conditional id* *asm routine pointer*
- •I may have mentioned this before, but finding where to hack routines is difficult. And I’m sure I mentioned that finding space for them is difficult.
- •It’s not super long, but it’s got some new things we need to learn. Let’s get started.
- •Part 5: Finding asm Routines & Basics of Using a Debugger
- •Warning: terms may not be accurate. In fact, they almost definitely aren’t accurate, as you’ve probably figured out by now.
- •I don’t know what the flags do either, but they’re there, right next to the window. That’s g.
- •I hope to hear of your achievements in the near future!
- •Final Chapter: Credits, Thanks, and the Epilogue
FIRE EMBLEM:
ULTIMATE TUTORIAL
Welcome to my “ultimate” Fire Emblem hacking tutorial, dedicated towards hacking the GBA Fire Emblem games. Don’t say I didn’t warn you: this tutorial is massive and it has tons of details. Although this tutorial is a bit inclined towards Fire Emblem 7: Blazing Sword, the information can usually apply to the other games. However, this tutorial will help most for FE7 hackers as it IS FE7 oriented. I will try and add details on the differences between modules and offsets for different games when I can (the tutorial is already really long as it is).
Downloads:
HTML Version (Online)
DOC Version PDF Version
Last Updated: March 27th, 2013
Background Info (Not necessary to read): Anyhow, I’m a 4-year or so Fire Emblem hacker who is most commonly known by Blazer. My original username was Fire Blazer as in, one who starts a fire by setting something ablaze, but that was kinda lame, so now I just go by ‘Blazer’. Anyway, I’ve made several Fire Emblem hacks. My biggest ones are Prince of Durand (now dead) and The Last Promise (now finished!) but I’ve also made other hacks like Fire Emblem: Shining Armor, Fire Emblem: Sacred Contention, Fire Emblem DS: Evil Version, Fire Emblem Wars, Fire Emblem Rebirth, Fire Emblem Prisoner of Darkness, and some other minor ones. I was also the lead manager/hacker of the Fire Emblem 12 Translation Project and Fire Emblem Rebirth 2 with teams of other dedicated people.
Contact Info: If you need to contact me about something, here’s my contact info. Please do not ask questions about hacking, ask for ROMs, or anything else that’s illegal or time-consuming, because I don’t have the time. If you need help with hacking, please go on public forums where various hackers can help you as opposed to… no offense, but pushing the burdens of your personal projects on me (I know I’m evil for trying to conserve some of my free time). I do appreciate some nice feedback though and I’d love to know if this tutorial came in use for someone, so feel free to let me know that I spent my time on something someone used.
E-mail: blazer@feshrine.net
Skype: ballin1337
Website: http://www.feshrine.net Forums: http://forums.feshrine.net
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/FireShrine/
Disclaimer: I do not have any rights to Fire Emblem, Intelligent Systems, or Nintendo, nor do I claim anything by writing this tutorial, etc., I am just a humble video game player.
Please do not post this tutorial anywhere but the Fire Emblem Shrine. If I want it to be on a website, I will post it there myself. Thank you for your understanding.
Please read the “Epilogue” at the end of this tutorial for more details on using and sharing the Ultimate Tutorial.
Update Log:
July 8th, 2010 – I’ve remade the tutorial from near scratch (but included parts of former tutorials as well).
August 19th, 2010 – Updates, added more chapters (sorry, I forgot to record which things I updated).
February 19th, 2011 – More updates/chapters (see above).
November 6th, 2011 – Chapter 26 has been slightly updated. Chapter 45 and the Epilogue have been majorly updated. Added new JFP patching chapter, and renumbered chapters past it accordingly. Started and finished IPS, UPS, JFP, and XDelta patching chapters, as well as the Nightmare Module Format chapter. Also revised chapters 72, 73, and the final chapter. Only chapters 59-61 remain, which will most likely be finished in the next update.
November 7th, 2011 – Finished chapters 60 on weapon icons and 61 on map sprites in one fell swoop. Then, after several hours, finished chapter 59 on custom spell animations. This means that the tutorial is now complete—all chapters are finished. Any future updates will likely only be revisions, adding small details, updates, and adding more information to the archive chapter, chapter 72. Thanks for reading and waiting so long for this tutorial’s completion. I hope it helps many people make awesome hacks! – Blazer
June 7th, 2012 – Minor fixes here and there.
December 4th, 2012 – More fixes and updates and whatnot.
March 27th, 2013 – Minor fixes, added a chapter on ASM hacking to the end, making this tutorial well over 300 pages.
With that, it’s time to start my tutorial!