Hey everyone. There's something I've been wondering for a while, so I figured I'd ask here. As anyone that has played Secret of Mana knows, when you get to your ring menu to cast magic or use items, the game will pause. Is there anyway to hack the game so that the game wouldn't pause? That way, playing the game would be much more fluid when it's multiplayer, and perhaps a bit more harder. It's really not that big of a deal, but when magic is pretty strong in the game and you cast it over and over again, it gets a little tiresome when you're using the boy and trying to attack, but keep getting interrupted by the menu.

I'm not asking for any real work to be done, but I would like to know if it is possible. Any replies would be cool. Thanks.

Yeah, I figured that much. It would be cool though. After playing the latest FF:CC game, I kinda enjoy each person doing their own thing. But we've each got our own DS, so I guess it makes it easier to not interrupt each other. Oh well, SoM is still a great game.

That might not quite work. You need to map 2 buttons for that in a 1 player scenario, and the L/R buttons are used for allowing the character to continuing facing the enemy while charging the weapon (you would need to find a suitable option, and remapping would require some thought at the very least).

A menu option that casts the previous spell wouldn't be as farfetched though.

Why do you need both R and L to face the enemy?

edit: for that matter, why does my suggestion require two buttons? The only thing I proposed was a button mapping to "repeat" the last action if possible.

I was thinking of having that for both characters (L for Girl's spell, R for Sprite's spell), but your idea is still workable.


That would only make it interesting...

However, the game occasionally has problems casting the spell you cast, though sometimes that has more to do with the spell itself than the menu/input being kinda unresponsive due to lag or some spells coming off a delay (such as level 8:99 spell effects).

They don't cast until the spell is selected. If opening the ring menu doesn't stop the game anymore that leaves them open to attack. So either they need to be immune, or they need to be able to take damage. And if they take damage it would make sense that the ring menu closes when that happens.

I'd be seriously impressed if somebody were able to pull that off. I imagine it would be very difficult. Making the main game engine and menu engine run concurrently is likely to be hell. I'd also question the SNES's CPU power to be able to simultaneously handle everything. I also see potential for many glitches to occur as you'll have to take many possibilities into account with the hack since the game wasn't made to run concurrently originally. One horrible thought occurs to me; what if the menu engine and main game engine use some of the same memory locations? What goes on when you bring up the menu loading wise and when you exit? There may be resource overlap. That could be disastrous to hack. Anyway, you'll have to be very intimate with the game code to do something like this. I'd say only a small handful of people would have the ability to do it.

It's a MUCH more feasible job to do the spell recast button hack. By doing that, you've reduced the hack to a menu option shortcut or hotkey. It might be as simple as just setting a few bytes in memory on keypress depending on how the game knows it's supposed to cast a spell. It's probably got a command queue or something like that since it seems spell selections are delayed at times. That would make it easier. You could potentially do other neat things with the game this way. It's like adding hot key support.

It may not be that hard to make the game still run while the ring menu is still open...

This is just sheer speculation (I have absolutely no experience in SNES hacking but I do in GBA) but I did make a menu hack for MZM on the gba and one thing I found while hacking it was that there was only one specific value that specified wheather all active in-game action should stop or not. If you changed that value you could control the game while the menu was open. So what I'm saying is that if there's such a value for that in Secret of Mana you just may be able to accomplish that.

Secret of Mana was a good game though I kinda liked the 3rd one better, but it'd still be cool to see a few hacks for it being released.