Has anyone tried to hack FF1's battle system ? Very likely so considering how far FF1 has been hacked.

The 'GFFBH' FF1 Balance-Bugfix hack fixes many of my issues I had when playing FF1 : It makes the game faster paced, allow running, removes supid noise when talking to people, and make the game more balanced, with less power-levelling needed but still not ridiculously easy (altough I still haven't got very far so I can't really tell, I can only trust the authors), removes graphical border in battle, reduce flashes, and make the text on a blue BG.

Now those changes makes the game a lot more enjoyable for a gamer used to "modern" standard but that still want to play the original. I tough about taking it one step further and hacking the battle engine, to replace the old round-based battle system by FF10-style CTB, or even FF4-FF9 style ATB.
Currently the battle system should be somewhat like that :
- Ask the  player to enter commands for 4 heroes, memorize them
- CPU somehow chose the commands for enemies
- Each protagonist/antagonist get it's turn randomly (or is speed/level taken in account ?), where it's command is executed.

It's also a possibility that enemies decide their command on the fly instead of at the start of the room, it doesn't really matter. The new CTB system would be like that :
- Each protagonist/antagonist get it's 8-bit "time counter" (or more bits ? don't know).
- The CPU does "time counter += character speed", and if it overflows, the hero or enemy get a turn, and execute it immediately (effectively removing the "inefective" problem)
- When casting magic, some trick is used to make the time longer (optional)

Another option, more complicated, would be to go the ATB way :
- Each protagonist/antagonist get it's 16-bit "time jauge"
- The CPU does "time counter += character speed" at regular short intervals, when overflows the jauge is full and the enemy attacks or the player can get a trun
- The battle system still runs when the attack selection window is opened (that's the tricky part)
- When casting magic there is some delay before it's effectively casted (that's the second tricky part). It doesn't remove the "innefective" problem.

Of course in both cases the core battle system would have to be rewritten, the handling of the status/information boxes too, but the routine it casts for attacks, graphics, etc.. would still be the same.

Does this sounds doable ? Would anyone actually enjoy seeing this ? Thanks for reading this huge post.

No not really. It if was about something I said like 3 or 4 years ago, I guess I meant I hated that some people hacked games and called it "their" game when it fact it wasnt. And/or that I hate when roms distributed are hacked instead of clean roms.

Here the point would be to improve FF1 while still being entierely FF1.

In short: your very first objective should be to try and make FF1's battle system function identically to the version used in the modern remake versions (Origins, Dawn of Souls, Anniversary Edition...I'd mention the Wonderswan and cell phone versions that started it all, but we didn't get those ^_^;).

I always wanted to make a patch to allow the LIFE spells to be used in battle.  These days I'm too distracted from romhacking.

speaking of,  she has a couple of nice threads going over there:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=522595&topic=45575058

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=522595&topic=50954131

she sent out the latest version of her patch (.987 - ff rebalanced) in mid-august, and it's quite nice to play. 

Nasir was a pretty decent coder. It’s just that FF1 gets a lot more scrutiny than it was ever intended to get.

And that makes him a bad coder? If anything, the fact that the game was rushed, but still turned out playable, with no game-breaking flaws just proves the opposite. I've played games that were so broken that they were completely unenjoyable; Final Fantasy and Nasir's code certainly doesn't belong in that list.

I dunno... when compared to today's games where crashing or massive slowdowns are inevitable, it's more impressive that nothing horribly goes wrong in this game.

The game didn't expect to go far in the first place, but its own popularity despite these issues allowed this series to continue.