I’m having a bit of confusion in my hacking adventures.
Do save files from an older version of my ROM (one with less changes) carry over if I use it with a newer version of my ROM (one with more changes)? I thought only save states from the emulator affects the ROM in this way. It seems whenever I use an older save file on newer versions of my ROM, I see some changes that I made revert back to their unchanged version.
If someone could verify, that’d be great.
And if save files (non save state versions) do affect the ROM in this way, does this mean my library of save files of various chapters could no longer be used? (unless I want to lose progress) And if this is also true, how does everyone else categorize their saves so they’re able to go back and test certain chapters when certain things don’t work?
I just edit my events if I want to skip around to different chapters.
Save files shouldn’t affect the ROM’s data directly (by definition of it being Read-Only Memory), but saves themselves can get wonky depending on how old they are compared to the ROM’s version. Have you tried restarting chapters to see if the save becomes a little more up to date?
Yeah I always restart the chapters, I suppose this wonkiness you’re speaking of could be just that. I know about not having more than one program open to prevent overwriting and not saving properly, so I suppose old save files and newer ROMs don’t mix well. The save archive I have made are from a way older version of my ROM.
So say, you’re currently working on chapter 14 and you wanted to go back to chapter 5 because of (insert reason), you just paste the chapter 5 events into chapter 14 and edit it until desired then paste the correct form/version chapter 5 into chapter 5’s place? Are there other ways to do this as well?
No, I’d edit chapter 14’s events to just take me to chapter 5.
Opening_event:
// Whatever the opening scene's events are
MoveToChapter(0x05)
ENDA
You have the power to just move to whatever chapter you want, so use it!
i’m just sitting here with the most dumbfounded face right now. the movetochapter command just runs the events of specified chapter?
Is there any other thing about save files you could tell me? I ran into this. And I am positive I did not tamper with the corresponding texts.
https://gyazo.com/285125413760bfbdad53fe6eb6fa89a3
https://gyazo.com/ceba40ec117dc0c312c4dd343f1b8631
Is it safe to assume I overwriten something? Oh god this is going to be a pain in the ass to find again…
You’re overthinking it. It takes you to another chapter (save screen and all). It doesn’t matter if it’s in the ending event or elsewhere.
well i’ll be damn, this would of saved me much headache in the past. well lets see how this goes. thanks mucho prime!
I’m going to go out on a limb here, Prime, but is there anyway to level up a character manually? Since say, I’m working on chapter 4 and I jump to chapter 12, the characters I have are already loaded so its not like I can change their levels manually right? Do you get what I’m saying? And characters from chapter 4 are probably not ready for a chapter that far ahead, stat wise. If I attempt to load another of the same unit, it’ll just load the one that is already saved into memory. I hope I’m not being too confusing.
Ram hacking is probably your best bet (going into memory and manually changing stats). I don’t know how to do it myself, though, but it’s something I want to learn because it’s easier for playtesting than closing the rom, opening in Nightmare, make necessary changes, reload, and restart the chapter.
Ram hacking is super easy. Open up Tools>Memory Viewer in VBA, look up the appropriate character data address here: http://www.gamefaqs.com/gba/468480-fire-emblem/faqs/31542 (drop the first digit e.g. 8202BD50 becomes 202BD50) and then change the value to whatever you want.
Huh…Ram hacking does sound like it’ll make things even easier, I’ll give it a go and see where it takes me. Thanks guys!
And I just want to say, @Primefusion, the MoveToChapter function made my pipeline about 1,564 times easier, so thanks again for that. I think I might have even found several solutions to some problems I’ve been having.