Author Topic: I just had a very odd idea.....  (Read 12200 times)

halkun

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I just had a very odd idea.....
« on: 2002-09-26 05:39:01 »
Hi, It's halkun, remember me?
I am currently under orders by my boss to start a home project so I can program better. While going though my stuff I have dicoverd that on a spending spree, I had purchased a Gameboy Adavnace dev kit...

Even cooler is that I have a 256 Meg flash cart for it too.

This is a picture of me holding said kit.



Now 256Meg is a lot for a cart. I was thinking, woudn't it be kid of cool to port FF7 to the GBA

Ok, stop laughing, hear me out.

The characters can be 3d scaled sprites, the backgrounds will be scaled down as well along with the movies.  Kind of like what they did with redient evil for the GBC in Japan

http://www.zadok.uklinux.net/necropolis/regbpictures.htm

(you will have a sprite for side view 1/4 view and top view) We can create the sprites by making 2d versions of the 3d monsters (screen caps) and we can animate most the characters.

Of course, it would require to re-constuct the fileds from scratch, but that shoudn't be too had as all the dramas are accessable via the debug room...

Or can someone else give me a cool FF7 idea to do.

*warning* I run linux. I made a posting about my dellemas with that.

Any input?

-halkun

Smurgen

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« Reply #1 on: 2002-09-26 07:26:46 »
I want one of those linker thingys!!
Did you load up the matrix trailer rom on your GBA? If you no have i can supply

Well anyway i think it could be done if you kinda just used an engine similar to FF6 or something and possibly still pic slideshows for the video if it was really necessary

synt4x

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« Reply #2 on: 2002-09-26 08:52:30 »
One problem is the music, how do you plan on porting that?

ficedula

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« Reply #3 on: 2002-09-26 11:22:31 »
Well, apart from the fact we still haven't decoded anywhere near half the file format data, that sounds great. Of course, that little fact kinda prevents you from actually porting it. So, you'd have to reconstruct a LOT of the data (like, *all* the scripts for the game?) from scratch...if you manage that, you have *way* too much spare time :P

Aaron

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« Reply #4 on: 2002-09-26 12:14:40 »
Hey, it'd be really cool.

256 Meg cart?  Is that megabit or megabyte?  Cause if that's megabit (how Nintendo reports most cart sizes) then that's only 32 megabytes... which isn't as much as you think.

But ... ... 256 megabytes should be plenty for a FF7 port.  Do you know any GBA programming code, how to create a ROM?

And I guess its ok if you spill over to two or three cartridges :-p might be necessary with all of those backgrounds and movies.  "Please insert the second cartridge" heh.  (This is possible with GBA's sleep feature - it can shut itself off but keep its memory, you can switch the cartridge and wake it up.)

Music wouldn't be too hard to port, as we have the MIDI data for all of them readily available...

[Edit] Stupid grammar...

halkun

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« Reply #5 on: 2002-09-26 16:26:35 »
Filling the flash  cart passed 32meg overflows it..
It's a 256MBit card... darn.
Yea, with a clearer head it would seem that you are right... We would need to decipher the bytecode scripting do-hicky in the field files.

It's a shame that I can't help like I used to. I'm sucky on anything other than MIPS. Linux doen't have a good PSX debuger. The best I could come up with was this

http://www.psxdev.de/psxdebug.html

But that requires a real PSX and it commincates though a serial connection. It would be nice to have this added to an emulater, that way I can follow the PSX code, which would be much easier for me. It's alot smaller than the PC code and it's a direct port Also the datasets for the most part are the same, just packed differently.Unless anyone knows of a PSX emuater for linux with a debuger in it. There has *got* to be someone here who uses linux and C as opposed to windows and delphi

for fun I grabbed Borg, which is a windows disassembler and ran it through that on wine , but during the first pass it went from 10,000 subrouties to 12,000 then crashed...

-Halkun

KojiroTakenashi

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« Reply #6 on: 2002-09-26 22:24:22 »
To handle the sound, use MIDI. Obviously some tweaking would be needed, but the GBA MIDI chip sounds damn good.
I recommend looking up Final Fighting Fantasy and watching the movie "Twilight", I think it is. A similar technique could be used, I think.

Aaron

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« Reply #7 on: 2002-09-26 22:40:04 »
I think it may be smarter to wait until the next generation of handhelds (which, if things progress like they are now, will be slightly more powerful than the N64) to embark on a project like this.  Then, anyway, you'll having something that can actually do rather good looking 3D graphics and  won't have to tone FF7 down as much.

You have to tone it down even more to fit it onto a 32 megabyte cartridge.  Maybe by the time the next handhelds are around, they'll have nice big cartridges, or will have found an alternative to them (still, CDs in a cartridge seems kinda wierd and it would surely use the batteries up faster...).

synt4x

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« Reply #8 on: 2002-09-27 19:13:14 »
Also, you might want to look at the GP32. It is more powerful than the GBA (in many many ways). Take a look at their website at http://english.gamepark.com/

ShinRa Inc

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« Reply #9 on: 2002-09-27 20:30:14 »
All I have to say, is I remember that RPGamer and a few other sites were claiming Square actually was porting FF7 to the GBA....for April 1st

KojiroTakenashi

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« Reply #10 on: 2002-09-27 22:45:59 »
Thought it was FFTactics.... though still no easy feat.

Aaron

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« Reply #11 on: 2002-09-28 00:30:15 »
They said FF7 as an April Fools joke.

FFT is actually coming to GBA, but it's not the PSX version.  It's a whole new game called "Final Fantasy Tactics Advance" I think.

They're also making a Chocobo game, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicle for GBA.  FF:CC will also have a Gamecube "cousin" and the games will be linkable.

The Skillster

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« Reply #12 on: 2002-09-28 21:56:58 »
about porting music to GBA
i do remember someone doing ports of music
he wanted to become a musician for games on GBA,
he once posted on this forum a year back
forgot his name dammit
has done alot of remixed sqauresoft music

synt4x

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« Reply #13 on: 2002-09-29 01:44:00 »
I forgot to say this, the GP32 is capable of playing mp3's  :P

The Skillster

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« Reply #14 on: 2002-09-30 21:31:04 »
ah i remember now
TSSF was his name
he is an expert at converting midi, snes and psx music to GBA sound
search for his profile and get in touch with him

Sephiroth 3D

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« Reply #15 on: 2002-10-01 04:33:59 »
Quote from: synt4x
I forgot to say this, the GP32 is capable of playing mp3's  :P


FF7 SoundtracK in MP3s: 261megs

ShinRa Inc

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« Reply #16 on: 2002-10-01 04:42:36 »
Depends on the quality.  I ripped my FF7 collection for slightly more quality than yours, for example.  383mb.  Chop the bitrate down to something like 62, and you could probably get something around a hundred mb.

But offhand, I'd say just use MIDIs.  It's just a GBA, not a home stereo.

And yes, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Goku7

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« Reply #17 on: 2002-10-02 00:40:03 »
Of course, we'd have to find out how well the GBA's Sound chip and its memory capacity will stack up in comparison to the PSX SPU.

I mean, it might be possible to wing it using the same method's Square used, maybe even the same samples?

Aaron

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« Reply #18 on: 2002-10-02 02:50:21 »
I think it would require a little toning down of the original music for some tracks, but I think it would be possible to pull off.

I think I remember reading that the GBA sound hardware can do 32 channels of sound at once (32 instruments)... as opposed to SNES, which could to 8 (I imagine PSX limit it a bit higher but I don't think any of the songs in FF7 use more than 32).

Smurgen

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« Reply #19 on: 2002-10-02 02:54:18 »
I believe the PSX could only do 24 channels...but i could be wrong

Goku7

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« Reply #20 on: 2002-10-02 23:41:43 »
We still need to take into account the GBA's amount of SPU-RAM in comparison to the PSX's 512k of SPU-RAM.

If we can't get it to fit, then it's gonna be a moot point anyway.

halkun

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« Reply #21 on: 2002-10-03 03:02:36 »
The pSX could do 24 channels of sound, but when you stared to use effects like echo, you start to loose some.

Goku7

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« Reply #22 on: 2002-10-03 21:31:29 »
We'd also have to remember that we're not talking about an independent number of PSX-MIDI channels in addition to SFX (sound effects).  The PSX had only 24 channels to work with on both music playback and SFX, so that's why you'd sometimes get notes cut off when a sound effect was played, because it needed to keep swapping the channels back and forth between using X number of channels for MIDI and using them for regular SFX playback.

Did that make sense?  Great, I think I'm goin' around in circles again..... :isee:

Aaron

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« Reply #23 on: 2002-10-04 03:40:12 »
No, you're right.  This was more noticable in SNES games, because it only had 8 sound channels.

However, as GBA has 32, we'd think we could avoid that problem.  Plus, you could have two or three channels devoted to SFX (hardly ever more than that going on at once in FF7) and you wouldn't have to worry about it cutting into your 21 / 29 (depending on system) channels for music, which should be plenty...

Smurgen

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« Reply #24 on: 2002-10-04 06:01:15 »
and a few games already (that castlevania one and Konami Racers) have already had singing so One Winged Angel should make the transfer intact