Final Fantasy I - Redux

So for example, if I have put two thieves in my party (Thief replacing Locke's actor data), one in party slot 1, and the other in slot 2. I can have them with different stats outside of battle and equip them with different equipment, etc. But when I enter battle the game loads two copies of the Thief in the highest slot. I'm assuming the issue with this is that the subroutine for loading battles loads the actor data instead of information from the active party, so altering the actor changes both. Is it doable to alter this subroutine to load the active party members instead of the actors? I've got a few ideas myself on how to fix this, but if anyone knows for certain and is willing to point me in a general direction that would be greatly appreciated.

The way battle character are determined is with the active party. You should look at the routine starting at C2/2F2F and more precisely at C2/2F8C for a "normal battle" (outside shadow at colleseum and the final battle). This is where the battle characters are set. I think this is where the magic happens, as routine $30DC pulls the SRAM actor number ($1600):

Code:

C2/2FA6: 20 DC 30     JSR $30DC
C2/2FA9: 9D D8 3E     STA $3ED8,X  (save "which character it is")

After that routine C2/27A8 assign all actor attribute to battle variables (from $16XX to $3XXX). From what I understand, the current party actors attributes only exist in the SRAM so I think it's the only place they can be loaded from...

Edit: What is actually happening is that the routine does a 16 times loop so the data in the highest slot will loaded because it's the 2nd time the good actor number will be found. It's an overwriting.