So, using only this site and Google, I was able to get pretty far on my first FireRed hack... But I've finally hit a wall. Hence this post -- my first on this forum. (Apologies if I accidentally violate any rules, standards, best practices, etc.. Lemme know if that's the case and I'll make any necessary edits.)
I can edit an item's name and description just fine -- well, I was able to once I broke out the hex editor and did it
for the program I was using...
But editing the sprite in any way, shape, or form causes the game to fade to black and crash when attempting to display it.
To be specific, here are pretty much all of the changes I've made to the ROM.
- Applied JPan's FireRed Hacked Engine to a clean FireRed ROM.
- This was the v1.1 IPS patch that came with the installer. So it deleted all scripts/people/etc. in addition to applying the engine hacks.
- Did some extensive editing in AdvanceMap. Found some bugs, emailed the creator.
- Changed some Pokemon sprites around.
- Altered an item. I changed the "????????" that is listed after the "GREEN SHARD" to an item named "GHOST BEADS" with a custom description and index 52 (previously it was 0).
- I compiled the description into the game with XSE, and used a hex editor to change the name and the description pointer. (I found the pointer using the Pokemon Game Editor's Item Editor [1]; I would've done the edits directly through that program, except that it derped horribly and mangled the item table.)
- Now, I'm aware that all "????????" point to the same sprite, and that I would need to add a new sprite to the game and change "GHOST BEADS"'s pointer if I wanted more than one custom item. So I tried several different methods of inserting a new item image into the ROM's data. So far as I can tell, the image was inserted successfully every time. I was able to re-open it and view it in both NSE versions, though I couldn't ever find it in unLZ. (It was compressed, though.)
- unLZ
- Nameless Sprite Editor
- Nameless Sprite Editor 2[2]
- Tried several different methods to repoint GHOST BEADS to use the new image.
- Pokemon Game Editor > Item Editor [1]
(This is probably the only change it was capable of making successfully.)
- Item Image Editor (by Swampert)
- Manual hex editing
The edits up to and including 4 all worked flawlessly. The item's name and description were changed and behaved stably in-game. However,
changing the item's sprite made it impossible to view the Bag when the item was present. (It was also impossible to view the stats of a Pokemon holding that item.)
The game would fade to black in preparation to display the next screen... And it'd stay black.
Crash. Freeze. Viewing the emu's map data, memory viewer, etc., showed that basically, nothing was successfully loaded. At all.
I've been searching for hours now and I've found absolutely nothing on this. Both Google and this website's search. And I've found nothing. Zip. Nada. So far as I can tell, I'm royally screwed.
Any help?
Oh, and some more technical details in case no useful information can be gleaned from the above:
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DETAILED APPENDIX OF CHANGES:
Modified item data:
Name: GHOST BEADS
Price: 350
New Description Pointer: 800349
New Description:
A necklace taken from MISDREAVUS.\nSome believe that it can be used\nto trick angry spirits.
New Sprite: [attached]
New Sprite Pointer: 8000E7
New Palette Pointer: 8004E5
[Unrelated changes are not listed for brevity's sake. They mostly include map and tileset changes, with a few scripts (that work correctly) and some sprite edits. If, somehow, anyone deems these to be potentially relevant, I can upload the relevant assets.]
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MENTIONED UTILITIES
Since I can't post links yet (this is, to my knowledge, my first post on this site), I'll give you thread IDs.
[1] Pokemon Game Editor: 252294
[2] Nameless Sprite Editor 2: 253701