[Script] More characters for Name

[Konekodemon]

Is there anyway for me to hack the script for the handheld games to allow me to have more characters in my character name? Like the GBA games I can only have a name that's up to 7 characters long, but I'd like to call my character, 'Stephanie,' is there anyway to do that? Or maybe a gameshark code I can use that works on hacks that's for renaming my character? Or perhaps hacking tools to hack the script to allow more characters for my name?

 

[~Wind~]

Seconding this as I'd like the ability to make player names up to, say 10 characters in any future hacks I work on - not least because my own name is 9 characters ^^;

 

[mgriffin]

Not trivially, because there's no unused space after the player's name, so you'd have to start repointing things. You could consider changing the player's name to have a different constant for number of letters in the name (which would involve changing a few other places too, but I don't know them offhand), recompiling, and turning that into an IPS that you then apply to your already-patched ROMs. If you're lucky that might not break anything. Although I imagine there are some text boxes that would overrun slightly because of the slight increase in number of characters.

 

[~Wind~]

Not trivially, because there's no unused space after the player's name, so you'd have to start repointing things. You could consider changing the player's name to have a different constant for number of letters in the name (which would involve changing a few other places too, but I don't know them offhand), recompiling, and turning that into an IPS that you then apply to your already-patched ROMs. If you're lucky that might not break anything. Although I imagine there are some text boxes that would overrun slightly because of the slight increase in number of characters.

I assume this might work fine if you're building a new hack from the ground up with that in mind, right?
Less so if you're just patching onto an existing hack or the base game, haha.
It seems a bit beyond my capability to do for now but it would be cool to see someone try it out and make it a ready-to-apply patch.

 

[mgriffin]

I assume this might work fine if you're building a new hack from the ground up with that in mind, right?
Less so if you're just patching onto an existing hack or the base game, haha.
It seems a bit beyond my capability to do for now but it would be cool to see someone try it out and make it a ready-to-apply patch.

Yeah, it's definitely more likely to work if you're doing it from the ground up. And guaranteed to work if you're working on a decomp hack instead of a binary hack (because the difficulty with binary is that you might accidentally move things around in a way that confuses tools; or—for what Konekodemon was asking—patches).

 

[~Wind~]

Yeah, it's definitely more likely to work if you're doing it from the ground up. And guaranteed to work if you're working on a decomp hack instead of a binary hack (because the difficulty with binary is that you might accidentally move things around in a way that confuses tools; or—for what Konekodemon was asking—patches).

Is there a masterpost or such anywhere that lists the differences between a decomp and binary & maybe even gives a guide on how to create a decomp hack?

 

[mgriffin]

Is there a masterpost or such anywhere that lists the differences between a decomp and binary & maybe even gives a guide on how to create a decomp hack?

It's not super detailed, but this pinned post in the Decomp & Disassembly section has some info. Basically, I'd pitch the difference as "you can change anything in a decomp". For getting started on compiling things, I've heard good things about Lunos' tutorial. There's also #rom-decomps on the PokéCommunity Discord server, which has quite a few helpful people that can give you pointers once you've got specific things you'd like to change (or if you get stuck following a tutorial).

 

[Konekodemon]

I can't use a Disassembly. Can never figure out how to put it together when it's apart into a Rom format.