Super Mario Advance 3 hacking - Yoshi's Island Hacking

Status update!

I managed to retrieve the "location from" and "location to" of the level names. Getting the message itself, even in its unaltered state, is a pain in the ass. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to tackle the problem. But those fence holes won't dig themselves, unfortunately.

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Looks good, Yakov, I'm glad you seem to be somewhat progressing with this.

Holy crap!

Finally, got the level names displayed nearly perfectly.

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Congratulations Yakov! I'm glad you're working on this project again, I had no idea you were still even going to make an editor.

Congratulations!

But, um... your "Referred from" column seems to add 4 to each offset? The first pointer is at 0x2F9888, not 0x2F988C...

By the way, it might be good to number those level names in hexadecimal starting from 0. Each map icon corresponds to a hex value, which is used for other purposes, so consistency could be useful. (Just planning ahead here...)

Also, message #12 in your list is the one used by the Welcome level; it won't change if you modify the other 0x2F90AC's. (As I may have mentioned earlier, the Welcome level corresponds to map icon 0x0B.)

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Alyssa's Unlikely Trap (demo 3)

Originally posted by Zeldara109

<SNIP>

Thanks for catching that. And now, update!

As you can see, the level texts were a bit polished (not pictured: all instances of FE 10 00 being converted to wjykkFEwjykk10wjykk00 and subsequently to \n). Also, a message editing dialog has been implemented with the correct message in it, but it doesn't do anything useful. Hopefully I'll be ready with the first public release in the next two days, although on the 31^st I have to go to school and pick up all of my supplies. We'll see.

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This would be very useful for users wanting to play their Yoshi's Island hacks on GBA flashcarts. ^_^

Perhaps you can create a transporter like how smallhacker did, to transfer data from the SNES rom to the GBA rom to make traditional YI hacks portable! Vice verca.

Yeah, I might, but it's not sitting high at my fictional to-do list. Maybe I should actually do a to-do list.

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Time for a new discovery!

Do you remember the 2 extra bytes in the level entrances and screen exits?

Setting the last bit disables horizontal scrolling.

Originally posted by Snowshoe

Perhaps you can create a transporter like how smallhacker did, to transfer data from the SNES rom to the GBA rom to make traditional YI hacks portable!

Resulting in something like this?
http://bin.smwcentral.net/27436

The problem with that is that the GBA has a smaller screen size (meaning some items/platforms would need to be manually moved up or down).

Also, a few important (though not absolutely necessary) things are currently unknown. These include how to edit graphics, how to relocate bosses (assuming bosses still have world-specific settings), and the rest of the screen-scrolling settings...

Actually, if those settings are found, I'm considering porting at least one of the SNES YI hacks to the GBA at some point in the future.

Anyway, I think a SMA3 editor (especially one that functions better than Eggvine) takes priority over something that creates SMA3 hacks from SMW2 hacks.

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Alyssa's Unlikely Trap (demo 3)

I did mention that I'm codenaming it wxEVA after the Wx GUI package and EggVine Advance, right?

Anyways, I spent like 3 hours trying to compile the goddamn PAR:

acker package so that I could make an EXE out of the source. Still no luck, but hopefully it will work.

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Sounds good, Yakov! I look forward to the first public release of this editor, it's nice to see you working on this project. I'd also love to see a converter to SMA3 from SMW2 hacks, so YI hacks could be made portable. Like Zeldara, I'd also like to know how to edit graphics and relocate bosses.

Judging from the screenie, the level name editor turns out good already. Don't forget to make it recognize the [D0] as Space. Furthermore, the [FF 00] and [FE 10 00] have meanings: The [FF 00] means, that the text starts here and appears at position [00|00]. The Y-Position is fixed. But if you change the [00]-Byte (to 10 for example), the text will be shifted to the right. The [FE 10 00] means, that the second line starts here and the text is at [00|10]. In that case both, the X- and the Y-Position are fixed. Also, I'd implement a relocator for the text itself. If it's possible to expand the ROM up to 8MiB, I'd make, that the program does this (or not, it depends, how much free space already exists in the ROM)

NEW! SMW2 Yoshi's Island is done!
Last update: 2012-12-31

Well then, it's about 9:53PM right now. But that's not important as much as this:

http://rumq4g.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pjyDFZByZd8pgA8So-8BHnZHCIXq7wH-EuWHD2ghyE-QSaY1fLpp4MbFTi3zbmVIKHAy4cUpQq0zPlPbwruWs8RpEs3XjYRBG/wxEVA.7z

Yeah, the earliest release of the program, now available publicly (until Microsoft will decide to remove it for some reason). It's 5.86MB, but it includes everything (source included), so no need to mess with stuff like .NET. Its only current function is to edit level names, but it can edit only within the range provided, so no relocations. Also, these characters are supported:

All digits
All letters, both lower- and uppercase
Spaces (0xD0)
!',-?

If I missed any characters besides slash (/), let me know. Other than that, enjoy and report any bugs.

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I've just tried it, and I say it works pretty well so far! The only suggestion I have is that it shows the edited level names before you save them to ROM. Other than that, looks good so far, I can't wait until we are able to edit levels with this program.

The editor seems to be functioning pretty well.

However, editing "Welcome To Yoshi's Island" doesn't seem to work at all... I tried manually editing the text with a hex-editor, but it still appears as "Welcome To\nYoshi's Island" in wxEVA. (Did you use a different offset than 0x2F98B4? I had repointed it earlier in that ROM in order to determine exactly which pointer it used.)

And is there any specific reason why you left out the period, or did you just forget? (I suggest using F3 if the period is followed by a space, and 3F otherwise. Did you not feel like adding that in yet?)

(Also, the hex values on the left are incorrect. Every pointer corresponds to a number, whether it's actually used or not. So 2-1 would be 0xC, and so on. Not like that's too important though.)

Anyway, it's a good start! I'm looking forward to more progress!

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Alyssa's Unlikely Trap (demo 3)

Originally posted by Zeldara109

However, editing "Welcome To Yoshi's Island" doesn't seem to work at all... I tried manually editing the text with a hex-editor, but it still appears as "Welcome To\nYoshi's Island" in wxEVA. (Did you use a different offset than 0x2F98B4? I had repointed it earlier in that ROM in order to determine exactly which pointer it used.)

If you look at the program, it points to 0x2F90AC.

Originally posted by Zeldara109

And is there any specific reason why you left out the period, or did you just forget? (I suggest using F3 if the period is followed by a space, and 3F otherwise. Did you not feel like adding that in yet?)

I just forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me, though. Also, F3 might take some time since it isn't as easy as the other found-and-replaced characters.

Originally posted by Zeldara109

(Also, the hex values on the left are incorrect. Every pointer corresponds to a number, whether it's actually used or not. So 2-1 would be 0xC, and so on. Not like that's too important though.)

I didn't look for the actual level numbers, I just arranged that in order on the list (except for the Welcome message).

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Originally posted by Yakov

If you look at the program, it points to 0x2F90AC.

As I stated (perhaps not clearly), I had repointed the various pointers that point to 0x2F90AC, in order to determine which one was used for the Welcome message. The real pointer is the one at 0x2F98B4.

My pointer at 0x2F98B4 happened to be pointing to 0x500000. The level name at 0x500000 loaded fine in the emulator; however, wxEVA still displayed the original name.

So, for the welcome message, the program was manually reading from 0x2F90AC? That explains it.

(Edited in advance: Level 17... Why am I keeping track of these anyway?)

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Alyssa's Unlikely Trap (demo 3)

And of course the link doesn't work.

OK, so first of all, I have a few bug reports:

After opening the ROM, if you go to the Edit Level Names dialog and the ROM is read only, it will hang.
Some Extra level names end with weird character, which depend on the local encoding (in my case, А(В)

Originally posted by Zeldara109

So, for the welcome message, the program was manually reading from 0x2F90AC?

Yeah, that's the reason actually. It's more complicated to relocate 12(?) pointers to the new message rather than only change the message. I'll work on that, though.

Originally posted by Mippish

And of course the link doesn't work.

And because I removed some extra crap after the .7z, it decided not to work. Great. But whatever, since I got the server to work again, I might as well post it there with a few more minor updates.

http://www.justyakov.com/~crap/wxEVA.7z

Also, development may be reduced because of school... and IB. Finally, can I ask the OP to put up the above link on the first topic?

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Originally posted by Yakov

Finally, can I ask the OP to put up the above link on the first topic?

Remember, post editing isn't functional yet.

(If I could, I certainly would be editing your progress into the first post, and probably updating the topic title as well.)

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Alyssa's Unlikely Trap (demo 3)