- •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- •If you don’t have this module, you’ll have to use this outdated way of doing it.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
Chapter 72: Miscellaneous Information Archive
This chapter is an archive of sorts for information. It will include documentation, links to help, instructions, anything I can think of that might not fit in a specific chapter. Thus it may get longer and longer through time, or it may stay short. I encourage people to submit knowledge to this section that may not fit into any other category or may fit into too many categories.
Miscellaneous Notes, Tips, etc.
First of all, check out this thread dedicated to obscure hacking tips, as it has a lot of random but useful information that you may just need to utilize at some point! http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=34117
There’s some interesting ASM hacks that can be found in the FEditor Adv folder, as well as documentation for much of the program within the doc folder.
You can find source for most programs, hacks, etc. regarding Fire Emblem, so just look around. Very useful if you ever plan to fully maximize the potential of what’s around you or learn how various codes etc. work just by looking at existing codes.
Playing around, guess and check, etc. are great ways to learn!
Back-ups, back-ups, back-ups. You always want to back-up, and keep notes of important things you do, important offsets, etc., to make the process as easy for you as possible, and to limit how much you have to go back and change if by some chance you mess something up.
Battle Animations
Did you know you can load a spell animation even for physical units? In fact, the final boss of my hack, The Last Promise, attacks with both a physical weapon and a spell simultaneously, which makes for an epic duo effect (at least in my opinion).
You can actually dump the code for animations using a program Camtech made, located here: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=33420. It will only dump the code, though, and not the frames—but it’s still very useful if you’re creating animations similar to existing ones, but with different graphics, as you can copy the timings amongst other things from the ripped code.
There’s somewhat of a fix to looping battle animations covered briefly in this topic: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=34352
A topic with a bunch of animations you can use in your hack (but always give credit and if needed, ask for permission!) can be found here - http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=34510
General Graphics
There’s this cool program called FERecolor which can help make recoloring sprites etc. easier. You can find a tutorial on it (with a link to the actual program included in the tutorial itself) here: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=27340
Making custom battle frames (AKA battle templates) is difficult, but if you want to, there’s a tutorial here: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=25045
There’s another tutorial on how to find most palettes in the ROM located here: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=29625
Some alternate tutorials on inserting map sprites and weapon icons can be found at http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=24957 and http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=25610 respectively.
Here are a couple of tutorials on inserting tilesets - http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=32071 and http://youtu.be/6phxEH9DKBQ (video tutorial)
Music
The FE7 native instrument map, located here http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=27558, lets you use the same instruments that the original Fire Emblem 7 did. The selection isn’t perfect, but it’s nice as it does make the songs sound more like they belong in Fire Emblem. Just copy the data in the .bin file to your ROM and repoint the instrument map (the second word of the header of the song) to the beginning of the instrument map; e.g. if your song header is at 0xD00000 and the instrument map is at 0xD20080, you’d type “80 00 D2 08” at 0xD00004.
A guide on changing instruments mid-song is located here - http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=32363
A topic on GBAMusRiper can be found here - http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=34297
And a lot of information on how sound works can be found here - http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=36157
Other
A way to calculate average stats is here: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10688
Some thoughts on creating original plots and worlds can be found here - http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=29699
A workaround for multiple proof weapons can be found here - http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=32113
If you haven’t already seen it, a bunch of obscure hacking tips can be found here, and a lot of them are pretty useful! http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=34117