Final Fantasy VI: Relocalization Project

I read your original long post with the details and I think I understand what you did. Then there was the trouble with the background in Cyan's dream and how did you fix that?

This was just a pointer issue. The Cyan dream background is the first after the final battle backgrounds and I, like a doofus, had accidentally copied its pointer out of the Japanese ROM too, which made it crash on load.

I think your way of doing it is just fine. I guess what I'd like to be able to do is shift graphic blocks around a little and be able to adjust the pointer table accordingly so I can insert modified blocks of graphics that are of different sizes than the originals.

Since the pointers for the background graphics are 3 bytes long, I believe you should be able to move them to literally anywhere in the ROM. I haven't tested this at all, though. If that's the case, you wouldn't have to worry about things things being the right size - as long as the right pointer in the table is aiming at the right data, it ought to work.

I am not really trying to create new backgrounds yet, just tinkering to see how things work. For now I am trying to modify existing tiles. I slightly changed the T2 background by extracting with Peer Sprite Viewer, modifying with YY-CHR, then recompressing it.
Miraculously, it worked and T3 loads just fine. I haven't checked, but I guess the compressed block of modified graphics turned out the same size as the original (or smaller, I guess).

That's pretty awesome! You could presumably uncensor those graphics in a cleaner way than I did, then. Nice work.

I guess what I'm not exactly clear about is that pointer table and where the graphics are in the japanese ROM. I shouldn't even need to know where stuff is, just adjust each entry in the pointer table by however many bytes I move things, but there are some bytes at the end of the pointer table that seem to point to lower offsets than the previous ones, and I'm not sure what that is about.
How long is that pointer table by the way? Is it the same size as in FF3us?

The graphics are in ALMOST exactly the same place as in the US ROM - they start in the same place, but once you hit tier 2 of the final battle the graphics are slightly different so everything gets offset a little bit.

To go into a bit more detail on the pointer table - it is the same size as in FF3US. It's at 271850/E71850 (headered) in the FF6J, just like in the FF3US. Ends at 271930/E71930. Since the graphics are spread all over the E banks, it uses 3 bytes for its pointers to hit them all. So you SHOULD be able to change those to point anywhere in a 32mb ROM.

As for the table jumping all over the ROM, that seems to because the ROM simply the stores graphics all over the E banks and those backgrounds pull from a variety of places. Most of the battle backgrounds seem to be constructed from tiles similar to how towns and dungeons are (I think?) and the amount of space they occupy is not huge. But there's some like the final battle backgrounds that take up a TON more space and are probably stored a bit more like a typical compressed image? Not sure about that, but I know that those backgrounds take up almost as much space as all the rest of the compressed backgrounds combined, if that pointer table is to be believed.

But yeah the table is kind of all over the place. It goes from banks E7 and E8 back to E1, E2, E4, E5, back to E8, back to E4... It's really weird. It's probably made in the order the devs created/added the backgrounds rather than a logical order (such as the order they're actually stored in the ROM).

Did that make ANY sense...?

The japanese pointer table in the ROM holds all those offsets so it's pretty trivial to find out, assuming the graphics are ordered the same way as in FF3us, just shifted so the offsets are different?
I've looked at that list of offsets at Lord J's site, and it only lists offsets for FF3us, it would be nice to fill it out with the japanese offsets too, and possibly some better descriptions.

Yeah that's more what I was getting at! The backgrounds are (as far as I can tell) in the same order in the table in both versions. It'd be nice to get some more info on which backgrounds are where, but I don't think I'll be doing that (at least right away, maybe later).

Let me know if I didn't answer your questions right or if you have more questions or something. Happy to help further.