Free up space for monster sprites?

Hello.

Is there anything I can do to free up the space for monster sprites?

Maybe delete some unnecessary stuff from the rom? Or compress all the existing monster sprites?

Expanding the rom doesn't seem to free up space for the monsters ... Is it possible to use that expanded 1mb for the monster sprites? If so ... that would be heavenly!!

Right now I can only make the monsters smaller so my rom has enough space to save. But by shrinking the images I am using ... they make the monsters not so visible ... I would like to keep them at 96 or 128 pixels. =(

With ASM, you can pretty much expand anything. I'm not very familiar with the code for this, but you can probably move all of the monster sprite data to a new location in an expanded ROM, then move the pointers or part of the code that tells the game where to look for monster sprites to that new location. If you, for any reason, go over 255 sprites, you will probably have to do some additional hacking to make the spriteID 16 bit instead of 8.

And lastly, in order to make sure you are inputting new monster sprites into the correct location, make sure you know how long each sprite is supposed to be. You can do this by importing a sprite in an unhacked game and comparing the differences in a hex editor, then copy the edited code into the hacked game at the new location, at the end of the list to make the next entry.

It will definitely be a good amount of work to do manually, but if you were hoping to use editors only then I'm afraid its not possible. ASM will definitely be required.

While this is totally unrelated to the topic...

Edrin, I read before that you were successfully able to expand the code to have more space for PC sprites? Would it be possible for you to post a tutorial on that? ^_^

Sure. There are a few minor things to iron out since I only did proof of concept testing, but I've got some time today so I will try to put something together.

And in order to be on-topic: the process I use to expand the number of characters with large sprite sheets is very similar to what you would end up doing to expand the monster sprites, if you were to do it from scratch. So it might be worth a look when I'm done yic.

I'm thinking this might involve making a video...