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Which Patches Seem Good But Are Bugged?

#11
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Applying Geiger's Painful Chainsaw patch causes Drill to lose its defense-ignoring property and instead take on the effect of Debilitator.

Geiger rewrote the Chainsaw special effect to replace it with what I believe is the slicing effect of Scimitar, $4F:
Code:
Item Effect:
C2/2B30:    A99E        LDA #$9E
C2/2B32:    8DA911      STA $11A9 (Use effect 4F)
C2/2B35:    A920        LDA #$20
C2/2B37:    0CA211      TSB $11A2 (Set ignore defense)
C2/2B3A:    60          RTS

In the process he changed the offset of the code that sets the defense-ignoring part of Chainsaw, which in an unchanged ROM resides in:
Code:
C2/2B4D: A9 20        LDA #$20
C2/2B4F: 0C A2 11     TSB $11A2      (Set ignore defense)

Drill relies on this part of the code for its own piercing effect. Geiger forgot to update the Tool effects pointer table, causing the Drill pointer to veer off into the Debilitator code.

Code:
Code pointers
C2/2B24: 4D 2B     (Drill)

C2/2B4D is in the middle of a string of NOPs that Geiger used for padding since his patch left 9 unused bytes at C2/2B4A - C2/2B52. That string of NOPs leads into the code for the Debilitator effect:

Code:
C2/2B53: A9 AC        LDA #$AC
C2/2B55: 80 02        BRA $2B59      (Set Debilitator effect)
The fix is simple. Change the Drill pointer to the correct offset:

Code:
Code pointers
C2/2B24: 35 2B     (Drill)
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#12
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My "Not Scary" patch is really not intended to be used with literally any other patch, I think I even said that in my patch description. It is fugly as hell because it hard-codes changes to in-progress animations, which is a terrible, terrible hackish way to do it but I didn't know any better at the time.

Gogo & the Cursed Shileld is, as assassin said, the bane of my existence. It's still buggy to this day. I don't remember what is wrong with it exactly, but it should be relatively easy for someone with a little assembly knowledge to back out and fix.

Separation of Powers is, as far as I know, just fine to use. It does consume a lot of space for it's relatively limited purposes (though it could be more useful in hacks), but if you want to do a major revamp of the battle engine, you need to do something like we did in Pandora's Box and just give the upper part of C2 its own, whole bank (no need to move the lower C2 part). From many years of looking at this game, and following the bug fixes made by several good folks, I can say that few of the functions in C2 are not buggy in some way, so moving it to a clean bank is really not the worst idea. Plus, there are so many other engine tweaks that I've seen requested over and over again, especially modifying the damage formulas, that it just makes sense to me to give it as much room as possible and make the engine able to handle both old and new styles in parallel. It could really be built into a much richer development environment.

The same can be said of the event engine to some extent as well; see my comments about adding event commands in other threads. The subscreen menu system, on the other hand, needs very little change to it. Unless you're adding new config options (which is really fun) or simply expanding the length of fixed length strings, there's not a whole lot of enhancement to be done there (but yes, there are still several bug fixes to do, but most of them are actually fairly simple).

I'd actually love to see the community come up with a vanilla FF6 version 1.2, with bug fixes galore. There's a couple hundred known bugs and most of them have been or could easily be fixed with the state of knowledge now. I know it probably can never happen, but it would be nice.


I appreciate the prayers and good wishes. Those who don't know, I was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma in 2019, and I have done well with the treatment, but eventually treatments stop working and you change.  I recently had a seizure at work, now I am healing but not able to work or really do much at all. The focus is just to get better. Again, thanks for the support and if I can help you I will.  I've forgotten more about this game than most people should ever learn, lol.
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#13
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I've already found the fix for your Cursed Shield patch. There's a byte missing near the end.
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#14
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Final Fantasy VI 1.2 has been a pipe dream of mine for many years. Many have made good efforts, like Darkmage (Improvement Project) and Dr. Meat (FFVI Relocalization Project) but everyone makes too many non-bugfix changes.

C.V. Reynolds supposedly made a patch combining all the available bugfixes, but I'm unaware of if it has been extensively tested.

What I'd like to see/make is a giant, well commented asm source file, incorporating every fix that's been made over the years, hosted in a versioning control system like Github. Contributed to by anyone who wants to join, open source, vetted by the community, and quality assured by volunteers. A real community project.

Something like that could really grow. And provide a stable base for mod developers to build off of.

Speaking of the topic, I recently tried to make use of one of Drakkhen's patches (Ignore Charm) and found it bugged. It was a simple fix and I presented it here:
https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/showth...p?tid=3224
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#15
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I think the know-how to do a community project of FFVI 1.2 (with purely bug-fixes) exists now, but my worry is that it would attract the wrong kind of attention. As I alluded earlier, there are hundreds of bugs known in this game (I'd estimate anywhere from 300 to 400), and the majority of those are ones with known fixes. While a few of the bugs do not have clear-cut solutions (and I admit, those which experienced vets argue about are the most interesting), the majority of the bugs are clear and obvious in their solution. It would be remarkable to give the game the kind of treatment it deserves in having a whole new bug-fix version, with enough community backing to be considered quasi-"official".


I appreciate the prayers and good wishes. Those who don't know, I was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma in 2019, and I have done well with the treatment, but eventually treatments stop working and you change.  I recently had a seizure at work, now I am healing but not able to work or really do much at all. The focus is just to get better. Again, thanks for the support and if I can help you I will.  I've forgotten more about this game than most people should ever learn, lol.
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#16
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One thing that would be great (or maybe it's already there somewhere) is a list of known bugs left to be fixed. I know there is one or two extensive thread(s) on mnrogar forum about bugs but with all the fixes released so far it's a bit overwhelming for someone who would like to start attacking some bugs. If you think 98% of the bugs have been fixed somewhere between PB and public patches, maybe such list would serve little purpose but fact is 13375K37CH3R keep finding/fixing bugs since a year.

Nobody said ROM hacking/bugfixing was easy but it seems I've been asking myself the same question for about 5 years: What is left to be fixed? Maybe all the info is there and I don't have the motivation to search more in-depth.
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#17
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I don't have an answer to that either, but with a bit of research I think we could come up with that answer fairly quickly. That being said, new bugs are still being found fairly regularly.

What we need is to compile a list of bugs, concisely described, from the threads on Mnrogar's and elsewhere, to get a good feel for all the bugs out there; then match that up with existent bug fixes. Some bugs will have known causes, which is just one step away from fixing them. Other bugs may not yet be fully understood. Just having a discussion should go a long way toward the goal. I'd suggest a sticky topic for a discussion, and maybe a whole table on a wiki page for the bug and fix listing.

Some bugs will be debatable, and that's fine. Life is boring if everyone always agrees. Some bugs will be very simple. Some bugs will be limited to only certain versions.

I honestly don't know what is still out there, because the biggest and lowest-hanging fruit have been plucked. Smile


I appreciate the prayers and good wishes. Those who don't know, I was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma in 2019, and I have done well with the treatment, but eventually treatments stop working and you change.  I recently had a seizure at work, now I am healing but not able to work or really do much at all. The focus is just to get better. Again, thanks for the support and if I can help you I will.  I've forgotten more about this game than most people should ever learn, lol.
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#18
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Nattak\'d
This bug that happens when opening this door, going to the menu, and exiting I'd love to see figured out someday:

[Image: BCh07ED.png]

There are 2 more cases of this in the game as well, but not this bad. Something making a bunch of crap tiles replace others when opening these doors and going into the menu...weird.

These Youtube videos has lots of bugs to check out, some which are still around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImQDFXf6Rns
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#19
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(05-06-2016, 10:08 PM)Imzogelmo Wrote: I'd suggest a sticky topic for a discussion, and maybe a whole table on a wiki page for the bug and fix listing.

That is a good idea. Each bug entry could have a title, description, the fix patch link (if applicable) and relevant link(s) to post(s) / thread(s) where it is discussed (whether on mnrogar, Slick Forums, RHDN or here). That is a nice project to start with :)
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[-] The following 1 user says Thank You to madsiur for this post:
  • Imzogelmo (10-17-2020)

#20
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(05-06-2016, 10:31 PM)Gi Nattak Wrote: This bug that happens when opening this door, going to the menu, and exiting I'd love to see figured out someday:

[Image: BCh07ED.png]

There are 2 more cases of this in the game as well, but not this bad. Something making a bunch of crap tiles replace others when opening these doors and going into the menu...weird.

These Youtube videos has lots of bugs to check out, some which are still around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImQDFXf6Rns

My first thought is that it might be related to entrance events since it normally gets run every time you exit the menu... Maybe I'll look at this if i have time.

OMG, bugfix night next stream.
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