My ROM Hack is leaving me with a black screen? What should I do?

[leedsunited]

I am hacking FireRed, and have made some considerable progress on it with the scripts, sprites, tiles and maps.

However, I didn't expect this so suddenly, but as soon as I attempt to load my existing save file, the game will fail giving me a blank screen. When attempting to begin a new game, the same thing happens upon selecting the player character's name.

This comes after I was testing the ROM after having inserted a few new Pokemon sprites using the programme "Advanced Pokemon Sprite Editor". I don't know if inserting these sprites caused this issue, because I've done the very same before and encountered no problems.

If anyone has encountered a similar issue before, and knows a workaround, I would be most grateful if you were to let me know.

 

[ShinyTillDawn]

You could have repointed things into offsets that are used when making the intro, and thus overwriting important data. You will have to start over if that's the case. Try to use free space past 0xE40000 where there are a lot of FF bytes.

 

[leedsunited]

You could have repointed things into offsets that are used when making the intro, and thus overwriting important data. You will have to start over if that's the case. Try to use free space past 0xE40000 where there are a lot of FF bytes.

Good information, thanks.

It certainly looks like my data has been permanently corrupted. Nevermind, I'll start over taking your advice.

 

[DaleFails]

I recommend taking routine backups.

I make a copy of my ROM every few hours of working.

Don't forget you can export maps from AM and reimport into a clean ROM if starting over.

I also recommended saving your individual scripts down so if you have to do a full restart on a clean ROM the scripts are already written. Obviously be careful not to insert the same game breaking scripts though!