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FF6: Messing with the final battle lineup

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Hi, and thanks for having these forums! This is my first post. Smile

I'd been talking with some friends about how the game handles the minimal character setup in the WoR, and we were wanting to try to see what might happen if you somehow had a different set of three characters available for the final battle - it doesn't really matter who, just some different people other than Celes, Setzer, and Edgar. I don't know anything about ROM hacking or SRM hacking, but I know enough that I'm pretty confident that the SRM should have access to all the data needed to make this possible - the list of available characters has to be stored alongside game-progress-specific data, surely. 

What I haven't been able to find after digging through documentation here and on other sites is where that might be possible to change. SRM editors for FF6 don't seem to have an option for it, and I don't understand the memory mapping well enough to find it on my own, though my guess is that it might be in the Save RAM in $1850-$185F in position "e" as documented in https://www.ff6hacking.com/wiki/doku.php...ffsave_ram 

Has anyone looked into this ever to see how it might work? If so, is that something that a dumb newbie like me might be able to accomplish? Thanks for any advice.
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#2
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Yeah it might be $1850-$185F but I'm not sure. It might also be the following event bits:

Code:
+$1EDC ??cccccc cccccccc
            c: initialized characters
     +$1EDE sncccccc cccccccc
            s: there is at least one saved game (go to load screen after title screen instead of playing intro)
            n: go to first Narshe scene after magitek march (instead of back to the title screen)
            c: available characters

You just have to test by setting the bits you want, you can do this directly in a emulator that has a memory editor, just search as an example "7E1850". On the wiki bit 0 is the rightmost bit and bit 7 the leftmost one. From right to left they each bit has a value of $01, $02, $04, $08, $10, $20, $40, $80. As an example if the byte value is $22, it mean bit 0 is not set (otherwise second digit would be an odd number). To set bit 0 and not change the rest, you must set the byte to $23.
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Thanks for that advice, madsiur! I started poking at the save file I had and I have discovered two things:

1. The game really does not like it when you swap Terra in for Celes immediately after leaving Solitary Island and trying to trigger the Tzen event. Smile
2. Adjusting the bits in my OP successfully removed everyone from the party that I intended to remove, which also removed them from the battle order menu before the last battle, but it did still include them in the ending. So, I think that you might be on to something with the "initialized characters" spot in the memory, so I will likely look at that next.
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"Initialized characters" is probably set when a main character is initialized for the first time. "Available characters" is set when a character is recruited, including the first time in WoB. After the FC all those bits are cleared except Celes I think and re-set when you recruit them in the WoR.
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  • thisff6 (09-27-2020)

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(09-26-2020, 09:18 PM)madsiur Wrote: "Initialized characters" is probably set when a main character is initialized for the first time. "Available characters" is set when a character is recruited, including the first time in WoB. After the FC all those bits are cleared except Celes I think and re-set when you recruit them in the WoR.

That was my guess based on what the data was called in the documentation, yeah. So, what I tried to do was take a savegame at the final savepoint with some "normal" looking parties, and I first took every character but Relm, Locke, and Terra out of those parties. Then I set all the bits to 0 for initialized and available for every character but those three, and played through to Kefka. Terra flew in from Mobliz in morph form, giving me two Terras in the cutscene, which was pretty great. After beating Kefka, though, I still had some characters show up that I had zeroed out, namely Strago and Umaro. 

I think I'm going to do some more investigation maybe with a savegame that only has the expected minimal characters to see if I can do a before-and-after of what happens.
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My most recent attempt had me restart at the Solitary Island and get the correct minimally required characters, then take them directly to Kefka's Tower. I saved outside, changed the party to three characters I hadn't recruited (Locke, Cyan, Relm) and they were immediately overwritten by the cutscene from the first time you enter the tower. So I went through that scene, saved again, and edited my three characters back into the party (all using $1850-$185F). They were again overwritten by the correct three once I entered the party selection screen.

So, I played through to the first save point I reached, just before Inferno, and tried it again, this time with Relm, Locke, and Gau; Gau was able to proceed from the save and fight Inferno but upon switching parties, Locke and Relm both appeared in the airship instead of in the tower, making the game unplayable. I am still not sure if this is reflective of the kind of breakage I should expect, or if I broke something more obviously. Smile
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