09-19-2022, 07:59 PM
I just wanted to share a dialogue editor tool I wrote for my project that allows for the expansion of the caption pointer table as well as the text space.
FF3usME only expands the text space and hard-codes the expansion's location. However, this only expands the amount of text you can have, but not the number of unique dialog boxes, which is still limited to the 244 unused pointers and something like 63 unused dialog lines. And as my project adds dozens of new cutscenes, I needed a way to expand the pointer table, too, which necessitated moving the first dialogue block out of $CD to allow the pointer table room to expand.
This tool is cross-compatible with FF3usME with its import/export function and the way it encodes things like character names and page breaks. However, if you use this tool to modify any of the locations of the dialogue blocks, FF3usME will no longer be able to edit the dialogue of that ROM (but can still edit all the other things it has access to).
Some other modifications I made over FF3usME is that it shows you both the remaining pointers and remaining text space, as well as giving you the hex value of each dialogue pointer for use in calling it in event code.
![[Image: h6lYpdE.png]](https://i.imgur.com/h6lYpdE.png)
You can only add additional dialogue space and move existing dialogue blocks on an expanded ROM, so the "manage" menu gives you the option to expand the ROM and perform the necessary modification to add a third dialogue table, which is the same as what FF3usME does. The only difference is that FF3usME is hard-coded in where it's looking for those tables, whereas this program dynamically examines the code itself to find them.
Once the ROM is expanded and the dialogue expansion modification is applied, you can select whatever empty banks you want for your three dialogue blocks. The program will only list empty banks as options (i.e., the entire contents are "FF"), so don't worry about accidentally selecting one you already wrote stuff to.
![[Image: 4FhJfmw.png]](https://i.imgur.com/4FhJfmw.png)
I am not 100% positive that the maximum number of captions is actually $3FFF (16,383), but it is definitely at least $0FFF (4,095), which is still about 1,000 more than were originally in the game, and still (hopefully) more than I'll need.
FF3usME only expands the text space and hard-codes the expansion's location. However, this only expands the amount of text you can have, but not the number of unique dialog boxes, which is still limited to the 244 unused pointers and something like 63 unused dialog lines. And as my project adds dozens of new cutscenes, I needed a way to expand the pointer table, too, which necessitated moving the first dialogue block out of $CD to allow the pointer table room to expand.
This tool is cross-compatible with FF3usME with its import/export function and the way it encodes things like character names and page breaks. However, if you use this tool to modify any of the locations of the dialogue blocks, FF3usME will no longer be able to edit the dialogue of that ROM (but can still edit all the other things it has access to).
Some other modifications I made over FF3usME is that it shows you both the remaining pointers and remaining text space, as well as giving you the hex value of each dialogue pointer for use in calling it in event code.
You can only add additional dialogue space and move existing dialogue blocks on an expanded ROM, so the "manage" menu gives you the option to expand the ROM and perform the necessary modification to add a third dialogue table, which is the same as what FF3usME does. The only difference is that FF3usME is hard-coded in where it's looking for those tables, whereas this program dynamically examines the code itself to find them.
Once the ROM is expanded and the dialogue expansion modification is applied, you can select whatever empty banks you want for your three dialogue blocks. The program will only list empty banks as options (i.e., the entire contents are "FF"), so don't worry about accidentally selecting one you already wrote stuff to.
I am not 100% positive that the maximum number of captions is actually $3FFF (16,383), but it is definitely at least $0FFF (4,095), which is still about 1,000 more than were originally in the game, and still (hopefully) more than I'll need.
