Ok, I as I announced in the projects thread. I've decided to disassemble and reassemble FF7NES so it's more like it's PSX counterpart. The thread asking for help is there, but I decided to to a memory dump of what I have so far so you guy can see how it's put together. These are pretty much my notes off the top of my head. I may add more, but it also may just go in the wiki.
Here's how it works...
The FF7NES game is a ROM weighing in at 2MB in size. This is split into 64 banks of 32K, labeled $00-$1F. Each bank is a module onto itself. On reset, bank $0F in switched in and boots the initialization code in bank $00. (This is as far as I've gotten). Each bank resides in NES memory from $8000 to $FFFF
There are some Key things that I have discovered that is mechanically different between FF7NES and FF7PSX that I will get into here.
1- Because the game is in Chinese, the characters eat memory, both PPU video memory and ROM space. This can be completely cut out.
2- The engine may look cosmetically similar, but is massively different under the hood.
3- The materia slots are gone. It works more like the FF6 method where you have one "ball" for each spell you learn.
4- The game is massively imbalanced, with no real way of correcting it
5- The growth curves are linear, with no exponential growth.
6- The batte system is a shell of itself. The only thing it has over the FF1 is is the ability to have 4 digit health. No ATB.
7- There is no 7
8- Becuause of the PPU being used for Chinese, little space is left for better graphic tiles.
9- Massive graphic/code duplication
10- The sprites are mostly ripped from other games.
I can go on, but the game deserves better than this.
Now for the big question... What about the Legality?
Well, what is done is done. The game is out and people are playing it. Either Square decided to blind-eye it, or it's under the radar. It's been around for a while now, so I'm gonna consider this "dead code" (Not out of copyright, mind you. There is a difference.) Trust me, if there are murmuring of issues, I'll be the first to know. For now, I'm going forward. Am I being a hypocrite? Well, kind of. But I like to think of this as an old car that has been abandoned. Anyways, the first stages to get this rebuilt is disassembly and reassembly. And that's not relevant because it's not Square's code.
So Yea, off to the Wiki I go. Lemme know if you want info about how things work, be it on the FF7NES side, or just the NES in general. I'll be here to help.