Originally posted by Disch

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The routine which draws the text in the main menu character boxes is at $3B992. A is set to 00,40,80, or C0 when that routine is called (which character's stats to draw)

The first thing it does is it checks the player's max charges (with a LDA command and 7 following ORA commands). If the player has no MP, it skips ahead... otherwise it draw player MP. I haven't fully deciphered the MP drawing section because I didn't have a need to (I ended up rewriting it to conform to drawing the new style MP).

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After that... it draws the player's current and max HP values (the numerical values). It writes a string to $0300 in RAM, then jumps to a routine (at $3B954) which formats and draws that string.

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After it draws HP... it draws a big chunk of text which has the player's name, his level, and the text "HP". Here's a snippit from my file:


; this builds the next portion of the string
LDA #$00
STA $0301 ; 00 = signal to draw the player's name
LDA #$01
STA $0302 ; 01 = double line break
LDA #$C6
STA $0303 ; C6 = 'L' (not the normal 'L', but the 'L' used for character's level)
LDA $0300 ; load character ID
STA $0304 ; move it here
LDA #$03
STA $0305 ; 03 = signal to draw the player's level
LDA #$01
STA $0306 ; 01 = double line break
LDA $0300 ; load character ID again
STA $0307 ; move it here
LDA #$02
STA $0308 ; 02 = signal to load premade string...
LDA #$00
STA $0309 ; 00 = "HP" premade string
LDA #$00 ; Strangely, this string does not seem to be null terminated =\. Either I'm missing something
; or the code somehow prevents null termination being necessary in this case... however
; I followed up the code as best I could and didn't see any special case here,
; My best guess is that the game stops the string when it loads a premade string "HP" in this case
; However, it doesn't look like the code actually does that =\. I'm stumped.
STA $3E ; reset start of string to $0300
JMP l3E_DE36 ; draw the formatted string and exit


"LDA $0300 ; load character ID" < -- the "character ID" was previously stored at $0300. It is $1x where x is 0,1,2, or 3 depending on which char's stats are to be retreived.

The way it works is... each character is pulled and drawn from that string unless it's a special character. $1x signals to retreive and draw a character stat... and the following byte determines which stat. So "10 00" would draw the player 1's name... "12 05" would draw player 3's current HP, etc.

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Originally posted by NightHawk

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2) I can't figure out where the cursor position is held during battles... it's not in the same place the game usually holds it, and I can't seem to figure out the code with my debugger.

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Originally posted by Kefka

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Originally posted by NightHawk

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2) I can't figure out where the cursor position is held during battles... it's not in the same place the game usually holds it, and I can't seem to figure out the code with my debugger.

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Not that this helps much (I'll just let Disch do the talking ), but use a corruptor (like Disch's Corrupster ) or a disassembler for all your data finding needs.

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Originally posted by Blue Antoid

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Just curious. Has the text parsing routine been located? It'd be nice to be able to jam in extra functionality for printing the names of party members in standard dialogue, which I'd have to imagine would be fairly feasible with a modest amount of ASM knowledge.

(Of course, maybe that wouldn't be a good idea, considering I'd just feel it neccessary to keep implementing stuff I don't have the talent for, like extra conditional pointers and whatnot. I swear, EarthBound has spoiled me like none other. There are over 200 unique control bytes in the primary text format alone... )

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Originally posted by Imajin

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Hm, are you saying that it's possible to have a character's name in dialouge? How?

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