Chapter 27: Battle Background Graphics

Note: This chapter will only cover how to insert custom battle background graphics. It may help with some other types of graphics, but it will not cover other battle related graphics such as sprites or the battle template.

To start, what are battle backgrounds?

I gave this term to the backgrounds that you see while you are fighting—not the platforms but the image behind it. If you don’t like these, then you can change them. I’m not going to supply you with the graphics to change to, but I will tell you how the whole shebang works.

First, using Nightmare, load my Battle BG Editor. Skip over to the Desert one (0x08). There are 3 pointers, very much like the CG editor.

• Graphics are LZ77 compressed

• TSA is LZ77 compressed, unlike CGs

• Palettes are also compressed, unlike CGs

Oshi- everything is compressed. Well, that’s actually not a problem. GBAGE can decompress said stuff.

However, there’s another trick to this. Compressed and uncompressed TSA work differently. When you look at an image with uncompressed TSA in GBAGE, you’ll notice that the whole image is flipped, and every 240x16 line is also flipped. Compressed TSA ‘doesn’t have this problem’ and works ‘normally’. With CGs, which use uncompressed TSA, either the re-used TSA or FEditor Adv’s custom TSA takes care of the weird image flipping. With battle backgrounds, you can just use my custom TSA and it should handle all 16 colored images.

That being said, we’re going to need a 240x160 image for the background. The WHOLE image doesn’t NEED to be apart of the background—you can have just a background strip like the original games do-but whatever, your choice. An important note about your image; battle sprite’s feet are typically set to be 100 pixels down from the top of the image. This means that if you are using a background and removing platforms from the game (like I did with Tactics Universe, for those who have played) you have to make sure there is a place to stand 100 pixels down.

You can stink that image into MS Paint and see if you want, verily there is a place to stand 100 pixels down. Also, to ‘format’ your image, you need a portion of the transparent color at the very bottom (the size of said transparent area is 240x8) and a pixel of the transparent color at the very top-left which will become black (there IS a way to avoid having this pixel here, but it’s so insignificant that I am not going to give you TSA to do it).

OK, we have a lot of things on our mind with all the information I’ve given. What we’re going to do is take this formatted image, make it 16 colors, save it, import it as a bitmap with GBAGE, repoint the graphics, insert over the old palette, insert our own custom TSA to use with any 16-colored image formatted like above, and then repoint the TSA. Then good thing is, once you insert the TSA once, all you have to do is repoint every custom battle background to use that TSA. That bad news is, you’re stuck with 16 colors, because I don’t feel like inventing a method to not be stuck with 16 colors. You can be mad at me, I don’t care.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8875056/hacking/downloads/BBG%20Standard%20TSA.map

There’s my TSA/map data. Download it. Open it up in a hex editor like HxD.

Alright, cool stuff. Looks like a bunch of numbers going straight up from 00 and on, with some LZ77 compression in the mix. It pretty much is.

Copy that and paste it into your ROM into some free space. Note the offset that you insert it at. In fact, write down all significant offsets from this point on. You’ll find it quite useful.

So I’ll say I inserted mine at 0x1376100. Now we need to insert the palette and the image. To GBAGE!

Now, using the offsets given in the Battle BG nmm, let’s load a background. I am using the desert one so the graphics are at 0x2F758C.

Don’t worry about what you see in the graphics area. It’s not going to look right until we load the palette and TSA. So do that—my palette is at 0x2F83A8. Make SURE you select ‘Compressed ROMpalette’ or else it won’t work.

Now, to load the (original) TSA. 0x2F8454.

Make sure that ‘Use TSA’ and ‘Compressed’ are both checked. If that’s done, your image should look like this, or look like whatever background you were trying to load: