Chapter 63: vba’s Tools
I’m going to (relatively quickly) cover the various tools in VBA’s “Tools” dropdown menu.
Disassemble: this lets you disassemble ARM or THUMB assembly. If you don’t know ASM, it won’t prove very useful to you. If you do, it can prove very useful.
Logging: I’m no expert on this, but to my knowledge, logging lets you keep track of various functions and operations whose purposes I do not know.
I/O Viewer: This viewer enables you to view the input/output area of the RAM and even edit the values here to some extent, in real time.
Map Viewer: The map viewer is one of the more useful tools for average hackers that lets you see backgrounds, as well as information such as their size and # of colors. FYI, “stretch to fit” stretches the background in the viewing window so that it fits the window, and “auto update” makes it so that the background is automatically updated as it changes in-game. (The latter applies to other viewers as well). On the bottom left you can select a square/color (which is selected by clicking on a place in the window) and see it’s RGB.
Memory Viewer: The memory viewer lets you view the game’s RAM (memory) in real time (if you click “automatic update”) and save it as a memory dump (which you can load later) or edit it (although the game might change it by itself right back anyway, depending on what you’re editing). To edit, just click on a byte and type in the new value. Type in an offset in the “Go” box to go to a specific offset.
OAM Viewer: Essentially the same thing as the map viewer, this lets you view sprites, which are essentially smaller “object” graphics that are on top of the backgrounds.
Palette Viewer: The palette viewer is one of the most useful tools in VBA as it lets you find a palette and view any of the colors in the palette. It gives you the RGB and hex value and can let you save either the background (BG) or sprite (OBJ) part of the palette viewer as a .PAL file. It’s very useful for finding palettes in a hex editor as one can search the values of colors to find and edit them.
Tile Viewer: This last viewer lets you view graphics as 16bpp or 256bpp (depending on which it’s meant for—likely the former) as well as scroll through a selection of palettes (as different palettes fit with different tiles in the viewing window). Its other functions are much like the Map Viewer’s own functions.
Well, there’s nothing else of major interest I want to talk about in this dropdown just yet. There is the ability to record videos and sound, but that is for a future chapter. ^_^
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.
The file menu has many options, most of which you should be familiar with. Pause obviously pauses the game (and also unpauses it) and ‘reset’ restarts the came (but doesn’t reload the cartridge, meaning if you hack the ROM and hit ‘reset’ in VBA, IIRC the changes won’t show up).
The Recent tab lets you load a recently played ROM. “Import” lets you import gameshark code files, battery saves (the “main” saves), and gameshark snapshots. Battery files and gameshark snapshots can be exported with the export tab, of course.
“Screen capture” takes a PNG screenshot and saves it to your computer, which is very useful.
“Rom information” gives very basic information of the ROM based off of the header and some other crap, and “close” simply closes the ROM without loading another one or exiting the program.
Now the more interesting and less basic stuff is in the “Options” menu at the top. There are a bunch of categories/tabs with lots of options, some with even more tabs. I’ll go through whatever I know well enough to teach. Haha.
“Frame skip” lets you skip frames, like you’d imagine. Lowering the frame rate makes each frame play—making it higher skips a lot of frames, which will make everything seem kinda laggy. Just try ‘9’ and try moving your cursor on a map in Fire Emblem, for example, and you should notice the difference. “Automatic” sets the frame skip to whatever VBA thinks is best.
Throttling forces the game to go at a certain speed (or close to said speed). Thus you can speed the game or slow the game down (of course, you can always speed the game up to max speed by pressing the spacebar too). 100% is normal speed, 25% is 1/4th said speed, and 200% is twice as fast as normal. You can also set your own emulation speed via the “Other…” (just enter a number in the dialog box).
The “video” tab affects the graphics display. There are a bunch of rendering options that I don’t care about, an ‘x1, x2’ etc. with zoom options (you can force the screen to be twice its normal size all the time, or just manually drag the screen yourself if you want), and most importantly, you can set which layers are on/off, which is useful for more advanced graphical hacking to see which graphical aspects are on the same graphic layer, as well as ripping graphics (because you turn the layers you don’t want to rip off).
The “emulator” tab has a lot of stuff that I don’t care about, even if I know what it does. The most relevant things to hacking are the automatic IPS feature (just keep it checked—all it does is have IPS patches with the same name as the ROM automatically be soft patched when you play the ROM-will cover in detail in the IPS patch chapter), and the PNG/BMP format which is for taking screenshots, which should be checked to PNG, of course, because BMP’s take up a ton of space.
In the sound menu you can turn sound off (which speeds up the game because it doesn’t have to load sound), mute it (which doesn’t speed up the game), or just have it on (…). The various channels (which should all be checked) control which… ‘layers’ (not terminologically savy) of sound are playing. So if you turn some channels off, you won’t hear certain music/sound. You can also edit the sound… type (again, terms = fail), with the 11khz, 22khz, etc., and adjust the emulator’s volume (not sure why you’d do that with the computer’s own volume changer though… lol).
The gameboy category doesn’t have anything I want to talk about. The end. Neither does priority.
So next is filtering, which is used for when your emulator is zoomed in. Filters edit the way zoomed in pixels are “interpreted” and displayed. You can make the game look like fine lines, smoothen things out, add motion blur, whatever, but the window has to be more than 1x zoomed in. Try out the filters yourself and see what you like. Here’s an example:
(This one is kinda smoothier than normal, if you can tell).
Joypad and Language also don’t have any interesting (to me) features, so I’m not gonna go over those… which means that, we’re done!