Hacking Final Fantasy 1 on the NES
walknsqualk.com
walknsqualk.com
I remember on my 1.33Ghz AMD machine at the time, it could not draw all of the RAM values in real time without causing considerable slowdown. I rewrote the code so that it only redraws ram values that changed, keeping a buffer of old values and checking for changes.
I also worked on other parts of FCEUXD including creating code/data logger. Parasyte coded the debugger.
i remember when you were creating that debugger, long time no see. (what's it been, a decade?) Fceuxd was always the best romhacking emulator, gotta love those conditional break points!
this takes me back to the old days of beta testing, and hanging in #rom-hacking on irc hope you're well :)
Good times :-)
Major ones to know for playing the game well:
* the index in the weapons table is used rather than the value in the table, making later weapons much more powerful and making Axes (lower %hit, higher critical%) useless.
* No secondary effects of weapons work at all
* Intelligence has no effect on spell effectiveness (yet another reason why red-mages are more powerful than they ought to be)
* All enemies are immune to poison.
Interestingly enough, people have created patches for most of the known bugs!
https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/522595-final-fantasy/4557505...
Ahh, the times before online updates where committing code meant burning it into ROM :)
Another one of my favorites is from the Gameboy (original) Final Fantasy Legend. There's a weapon, Saw, which performs an instant kill if it hits. It was supposed to work if your Strength is higher than the opponent's Defense, meaning it could take out random mobs in a single hit, i.e., the usual sort of useless instant kill technique that only instantly kills things that were already not a threat to you. However, the comparison sense is reversed, so it only instantly kills opponents whose defense is higher than your strength.
In particular, you can one-hit the final boss with this: https://youtu.be/bCyToT8jiJ4?t=1m26s As this predates the era of "post-game content" this is supposed to be the hardest fight in the game.
Superficially, most games can probably be judged the same way, even physical games like golf etc.
"You mean the main purpose of this game is to get a ball in a hole with as few hits as possible, why would I want to do that"?
or Idle/incremental games: On the surface the whole point is to play the game, just to play the games faster.
Of course we all know that there is far more going on here than meets the eye!
Musing a bit though, we tend to convince ourselves there is value in our gold coins, exp, etc.
When you get right down to it though they only exist as arbitrary values stored on a computer. If you go in and change them, they can say whatever you want.
I think this is what he means about grinding.
Maybe subsequently the value of a good game isn't the end resulting Pokemon team or character build, but the journey to get there.
I love RPGs when they present a new challenge or the story progresses a bit while you're leveling up.
It's just that some of the old RPGs, in particular, would leave you in a spot where you needed to gain a few levels fighting the same monsters, hitting attack over and over, without any real danger to your party, just so you could proceed to the next quest. That part is harder for me to stomach sitting through nowadays.
As mentioned elsewhere, there are a lot of bugs and things that weren't quite right, but the overall quality and effort to fit all that on a tiny cartridge is astounding.