mgriffin is correct; there's little to no reason not to use a decomp for a new project at this point. That said, to actually answer your questions...
Quote:
Originally Posted by chloapsoap
Regarding memory: I've heard it said that FRLG are superior to RSE in terms of how much free space is available. If this is the case, how does this manifest itself? How much additional space are we talking about here? Elaboration on how memory is managed in these games would be appreciated (if appropriate).
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Ruby/Sapphire and Emerald are very different beasts - FireRed/LeafGreen rewrote a fairly substantial chunk of the game engine, and Emerald is Ruby/Sapphire reimplemented on top of that. There's a persistent meme that Emerald is "unstable" dating from the early days of Pokemon ROM hacking - in short, it has unused space on-cartridge filled with both all-zeroes and all-ones, but the naive approach to finding free space in Emerald leads to corrupting instruments because some of those zeroes are meaningful. Using a decomp makes all this irrelevant, because you don't care about free space anymore so long as your final binary stays below 32MB in size.
The GBA has no memory management - everything is mapped into the processor's address space at fixed addresses. FireRed and LeafGreen have a simple linked-list implementation of
malloc to make use of EWRAM; Ruby/Sapphire don't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chloapsoap
Regarding the opening sequence: How much of this can be altered? I was surprised at how little discussion I was able to find about this, and I'd really appreciate some help tracking it down if it exists.
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What "opening sequence" do you mean? The one before the title screen, or the one where Professor Obligatory asks you your name, gender and social security number? Both are hard-coded, but "hard-coded" is just another way of saying "harder to edit, especially if you're not using a decomp, since it's not a data table".
Quote:
Originally Posted by chloapsoap
Regarding battle scripting: So, I'm pretty tacky. I want to include a couple of scripted trainer battles. To what extent is this possible in Gen 3 (and in other gens if applicable)? Can trainer AI be tweaked, or am I going to have to torture my hack to hell and back to make this happen?
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Scripting is easy whether you're using a decomp or not. Trainer AI is hard-coded (see above).
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The rival in Red and Blue is called Green. Gary is some character from a lame cartoon.