Good Lord Send Us An Esper Level Up Bonus Patch

BNW is a goldmine of nifty little fixes and tweaks that should've been in the original game. Pandora's Box is the same, only much worse because the developers seem to have dropped the project. So much great work undocumented and unreleased. :/

It's funny you should say that. While we worked on PB, we made several little fixes, tweaks, and engine extensions that we thought "hey, this would make a great standalone patch". A few of those did ultimately get released, although many did not, partly because we have relocated entire banks of code and data to make room for our planned changes, such as a whole new bank for just battle code, and a whole new bank for events, and an entire bank for monster AI. (note to those who have moved the monster AI: without some code changes your scripts won't work beyond 8000h in a bank, due to the way that it merely reads the top byte to know if a counter should fire... my solution was to have it look for FFh in the top byte instead, so you can go all the way to FEFF with no problems (and hey, just use the last 256 bytes for your pointer table or something).

Another reason is that, eventually you've made so many changes, it get hard to disentangle them from one another. For instance, making every spell, attack, and other check compatible with 24-bit monster HP gets your code into a lot of otherwise unrelated spots. Then you have code that can access a whole 2nd set of 256 types of items, which hooks into even more code. You're also fixing bugs and making those play nicely while trying not to step all over other code. Some of the code is in assembly files; other code is just old hand-edits from antiquity... it gets hard to maintain. Oh, and then real life....