Fire Emblem 7/8 Bonus Content Edition

After all this time, finally, the moment many of you were waiting for has arrived! I managed to find how the Bonus content is coded in FE7 and FE8, and now I’m sharing this knowledge to the world as a late Christmas gift!

I share this on the documentation section since this is a document (very extensive too, I’m sorry :anguished:), but it is basically a tutorial to understand how to edit the save file of both games in order to add your own personal Bonus Content to your game, the resumed process is the following:

  • Load any save file for FE7 or FE8 in any hex editor of your choice.
  • Go to address 0x0007134 in FE7 (0x000725C in FE8).
  • Write the following data in the following format:
    01 00 XX 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 in FE7.
    01 00 XX YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY YY in FE8.
    Where XX is the item ID of the item you want to add, and YY is the hexadecimal value of the letter you want to write in the case you want to write any custom message (only in FE8), otherwise just fill all the YYs with 00s.
  • Calculate the 16 bit checksum value of the data you wrote and reverse it in the following format:
    01 02 03 04 is reversed to 04 03 02 01 (this is an example value)
  • Write the calculated and reversed checksum value at address 0x00073B4 in FE7, or address 0x000739C in FE8.
  • Save the file and load it in VBA or in any emulator of your choice.
  • Enjoy your own custom made bonus content!!

If you want more detailed info, you can consult the document (it has screenshots and all of that) or you can write me as well, my contact info is in the document at the very end, I’ll be happy to help if I can.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!!

The document is the following:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1v6bDfKQnvrzUDlD-d8f966OpaPrztrFW

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First off, Wow… this is amazing.

Is there a way to activate/deactivate the menu and its items via in-game eventing? I apologize if this was already explained, I just briefly glanced through the document. It would be super cool to utilize this as a gameplay feature.

Second thing, I recommend possibly splitting this into two threads and copying the pdf to its own “tutorial” topic while leaving this “documentation” thread with just an explanation of the hex values and how the game reads/writes the data. The reason for this is that many files and links shared on this site 5 years ago are no longer available for download and it is much better for posterity’s sake to have the tutorial physically typed on the forum itself. The other reason I mention this is because it is good to have a dedicated documentation thread for the mechanics instead of having to find the info embedded in a tutorial.

All in all good work! I’m looking forward to tinkering with this later!

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Since we’re hex editing a save file here, it should be possible to alter its contents through ASM since the save file does get loaded into the game RAM. Just a theory though.

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If download data, there is an implementation in FE8J to give to the player from the ROM side.

There is a hack that distributes download data(ダウンロードデータ) only on the ROM side.
This feature was first analyzed by FE8 Girls’ author, chap.

Source code.(for FE8J)
aera seems to have made this based on the results of chap.
https://github.com/ngmansion/FE8N/tree/master/Engine%20Hacks/_N/DOWNLOAD

I did not confirm that FE8J download data and FE8U Transfer Data were the same.
Therefore, I compared the image data.
Apparently, it seemed to point to the same data.

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With the game as it is, is not possible, as far as I know the game doesn’t have any routine that allows to modify the save in that especific region (the bonus content block), that region of the save can only be modified by an external source because it was programmed that way, BUT, like Ephraim255 said, it could be made possible by ASM hacking the game so that, when a certain condition is met (for example, defeating a certain boss, recruiting a certain unit, etc.), then the game would write the corresponding data to the bonus content region of the save, and would allow the player to unlock certain items and such. However that would require a pretty advanced level of ASM hacking, which I do not have, so I don’t think I can help you in that way, sorry :frowning:

Well, actually that was the original plan, I wanted to write the info about the bonus content and how it’s loaded on it’s own topic, and then the tutorial part on a different topic, so I started writing the document as a template so that I would only “copy-paste” the content of the explanation and the tutorial on their respective topics, but I liked how the document turned out so I decided to leave it this way and share it, I will write the same info on it’s own topics later, because I know the struggle of trying to find documents that where uploaded 5 years ago, and not finding them because Dropbox decided to become an idiot and delete almost all of it’s old archives, and I don’t want that to happen to this info.

Thanks for your feedback!

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