Some questions

Maybe the resident forum wizards can shed some light on these?

Let me consult my Cauldron.

(1).

when two characters have their ATB gauge full, and you issue attack commands to both of them in quick sucession -- say, "fight" and "fight" -- the one you ordered second has to wait for the first to launch his attack, damage the enemy, then return to his position, before he can perform his own attack. Is it possible to eliminate this separation? Meaning, to have the 1st character attack and the 2nd make a follow-up attack *just after* the 1st begins his attack?

Unfortunately, due to hardware limitations, this can not be done. It *might* be possible if the attacks that were stacking were always fight and fight, but even that would be dependent on if the processor could work on all the actors simultaneously... But the main problem is the fact that the animations are loaded into a single location in the video RAM, and the palette space is already cramped, so no two animations could be executing at the same time. Neat idea though.

(2). is there a way to remove the character name from the Equip and Relic screens? I think it looks weird on top of the portrait:



It doesn't show on the Skill menu, which is nice, and I want it to appear only in the Status screen -- it already does.

This is doable! The overworld menus are handled in the C3 Bank. You can get a copy of the disassembly from the FF3us Documents Page we have on the site. I did some basic control+F searching for a few key words and found this after searching "name"

Code:

C3/90ED:    20E593      JSR $93E5      (display character name in equip screen)

It's in a block of code that draws the menus based on the parameters set during initialization. By removing this JSR the names disappear. You need a Hex editor to do this.

Code:

C3/90ED:    EA EA EA      NOP

voila.

(3) how do I make it so the music for normal battles doesn't trigger at all? I want the overworld -- or dungeon -- music to just keep playing normally as it were, unnaffected by your entering a fight or exiting -- which means no fanfare music either. Gogo13 implemented this in FF6 is the Best Game Ever, I want to replicate it for my rom.

This is handled in the event code... well.. sort of. If this is a temporary thing you want to do, then there is an event bit you can set that will make the current song override any other automatic song, which means the song won't change automatically when changing zone's either... which would mean you would need to manually set the song every single time you want it to change... so this works best in small doses.

However, if you want to remove battle music from the game entirely, There is likely something in C1 or C2 that stops the current song and/or starts the battle music. Poke around there, and tell me what you find! Try small hex edits if you think you find something, but be ready to put it back if you're wrong, and always backup your ROM!

I still have more questions, but I forget atm.

Happy to help, but don't let us be a crutch!

Happy Hacking!