MysticLord

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About MysticLord

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  1. Does "second hand" refer to the minutes hand or the seconds hand of the clock? edit Emulator froze, there goes my last hour of progress!
  2. How can one edit Blitz inputs?

    That is unfortunate, but as BTB says above we don't actually need to deal with diagonals. I didn't know that and I'm thankful he shared that info with us.
  3. How can one edit Blitz inputs?

    Here's a patch that turns the Blitz command into a menu where you can select one. I think there's another patch for Cyan in this thread too. No idea if they play nice with BNW. https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/thread-3945-post-38389.html#pid38389
  4. Is this the PSP version? Where are the addresses posted? I can maybe whip up a spreadsheet you can use to edit some tables in the game.
  5. My playthrough log

    Stopped to grind on the Veldt. Cyan's tech gauge speed boost and new skills are a welcome change. A free hp/mp absorb is very useful and will probably be a godsend once I can learn spells. The MP damage tech was useful for Soul Train (lol I just got the reference), and I appreciated the color names gag - especially Cyan's wife's and daughter's names. Shadow dies pretty often and doesn't hit especially hard, though his throws are great. I had to switch tactics and gear several times from the start of Sabin's scenario to where I currently am, and even very early monsters are kicking my butt. I appreciate the increased difficulty and balance. I managed to pull off Fire Dance on my first try, and other than not having them written down on paper next to me it does seem kinda OP to have a lot of useful, infinitely repeatable skills with little downside. Were Sabin's Blitzes made easier to input, or the controls made more forgiving? Not saying that I want them to be harder to input (a cooldown on Blitz makes more sense to me, sort of opposite of Cyan's warm up to Tech, if of course someone has already created a hack to do so). Gau's Rages are so much easier to use now, but I hope for your own sake that you didn't need to manually input those descriptions. I'm getting back into the story, so my inner cynic is quieting down, but then again Cyan and Sabin are two of the better done characters. Your script changes are nice, and the cheeky jokes spice it up.
  6. Mixed in with this is me dunking on vanilla's plot and thinking out loud about things I'd like to do in a mod, don't take it too seriously. Narshe Big fan of the expedited game start. I've played through this part of the game so many times it bores me to death, though the argument could be made that changing things up (as in ROTDS) makes it interesting enough to keep one awake. If you're going the expedited route, I would make the troopers actual magitek knights or the imperial equivalent of special forces to really hammer home how great the advantage of magic is and what the resistance is up against. You don't see much of Narshe right now, but it is tiny. Post-Narshe to South Figaro Nothing really to say here. I wish that Edgar's tools were different from vanilla. After verifying that auto-crossbow is better than vanilla attack in most cases, I moved his commands around so tools is at top, and just held A to win. I did have to move Terra to the back and heal periodically, but it wasn't too different from vanilla. Speaking of auto-crossbow, here is Edgar's spiritual brother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbKGjRoSofA Plot Sperging: The cave to South Figaro was more straight forward, which is a blessing. Pretty easy too. South Figaro to the party split The racoon enemies who counter everything with heal and are weak to fire is a definite improvement to vanilla. South Figaro is pretty much unchanged. The new relic situation is nice, as is the armor. I settled on maximum defenses and evasions and used that until it stopped working (Sabin's scenario). It's probably a limitation of the engine but it really seems like there's not much going on in South Figaro. It's basically a village. Removing the walls and having the town go up to the edge of the screen and seem to continue would at least provide the illusion of a large port city, as would a larger dock area with shady mob types lurking around the edges getting paid to do nothing. I had to retreat from Mount Kolt and level up for a bit. I probably did too much. I'm annoyed that I need to wait until 1/3 of the way through the game to get espers. Sabin is a better character than Edgar, because he just has a few things that define him and you get to watch him and the other characters bounce off one another. Lifting weights, conditioning, and martial arts sparring would make him the ADHD kid to my idea for a revised Asperger's Edgar. I'd prefer that Blitzes get a menu, you select one, and then they either warm up to execution or they have a cool down until Blitz can be used again (several turns, ideally, though it should depend on the Blitz). I think there's a hack for that at FF6hacking.com. As it is, they're broken once you get the controller inputs down. Sabin vs Vargas seems like a riff on 90s anime, such as DBZ. Vargas being blown away instead of KO'd would give you an opening for a return appearance, possibly in the WoR or coliseum. Though if you do that, the final confrontation should take place on a bridge or cliff edge as per JRPG tropes. Returner's hideout is small, and in the middle of nowhere. No evidence of communication infrastructure (message pigeons, fire/smoke signals, heliographs). Pretty much nothing going on here. Only emergency exit is in a raging river - very good planning lol, good job Bannon! With that level of incompetence, I wonder if Bannon's first name is Steve? Given that we need to escort his dumb ass, it's a shame we don't see him die later. Lete (Lethe?) River was a little tough, but not too bad. Just scraped by a few times, but it's hardly an issue given that I can just go outside and level up. The boss fight was fun and a nice change of pace from vanilla. Spicy dialog, counters, but still manageable. Ultros is a much better character than Edgar, and I'd rather escort him than Bannon. Terra's Party The tonberry caught me by surprise and resulted in a TPK. Annoying at first, but funny in hindsight. I'll check back later and scan them to see if I could have beaten them or stolen good loot and ran away. The rearranged cave was nice, got to meet the moogles and found a bit of treasure. In my experience few people do things for the greater good, or for the good of anyone but themselves. Making Bannon more of a douchebag - a wannabe Machiavelli with delusions of grandeur, a lot of money grifted from people suffering under the empire, and alcohol fueled pseudo-charisma - would be par for the course regarding dissident politics. Maybe make him order the remaining returners in the "hideout" to fight to the last man against the approaching imperials, while he does the unfortunate but necessary duty of running away with the pretty girl and her bodyguards to save his own ass. Locke's Party I'm disappointed we didn't get to see what Locke was doing to hinder the empire, or who was in charge of the force that took South Figaro. The disguise thing was pretty boring, same as vanilla. Planting a Returner pamphlet on a sleeping guard and making a false report to an officer while posing as an informant would be funnier, and more in line with Locke being a rogue. Celes would be more interesting if she wanted to simply escape the empire for personal reasons or to be free, rather than due to war crimes. She was raised by the empire after all, you'd think she wouldn't have a context for what is good or evil or a well-formed personality outside of what the empire needed her to do. I have no idea what her personal reasons would be, maybe she just didn't give a shit about war and the empire anymore and wanted to do something more interesting, or live a life like a normal young woman. Why does the rich guy have manacles bolted into a wall and a save point in his hidden basement passage? Maybe add some interactive objects in the nearby bookcases, like a copy of the Lusty Argonian Maid or 50 Shades of Lavender. Would explain why the empire could blackmail him. The hidden passage should be a sewer access, with dialog from Locke and Celes where they express disgust about walking in muck. Maybe something from Locke like "I've crawled through worse. Do you want to go back and be executed?" By the same token, the enemies therein could be sewer critters, and "oozes" if you know what I mean, rather than imperials. Speaking of Locke, his personality would be much more interesting (and his responses to the thief jibes) if he were actually 99.99% thief and 0.01% treasure hunter. Same with the Rachel flashback later - if he were unironically breaking and entering into some forbidden dungeon guarded by the undead and he for some insane reason decided to bring his girlfriend along, his guilt at her being hurt by say a spell shot at Locke would make much more sense, as would her parents contempt. Or you could play it for laughs, and make Locke totally unable to understand what he did wrong. Locke should also be much more shifty and untrustworthy, looking around for things to steal while in enemy areas and getting blamed for the party's belongings going missing. Is there a reason why the enemies in the South Figaro underground passage don't give experience? I couldn't backtrack to get experience, and they dealt too much damage too fast, so I was forced to run from every battle. The treasure chest fight was good too, as was the lack of a ribbon that early in the game. Outside of South Figaro, I couldn't level up because I can't easily kill most enemies with 2 party members and Ice. I did a bit of leveling in the cave before fighting Tunnel Armor, but I died a few times in that fight until I switched Celes's commands around so her topmost command was Runic. Then I held A to win, periodically letting Locke heal and using a remedy on Celes once when the enemy squeezed in a sleep spell on Celes. I also had to rejigger my armor setup to maximize magic evasion, especially for Celes. Pre-Esper game would be more fun if there were more utility items (like Grenades in FF7), especially offensive ones. There aren't many options and it's frustrating dealing with the lack of magic. I like the innate dual wield and two-hands of various weapons. Altogether it's worth playing so far, thanks for all the hard work and I'll post again after I complete more of the game. General Critiques So Far No sidequests so far. Wouldn't mind a few small optional dungeons, and maybe even harder ones I can revisit later or in a NG+ to get magicite. The existing areas aren't expanded much with new stuff to find and areas to explore. No new rare "Run Away For Now" encounters meant to be fought later.
  7. I run a program to check and recalculate EDC/ECC after I patch every PS1 rom, and in doing so I got this error which it seems prevented this. The game runs just fine on a modded PSP, so it probably didn't have malformed EDC/ECC to begin with, but I thought I'd let you know about this if you didn't know already. I'm not sure what it means but maybe it makes more sense to you. .\error_recalc.exe '.\Monster Tactics.iso' error: image not in 2352 byte sectors
  8. Mod Updates

    Those links I posted should expire soon, do you have a discord I can post them too so they will persist until you update the download links here and at RHDN?
  9. Mod Updates

    Someone made a GUI Windows tool to correct EDC/ECC. You can link to it in your readme if users have issues. http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1550/ I would make a note of the bug, that it's temporary, and how to avoid it in your readme as well. Python 3 is pretty easy, the tutorial is online and Thonny is a decent IDE. I learned Python 2 at in high school, the teacher just read the tutorial and worked through exercises she made up. I was 17, could have done it at 11 if I had better math instruction (but then again, I didn't have problems sitting at a desk for hours as a child). https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/
  10. Mod Updates

    I'm sorry about that. I actually tested this version, and while it has a single temporary bug it seems to work once you get past the point where that bug is triggered. I didn't test both hardtype and no-exp together. https://ufile.io/7i49lhfy 7ad4eef08947bef9bd18da69d6c63b35e96157570d22194ca5c4567ecfadde51 *Castlevania SOTN.bin 392c074ac8d82296efadaee234286ac3bf7cc1540a0a626e8fbc6a8978859c4e *Castlevania SOTN - No Exp.bin 8bb359091aec183e7117846cb4139eae09852b46928c3ad68d0b171da425fc29 *CSOTN-NoExp.ppf ce4f384e6f2ec5b5c4458f4596e5c511805c43d19103a31f38a77d6492c49687 *CSOTN-NoExp.zip Tested it and it seems to work in regards to no experience gain. The No-Exp patch doesn't seem to implement the Hardtype. Enemies died in one hit with Alucard's Sword, and dealt only 1 HP damage to me, I assume you're supposed to apply both to get the effect of both? I didn't play to the Marble Gallery. My first test with No-Exp was loading a the first save where I tested Hardtype. In jumping through the gap above the area where Death steals your gear, the game seems to enter a sort of infinite loop where you keep dropping through the top of the screen again when you reach the part where the bottom of the screen should start to track downwards. It seems like it's an issue related to loading a save from a different hack. This bug didn't reappear when I made a fresh save with just NoExp; unless you encounter it - or someone else does - in any circumstance where they made a new save, I wouldn't worry about it. The No-Exp patch seems to have an error where pausing the game freezes it. Not sure how'd you fix it. It seems to permanently goes away once you get the Short Sword drop from the first skeleton you see or you make your first save, so I assume this was an attempt by you to remove the bug where you can avoid Death stealing your gear by preventing the player from accessing the start button menu. The start button freezing the game could be an issue with pSX, I didn't test it on my PSP or another emulator. Mednafen is the most accurate and the best PS1 emulator on Linux (has an OK debugger too, though I wish it was in a different window), so I'd try it on that. No idea what you'd do if it persists other than ask for help at RHDN. No-Exp.ppf is pretty large, seems like you edit a lot of different sectors and it generated a lot of EDC/ECC in these sectors. That must've been a pain doing it by hand on Linux with no file import/export or disc image build tools. In the future you can avoid EDC/ECC issues altogether by compiling Starwin's EDC/ECC fixer, which is found on RHDN and comes with a single C source code file, or by using psxinject to inject modified files. The latter is found here, along with source code in the second link: http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1404/ https://github.com/cebix/psximager psximager also includes a tool to rip PSX files and a tool to build a disc image. If you need to do batch file insertion, this Python 3 script I wrote should allow you to do so with a bit of modification: http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=31293.msg399800#msg399800 batchRip.py import sys,os,glob for arg in sys.argv[1:]: for files in glob.glob(arg): os.system('psxinject.exe MyGame.cue ' + '/MyDirectory/' + files + ' ' + files) MyGame.cue is the name of the game's cue file, /MyDirectory/ is the directory where you files are found. Terminal syntax is: python batchRip.py [rippedfiles] Where [ripped files] is a regex/wildcarded file listing for the files you want to rip. You need to have batchRip.py in the same directory as compiled psxinject, all it's associated files, all the files you want to replace on the disc image, and the disc image. I assume it compiles with ./configure, make, and sudo make install commands. You could probably easily modify the string on the line that starts with "os.system(...)" to acommodate psxripper as well. Use print(...) statements to debug it and get a grasp on what you're doing. Do you have a background in coding?
  11. Mod Updates

    sha256sums: ce01203a9df93e001b88ef4c350889c19f11ffba89d20f214bdd8dec0b2d8d7c *Castlevania SOTN.bin 7ad4eef08947bef9bd18da69d6c63b35e96157570d22194ca5c4567ecfadde51 *Castlevania SOTN - Hardtype No Exp.bin cee8dbd07c6fcdb46b3e8eb32d9f80e8d064a117c9be784faf014d5055d5d9f9 *CSOTN-HT-NoExp-Fixed.ppf 5002447cee0463d9ec02c92c9778aba9026a2d8d56358a0144d026fc57d361fb *CSOTN-HT-NoExp-Fixed.zip Download for No Exp patch: https://ufile.io/aas9hlbr Starwin's EDC/ECC calculator is here, it includes a single *.c source code file that may compile with a call to gcc. http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1264/ Try: gcc error-recalc error_recalc
  12. Thank you!

    http://ngplus.net/index.php?/forums/topic/93-suikoden-hard-mode-complete/ There's an editor for Suikoden on RHDN.
  13. Mod Updates

    https://ufile.io/1z2psjtn No idea if this file uploader will work, the first thing that popped up when I googled free file uploader. Should be fine as long as file hashes match. Link expires in 30 days. SHA256sum of my unmodifed CSOTN disc image, a *.bin I renamed as *.iso because pSX doesn't need Cue files. ce01203a9df93e001b88ef4c350889c19f11ffba89d20f214bdd8dec0b2d8d7c After your patch (SOTNHTv4.8) is applied, but before EDC/ECC is fixed. e1d9e84b1dc477d5cd458b5aaaf21f77f29689fadcada44bc704734455089850 After EDC/ECC is fixed. fa169cb35d1ec5643bbaa26c825098f89276e6374d45e2f269e924d0e5ab167c CSOTN-HT-Fixed.ppf 3051567f4e0a1d56e526cb03ccfc1fa8561354d876572ab28195096291499aa7 CSOTN-HT-Fixed.zip e1f70888e585112656a3c6aafd9bd4b07a57abe4bf72128744ac8ed32b762b5b Do you want me to do the No Exp Patch too? edit I couldn't find source code for Starwin's tool, but I did find these: https://github.com/saramibreak/EccEdc https://github.com/claunia/edccchk Have to type this on my phone because the forum randomly doesn't let me edit or post. Is the source code included with Starwin's EDC/ECC fixer? Have you tried compiling it? What error messages do you get?
  14. Mod Updates

    LandonRay, your Castlevania SOTN mod is buggy because it has malformed EDC/ECC. You can fix this by applying STARWIN's EDC/ECC recalculator to it, as per this review: http://www.romhacking.net/reviews/3744/#review I run it with the Quality hack, and - with fixed EDC/ECC - it works just fine. I can't get past the first boss, but other than that it's fine. It's pretty simple to use, even on Windows. I just use "cd" and "dir" commands in Powershell to navigate to wherever I have it and the CSOTN disc image, type the first few letters of the tool and hit tab to autocomplete, repeat the process with the CSOTN ISO, hit enter, wait a minute, and it's done.
  15. I feel like I should make a reply which references the BNW IPS patch as a bossy Japanese anime girl trope here, but I don't watch anime. edit The rom with the SHA256 hash below freezes just after the soldier mentions the slave crown in the intro. Sound still present. Final Fantasy III (USA) (Rev 1).sfc 10ECCC5D2FAB81346DD759F6BE478DCB682EEF981E8D3D662DA176E1F9A996BC