What were your biggest newbie mistake when hacking?

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Once upon a time I thought that converting FE8 into FE3 would be a simple task and wouldn’t take too long at all. As it turns out, trying to port an entire game over by yourself is a difficult task, and making it actually look presentable is almost impossible. And so, I gave up and cancelled that effort. Over-ambition kills hacks: FE3GBA taught me that.
A more niche lesson not particularly relevant to GBAFE hacking, but I’ll mention it anyway: back when I was working on the FE Binary menu patch, I had no tool but a hex editor. Any and all text edits were done manually, and every time I wanted to adjust a pointer I had to manually recalculate it. This grew tedious very quickly. The first release was riddled with abbreviated names (such as “Sigu”) due to the failure to repoint, and though Sigurd’s name was one of the first to be fixed many late-game bosses still had names cut short due to space issues. I eventually got a proper text tool working which let me remove all the abbreviated text and was much less painful as the pointers were automatically calculated by the insertion tool. The moral here is use the proper tool. Knowing how to hex edit is important, but it shouldn’t be your primary editor.

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Repointing is the worst. I’m currently messing with the script of Gaiden. I’ve had your set of FE1 tools for a while, is there a way to reconfigure Atlas and Cartographer to work with the sequel? The text and pointers are spread throughout the ROM and some strings have multiple pointers. In part I found things out myself, in part from this Serenes Forest thread: Fire Emblem Gaiden Name Update Patch (v0.9) - NES and SNES Era - Serenes Forest Forums

Pretty much all the relevant info is comments on the first page.

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My other big mistake was becoming an “eventing mastah!” who “doesn’t need asm”. This lasted for several months before Sme set me straight.

If you want to have custom mechanics, learning some asm or C will be easier in the long run

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I set up Cartographer to dump Gaiden’s text a while ago. I haven’t set up Atlas for it, though.

Here’s the relevant git repo.