Yeah, you need to attack an enemy I recall for the max leveling to "kick in" essentially.
I kinda just remembered why the full items/equipment hack was useful: I needed to make sure every item's name/text would display properly and from the right offset. Making sure I had EVERY item and weapon in the game was useful on that account. I think first I found the bytes related to gold because that's pretty unique and changes all the time. If I'm not mistaken, the bytes for storing what items you have were near it also.
Basically, I had a very time-consuming hack where I had to use a brute force method of trying to identify one byte in a ~500KB state file that corresponded to a text pointer for the item display screen. How to find it without a debugger and without understanding the Assembly code?? Together with YAME and a perl script I did the following: Press F5 to load the state file in YAME (you can set a hotkey for it), open Ys4 item menu, check if text pointer was adjusted to properly read an item name from the 1st char, if not, ALT+Tab to perl script in DOS window, press enter whereby the script decrements the previous byte in the state file and increments the next one, then ALT+Tab back to YAME and press F5 to reload, and try again... I had to do this for thousands of times across several weeks before finally identifying the right byte.
Yeap, hence "brute force" method, but it got the job done and allowed me to fit all the item names in their fully translated lengths... But yeah, having ALL items to scroll through in the menus was needed to get them to display right and make text pointer adjustments.
Dunno if I explained it clearly enough, but you get the idea! Pain in the ass - a taste of what I went through to get this project done BITD! I
was doing it manually before by simply using a hex editor: 1) open the state file with a hex editor and 2) then just go byte by byte, incrementing the next value and decrementing the previous one, 3) then reloading the state file in YAME to see if any change took effect on the text reading offset when it came to the item display screen. Later in frustration I said, the ONLY way this is gonna happen is with some kind of script because I will lose my mind if I have to find the right byte like this (thousands of trial/error changes), so I came up with a perl script that helped automate this same procedure and sped up the process somewhat. Not that much mind you, but with this kind of method, ANY shortcut was extremely helpful! Heh!
I kinda shocked myself that I was able to find it in the end. I narrowed the search range of bytes in the state file, which helped, because some of it is for ADPCM and other uses; RAM is in the 256KB range and you can tell where it starts in a YAME state file. So really, the search for this one byte was in 256 x 1024 bytes.
With a linear search, as I did, if it was the last byte in RAM, it could've taken 262,144 tries of this technique to find it (
change a byte in the state file, save it, reload in YAME, check menu for difference, etc.)..... Well enough, it was as painful to write about it (hence relive it) as it was in doing it! Heh!
Eh supposedly, modern hackers should have it easy though with built-in debuggers that Mednafen comes with, but I never tried that feature. Too bad that emulator is all command-line. I used to ask David Michel all the time about adding that to MagicEngine, but he never got around to it. I don't see him much these days, not since his PCFX emulator.
Anyway, I hope this component mod idea of thesteve's works out. I'm looking forward to playing a fully translated version of Ys IV with a component video connection on my 32" CRT when you're finished! The component hack I did for my SNES is just gorgeous (
comes close to looking like you're using an emulator with an analog VGA connection)! If a cheap component mod could've been done to NEC hardware all along, it'd really be something! I was actually playing my last Ys IV burn a couple of days ago and I was having fun! It is a game I will be able to fully replay after all these years. Not interested in replaying the first 3 anytime soon though, but definitely this one once the dubs are finished!!
EDIT: You probably don't have to bother removing the item hack. When it comes to event items, the game just acts like you don't even have it and "regives" you the item. I was playing around with some of my old state files and this is how I was playing the game to test things from what I see.
