Sorry, Iâve been busy with lots of stuff lately (mostly, pulling my poor ass grades in school out of the gutter). The current status of Grandia is this: Going nowhere. Now, this isnât really as bad as it seems, and I am NOT the only person working on it (Gavionne [formally Cyber Warrior X] has been helping me out a hell of a lot). I have all of the equipment for covenant and easy hacking now (like my Action Replay and the Comms card), but I have been focusing on a few more important aspects of my hacking skills⦠namely, getting real ones. ^_^; Everything I have EVER done in ANY game has never been more then simply, lamo, hex editing, combined with pure dumb luck. I have been working on learning some actual programming languages, and I really want to find some nice info on ASM so I learn it and understand what code is actually doing.
Now to answer some of the previous questions:
Hey Xev, did you ever get your Comms Link card? Oh yeah, and does anyone know what kind of method you'd have to use to patch the game?
As of right now, every ISO patching method I have looked at is completely inadequate. Eventually, when I get to the point of editing the actual scripts, I know with 100% certainly I will have to be able to modify the size of each âFIELDâ file (The script is stored with-in each HEX numbered MDT file in the FIELD directory of Grandiaâs CD. Each MDT file represents one level, or field, in the game [Inside of Justinâs house would be one field, and Sueâs house another, just for an example]. If you have ever used RPG Maker2k+ for the PC, it uses a similar concept. Also, if you open the similarly named files on the PSX version in something such as EditPad, you will be able to read the English script in pure ASCII). Because those file sizes will eventually have to change (most likely requiring one HELL of a script editor O_O), the ISO of the game will have to be completely rebuilt using Sega Tools (I have managed to do this, and can probably right a batch file or something to do all of the work). What I am looking at right now is writing a batch file that will require the end-user (you, the person that owns the game) to copy all of the files off of the Grandia disc to a folder with in my script setup. Then, Iâll do some pain in the ass stuff, that will IPS each FIELD file (and BIN for the menuâs) to patch them into English, then have the script build the ISO for you. From the ISO, you can just burn with any ISO program of your choosing. This is my âideaâ of getting around an extremely large ISO patch that would be ridiculously over sized for the task at hand.
Other then that, Grandia isnât moving, the wall seems pretty big right now (the largest one being able to change the size of the FIELD files), Iâll talk to Gav over the next few days on IRC and see if he has any ideas how to change the FIELD files. If worse comes to worst, Gav might be able to hack in some text compression to keep the file sizes as they are (hell, he did hack an 8x16 font into Grandia, even though there was already one in the game
😛). Iâll get back to you guys in a few days on whatâs going as, as I kind of let Grandia slip out of my âto-doâ list.
