Download Final Fantasy IV Graphics Update ROM Hack

I thought I'd share what I've been up to recently. After looking through Gemini's very helpful posts from years ago (Thanks!) about inserting 16-color portraits into the menu screen, I became curious. I decided to take a look at ASM and tried to at least understand what exactly his code was doing. After a couple of weeks of studying the guides and experimenting with debuggers I finally hit the jackpot and got my very first ASM hack to work: inserting the 4bpp Wonderswan enemies into the expanded SNES ROM and actually making it work! (YAY!)

It's obviously not finished yet and quite a few things need to be done. The code that loads the enemy graphics is also used to load the background tiles and menu elements like the pointer and damage numbers. Which is a very welcome side effect as far as I'm concerned... 30 color battle backgrounds, anyone? :happy: Also, other palettes like spell flashing and enemy death need to be changed as well. The more complex bosses cannot simply be copied over either, because of the more sophisticated way the game loads their tiles. But that's not much of problem - a tiny bit of simplification won't hurt that much, I think. Oh, and summons display as garbage, so they use unique tile loading code. Same is true for Toad/Piggy/Tiny status effects.

I rewrote the enemy palette/size/graphics pointer index documented by JCE3000GT (Thanks to you as well!) and I can say that code-wise everything seems to be working very well. Even the Four Elements battle (which had me worried) causes no problems thanks to the unsophisticated way the game manages the palettes, hehe... (Remember how Kainazzo turns yellow before transforming into Valvalis - totally unnecessary, but very fortunate for this project!)

I just pasted part of the battle background tiles back over the originals in 4bpp mode to make at least the field background look right in these screens. (That, of course, throws off the index and screws all the other bgs.)