holy shit it’s an entire preparations menu
for those playing along at home, ordinary bsfe gameplay doesn’t use preparations menus and just plonks you and your units right into the action. makes sense, given that you’re only here for one chapter and all that. unsurprisingly there’s not really all that much to do on the screen: everything works, but the only unit listed is your first main character (nyna/hardin/rickard/nyna again), and the convoy is completely empty (not that i was expecting otherwise). i guess it’s kind of interesting that the maximum number of units allowed, as listed along the top, is consistent with the number of units you start with; the others just haven’t been added at this point in the eventing sequence or something
fun fact: unlike fe3, you can freely deselect and reselect the main character and even press start to begin the chapter without them, but this just makes the game hang at a black screen
i can’t speak for anything like unit starting coordinates, since i’m nowhere near smart enough to be able to extract or deduce that. presumably the starting coordinate for the lord is wherever they spawn, but the unit count indicates that there are spawn coordinates for every slot. do they match the coordinates they have when they are added to the map after this screen? who knows? hopefully someday someone will find out
oh, and the save function is still here, featuring a different borked non-anna “portrait” for every episode! surprisingly, the game doesn’t throw up errors or do anything weird if you hit yes on the save prompt, but the satellaview bios does not like it if you try to reset the game and enter the episode again
i actually found this completely by accident. i was messing around in the hope that i could force bsfe’s first episode to boot into leftover fe3 chapters or something, by editing the byte that vanilla fe3 uses to determine the current chapter (7E07DF) in the brief period between the bios loading the bsfe rom and said rom’s game beginning. that didn’t quite work, but by setting the byte to the id of any chapter in fe3 which uses the preparations menu, it does at least trick the game into loading the menu. the byte also happens to be what the game reads from when you load up the status screen, so…
it also tricks the game into loading up the names and objectives of chapters from fe3, even the debug one (00)! the only missing one is book 1 chapter 1, since every bsfe episode has its own map occupy its value (01) instead
quick acknowledgement to this site, since it’s what alerted me to the chapter-determining byte in fe3 itself (in the form of a gameshark code, sure, but still)