PSII bugs (and fixes to them)

[Zucca]

I found a PSII fix rom hack from romhacking.net. I knew there were some hack to PSII, but this seems like a good one. And propably some of you already know this. It's made by lorenzo.

What was completely new to me was:

- Hugh can now cast Gires outside of battle.

This bug is obviously something you'd be unlikely to encounter. But it tells me that some statistics of techniques are in character data.

[MrStarbird]

the game has a bunch of bugs and I know Lory has done a lot of hacks/patches to fix them. I know I'd like to see a fix for the inventory glitch before I attempt to work on a Randomizer for PSII... the only thing is, I haven't seen Lory in ages. He helped me a lot with the Phantasy Star IV randomizer and I had more questions for him, but alas, it feels like he has vanished.

[lorenzo]

I fixed the inventory glitch in PSII, so whenever you start work on your randomizer, I'll tell you how to do it.

[Zucca]

Interesting... I was planning to do harder PSII rom hack (with bug fixes). Basically making monsters harder and change enemy groups, pop out Van Leader etc...

I wonder if it isn't a bad task to first apply the "harder PSII" patch and then randomize the resulting rom image...
Anyway. All these randomizers: I love them. And PSII shouldn't be that hard. It seems to be much less complex as PSII and PSIV. Right?

[lorenzo]

Interesting... I was planning to do harder PSII rom hack (with bug fixes). Basically making monsters harder and change enemy groups, pop out Van Leader etc...

Feel free to ask anything if you need help.

I wonder if it isn't a bad task to first apply the "harder PSII" patch and then randomize the resulting rom image...

I think it's fine as long as the randomizer will not overwrite your changes.

Anyway. All these randomizers: I love them. And PSII shouldn't be that hard. It seems to be much less complex as PSII and PSIV. Right?

I guess it's easy when you randomize standard stuff such as techs, items, and chests...Depends on the game and what you want to change. One thing that's certainly easier to do in PSII than PSIV is enemy formation randomization because they are compressed in PSIV.

[Zucca]

Interesting... I was planning to do harder PSII rom hack (with bug fixes). Basically making monsters harder and change enemy groups, pop out Van Leader etc...

Feel free to ask anything if you need help.

Well. I can edit the game. Thanks to your disassembly.
But what I've read (now lately) about m68k assembly, the code in your disassembly isn't quite that. I recall reading it might be 'masm'?
Basically I'd need to learn little more of it (although I could do all the modifications I need with my current knowledge). And then finally be able to compile it... on Linux. Yes. I only have Linux machines here. Also I need to look how to apply the patches on Linux too.

[lorenzo]

But what I've read (now lately) about m68k assembly, the code in your disassembly isn't quite that. I recall reading it might be 'masm'?

The code in my disassembly (and the other ones) is pure m68k. Where did you read it's masm and not m68k?

[Zucca]

The code in my disassembly (and the other ones) is pure m68k. Where did you read it's masm and not m68k?

I think it was from the disassembler quide/readme. I'm really not certain. Also it may have been masm, nasm, pasm, <a-z>asm... Not fasm that's what know for certain.

Anyway. Cool If it's pure m68k, then I think compiling the code isn't that complicated on Linux. I wonder if GCC has m86k target...

[lorenzo]

Unfortunately you will have to use the assembler the disassemblies come with. The macroassembler AS is Linux compatible and I wanted to make the disassemblies Linux-compatible, but never had the time to do that. You could try downloading the binaries from the assembler website for Linux and put the in the AS folder. Then you will have to compile the .c file that's inside it to create the custom p2bin executable file for Linux. I'm sorry that's so inconvenient right now.

[Zucca]

No problem. This should not be too hard... I'll try later to create a package for the assembler for Gentoo Linux.

[Zucca]

There's something wrong with github. If I clone ps2disasm many of the files are left blank. I even tried to download the zip but I always end up with about 2.2MB sized archive.

EDIT: Zip file seems to be ok. git cloning just didn't work for some reason.