There are four beta ROMs though.



Oh, are you talking about this picture?



It is just being made in MS Paint, I'm sure. I would also say that it's a beautiful fake, but beta ROMs show us that the work at least began.


@Lugia2009

Impressive. Your Shinra Building has very strong Final Fantasy VII feel. Keep it up please. :thumbsup:

Floor 67 is done:

dace
you have the problem that Lugia2009 doesnt have a good knowledge of 6502 ASM, so he cant do what he would like to see on this platform and ROM.
If the progress is much to slow for you just play FF III(NES).
As for the number of screenshots,count the unique picures in this thread and subtract it from 103.

Since I've been unemployed for a while I was curious to see how the FF7NES improvement threads have been doing.  I am pleasantly surprised and impressed to see how much progress has been made, especially by Lugia2009.  I played through his newest patch and wrote a list of thoughts and issues. 

* Someone tried to overwrite Tifa:"Turn all the gears." to Tifa:"Hit all the buttons", but ended up corrupting her line (and Barret's next line) as "TurHit all the buttonsDamn man,get a hold of yourself!". 
* Waiter:"The boss is out,please come back in a few days!" is corrupted to "The boss is out,please come back in a few Hit the Button__", which seems to be corrupting the "Got Potion." in one of the first treasures at the first mako reactor to "e Button__". 
* If you talk to Elmyra as you sneak out of her house she says "Aeris is an unfortunate child.", which was an improvised translation.  I'm not sure what her actual line should be here, but the [40][4E] code for her image isn't scripted to appear. 
* When "A chocobo came!" we can remove the [40][31] for Cloud's image.  It just seems weird for him to say it. 
* Editing text and maintaining format is tricky, but that's partly my fault for the way I worked around the game's text engine. 
* The Main Theme (Overworld) is just the intro part on loop (played way too drawn out). If you're going to loop any part of the song I suggest jumping to its main melody. 
* The Chocobo Theme only loops a small part of the song (a la FF2j).  I can live with it, but I'd prefer a fuller version. 
* Speaking of chocobo music, my patch already had code to change the music when you mount/dismount, but since no Chocobo song was implemented at the time I used the victory fanfare as a placeholder.  In the ROM change 0x75C8 from 08 to 0B to fix this. 
* Nibelheim doesn't seem to have its well in the flashback. 
* I'm not sure what you did at the Golden shiny wire of hope, but I got past without the Battery.  I guess you removed that sidequest. 
* Event code seems to not kick in when I climb up to Shinra HQ, but you pretty much warned that on page 17. 
* For anyone who was brave enough to dig through my old archive of files related to this ROM, I had already converted some songs, and in another thread shared work with Tummai about song encoding.  I don't know whether those have been used or compared to the versions presently implemented.  I can check into that. 
* I'm trying to trace that wretched menu screen corruption (works fine in overworld).  Let me know if you already know something about it. 

Thank you for addressing every note.  Without a formalized repository system It's getting tricky to keep track of every patch and version. 

I have new intel on the menu bug...
The index of the cursor's position in the main menu screen is at $6F1D.  00=Status, 01=item, 02=Magic, 03=Equip, 04=Party, 05=Save.  When you move the cursor up or down it modularly increments or decrements the index (Increment function starts at $A692, 0x726A2 in the ROM).  If you press A it computes the function address to load the next menu (This starts at $A69E, 0x726AE in the ROM). 
The cause of all the trouble is that $6F1D gets rewritten to 00 at times when it should not.  Even in the overworld where the problem seems to be absent, if you wait long enough $6F1D will eventually automatically reset to 00.  I think certain circumstances in the music will trigger it.
The cursor index corruption happens in a function that starts at $FF20, 0x1FF30 in the ROM, specifically the "STA $6F1A,X" when the X register == 3 (not that that's the only address that should be avoided).  I have found this function does not exist in the original ROM, but is created by Tummai's sound engine patch.  Tummai probably used this part of the memory without realizing that it had a purpose, and we never noticed it probably because no song that was encoded at the time was triggering it.  That should give us a start to figure out how to fix it.  So far I don't see any problem with using the RAM from $6FE0-$6FFF for our own purposes.  Maybe all we need to do is modify the calls at 0x1FF32 and 0x1FF3F to reference $6FE0 instead of $6F1A, and use $6FE4-$6FFF as our free RAM for other things.  So far this fix is working for me. 

Songs are encoded from 0x1B8DD onward, with your own inserted in the formerly blank space around 0x1D8C0. 
In case you're referring to the blank space from 0x16B30 to 0x17C10 you can't load that because that is outside of the 32kB page.  Just in case you don't know, the $8000-$FFFF space in memory is loaded from the ROM by saving the page number to $5000 (e.g. LDA #$02, STA $5000 loads page 02, i.e. 0x10010-0x1800F).  In the case of music (0x1B8DD and up) this is typically page 03 (0x18010-0x2000F).  It is theoretically possible to store songs on other pages if you modify the code to decide the page number based on the song number.  You can use breakpoints to detect load events. 

Tummai once said:
* I think he meant $7FFF, and it does seem to be accessed from time to time, but I'm not sure what for.

Thanks for finding the problem  :thumbsup:, If you can fix it, then the golden shiny wire of hope should start working too. The menu bug is probobly the cause of that problem.


Sounds good to me, I trust your solution.

Man, I gotta admit, those before-and-after pics look great.  Keep up the great work, guys!

Thanks, I'll try that.


I was wondering what caused that.


Yeah, I tried that patch, but the game kept freezing on the first town area. It'll be cool to be able to buy weapons.


It'll be good for the weapons to gain more than 1 point every time they level up, right now spending time leveling up the weapons just isn't worth it. It would also be nice for materia to gain more than 1 point.

Also, would you be able to strengthen the character's attack stats, or increase how much the character's strength increases each time they level up?


I'd been meaning to ask about that, would it be possible to add credits at the end of the game?


That shouldn't be a problem.


I had an idea about that, after I changed one of the areas, there were some left over maps. I may be able to use those extra maps to make an ending screen if the map has enough graphic tiles.



on this map there were other teleport spots that led you to other maps that would end up sending you back to this map. I may be able to use them for some ending pictures. Plus I can change the music that plays for those maps.

The prison area is done:



The top left is blacked out because there weren't enough tiles to make the capsule that Red Xiii was in. So I just took the extra gates and used them to block that area off.

Plus I completely rewrote the event for this part. Now Red Xiii actually goes over to the dead soldier before saying "No human could've done this"