lol, relax dude {XD}
Does your upcoming "- OAM generation/manipulation routine" might deal with that? I mean, altering existing OAMs, or just generated ones?
Yeah it does. I'm still working on making it load arbitrary images too, but that will take a little more time.
The reasoning is more "people willing to research are scarce as it is so focusing our efforts onto the same two, most powerful / useful / well-documented ROM bases instead of spreading ourselves thin for what is basically completionist / superficially different reasons that are otherwise basically redundant" than what you listed. FireRed already has a hack by Jambo51 to allow the use of lots of flags, so that isn't really an advantage for Ruby, either.
That and FireRed has over 511 Safe-non-temporary flags to use as it is (without the hack).
That sounds lazy to me lawl. "Well it's not researched, so why research it lol" is a horrible line of reasoning.
I'm figuring out assembly at the moment so I'd love to do all the dirty work but can't right now. :/
Yeah, it is lazy. I don't have time or patience to hack something that's not my preferred base. Ruby is like Emerald with less features and more bugs. Anyways, I'll address your points now.
Ruby doesn't have a giant chunk of wasted free space, and lets you manipulate more flags (albeit outside normal RAM) than FR or E. Using the debugger to find RAM offsets of things is far easier (say, with graphics). I see little reason not to research it.
There is no such thing as "wasted free space". File Sizes for the GBA are static sized because the cart size is 32MB max. When dumping the ROM, the dumpers trim the file size down to just the amount used (for Pokemon games that size is 16MB). If your argument is that the free space appended to the end of the file isn't present in Ruby while it is for other bases, then that just means you have less free space to hack the ROM with and add features to it. Though ROM expansion is very easy these days with tools existing to do the process for you. However, this should be testament to show you how much more efficient Emerald is than Ruby if Emerald has more features and a smaller base file size.
As for the GBA's RAM, it's the same amount of RAM for each. See
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbamemorymap for a full RAM Map out for the GBA. Also without a free chunk of RAM space (like FR's 0x203C000 area) you cannot repoint the save blocks to include more flags, saved datastructures ect.. in general. Finding RAM offsets for structures are generally easy IF you know what the structure is like, and what to look for (this is where the superior research of the other bases come into play).
The reason I use Ruby is because it's easier to hack, period. The transition to extended ROM support isn't quite complete yet and its nice not worrying about that.
What? Ruby is in no way "easier" to hack than the other bases. If anything, it's harder and less fruitful. Fire Red is the easiest to hack out of all the bases, period. Other more popular bases are starting to require expansion support because they're so far ahead of R/S that all the wonderful hacks can't possibly be supported with the original file sizes. Anyways, this whole issue with expansion dis-compatibility was caused by poor programming practice in general by tool writers. However, you can't blame those who are working for free, and three years ago, probably couldn't imagine we'd have this many new things!
Because you think Emerald and FireRed are programmatically superior is no reason to other people regarding what's most comfortable with them. If they're picking their fruit over which ones others are picking as opposed to what tastes best to them they're missing the point.
You're partially right here. Everyone has their preferences, my favourite ROM is FireRed. It's a nice coincidence that FireRed is pretty much the awesomest base ever. In general, hack what you want, but if you're hacking a low resource ROM, then I will tell you what the disadvantages are and the better options. From there it's your choice on whether or not you prefer quality over a sense of nostalgic likeness or whatever. No one will ridicule you for hacking what you want, we're all doing this as a hobby :)
As for the topic, I don't think it's right that the elitism promoting only those two bases shortchange Ruby from having more assembly work done for them. I'd like to see better hacks for Ruby, and while I really don't care about Sapphire or LeafGreen, I'm not against using them simply because I prefer something else. My opinion weighs the same as everyone else's.
I'll likely end up doing this myself later on anyway so it doesn't matter.
The elitism is well justified. This is something you need to understand. These popular ROMs
ARE better alternatives. Initially, the most popular ROM was Ruby, but people figured out why it wasn't the best. Which led to the ROM hacking trend we have now. Anyways, as I said prior, it's always your choice to hack what you want. I for one, have no interest in hacking Ruby.
