Clear songtable extending tutorial

[xGal]

Hello. In this post, I am going to show you the easiest way possible to extend the songtable of any GBA game.

What we need:
- A ROM
- Sappy
- A Hex Editor (I'll be using HxD but any editor would work)
- A brain

Getting our songtable offset

FireRed: 4A32CC
LeafGreen: 4A2BA8
Ruby: 45548C
Sapphire: 4554E8
Emerald: 6B49F0

2. Navigating to our songtable

Let's say I am using FireRed.

I am opening my ROM with a hex editor.

I am going to the songtable offset, which is 4A32CC is my case.

Mark every byte there is until the end of the songtable (consecutive 00s). In FireRed, the end of the songtable is exactly at:

4A3DA8

(In a case you didn't change it)

Now, copy all the bytes you marked and navigate to any free space after:

800000

I'll be using offset

960000

Paste the bytes and remember the offset you pasted the bytes to. Now, go to the start of the NEW songtable and search the bytes:

8C BE 6F 08

. After those bytes, write

00 00 00 00 8C BE 6F 08

.

Now, Open the sappy.xml file and change the songtable of the free space offset you picked up, make sure you change the songtable to the correct game code.

Now, open up sappy and play song 347. You should hear Teachy TV song. That's good.
If you don't, you probably did something wrong.

Now, close sappy and open up the hex editor. Click CTRL+F and search the bytes: Your songtable in reserve hex. Reserve hex is simple, in my case, the songtable is

4A32CC

, so this offset in reserve hex is CC 32 4A. If you found the right bytes, there should be CC 32 4A 08. Simply overwrite the CC 32 4A to the NEW songtable in reserve hex.

960000

in reserve hex is

 00 00 96

But if you might notice there are MULTIPLE CC 32 4As around there. overwrite ALL OF THEM.

Open up Sappy and navigate to the last song. In FireRed, it's songnumber

346

Click on the right arrow to navigate to the next song.

Click on assemble song and choose in a random song.

Change the followings:

Base destination offset: Free space to import the song to.
Voicegroup offset: The voicegroup offset...
MST Offset: It will probably be on 347, but if it's not, change it to 347.
Song groups: ALL to 0

. Assemble it and play song 347. You should hear the new song! Congratulations! But, hey, we didn't finish yet!

Go to advance map and change the map music of any place you want to:

15A + M

. Where the M variable stands, put the number of the new song you inserted. Example, if it is the first song I added, I will replace M with 1, if second, I will replace M with 2, if 30, I will replace M with 30, etc.

Now, open the hex editor and navigate to the end of the new songtable. After the new song you inserted's pointer, type:

00 00 00 00

If you won't do that, it won't play ingame!

Now, test that in-game, and if you hear the new song you assembled, congratulations! You extented the songtable!

To make the access to this song easier, open up sappy.xml and navigate to your ROM's songtable. Copy the last song's FULL line and copy it to the next line. If it's teachy TV's line, it should look like that:

            <song track="0x15A">Teachy TV</song>

.

Simply check out your song's number on sappy (in my case, it's 347), open up Caculator and convert the number 347 from Dec to Hex. You should get 15B. Now, when you got the hex number of the song, simply change the line to:

             <song track="0x15B">New Song W00T!</song>

.

Let's test!

Yay :<

That's it! Simple, isn't it?

Now, this is for people wants to know how it works:

Spoiler:

The 00 00 00 00 8C BE 6F 08 we put contains a pointer. Let me show you:

[B]00 00 00 00 [/B][I]' I am not sure, I think it is the space between two song pointers.[/I]
[B]8C BE 6F [/B][I]' Teachy TV's location in the ROM, in reverse hex ofcourse.[/I]
[B]08[/B][I] ' It tells the game that the offset we put before is in the ROM.[/I]

Now, when we went to song number 347, Sappy was looking for the 8C BE 6F 08 we put before, and as I mentioned earlier, it's the pointer to Teachy TV's song.
Now, once you have assembled a song as song number 347, Sappy replaced the pointer to the Teachy TV's song we put after the 00 00 00 00 with the pointer to our new song's first track!

I hope it helped you!

- Gal

 

[阴魂君]

wow..amazing!I just knew changing the song in the past,can i translate it to Chinese and reprint it to a Chinese forum?

 

[xGal]

wow..amazing!I just knew changing the song in the past,can i translate it to Chinese and reprint it to a Chinese forum?

Feel free man, but give me a credit x)

 

[Flandre Scarlet]

But do these new songs play in-game? One major thing you're missing is telling the game itself that you have a new soundtable, and the game will just read the old table and not check the new one. Or does Sappy fix all that behind-the-scenes?

No, you have to repoint all of the pointers to the old soundtable to the new one. Just replace them with a hex-editor, but I'm sure you're experienced enough to figure that out. :)

Also, yes, Team Fail is correct, you are missing a major thing in this tutorial, which is replacing the old pointers with the new one. That way it tells the game to read the new soundtable. If you compile a song in the new soundtable with Sappy, it will just be silent in game until you do this.

 

[xGal]

But do these new songs play in-game? One major thing you're missing is telling the game itself that you have a new soundtable, and the game will just read the old table and not check the new one. Or does Sappy fix all that behind-the-scenes?

For me, the music is not freezing, but I almost completely forgot about this, thanks. -I would add this part when I'll be on my computer- Done. Thanks again.

 

[xGal]

Hiya guys, sorry about the BUMP, but I found some problems on the tutorial, so I fixed everything. If you already did it, I highly recommend you to re-do this tutorial!

Sorry again.

- Gal

 

[Chaos_Darkrai]

Great, but if we want to insert Tracks, ripped from another game, what do we change?

 

[karatekid552]

Closed at owner's request for a new thread where he will revise the tutorial and make it better.

~karatekid552