Hello, everyone. I'm tarpman, from Canada.
I've recently started disassembling and reverse-engineering Golden Sun as a fun learning project. I understand there's existing documentation out there but I'm trying to figure it out on my own as far as possible.
Early days still. My best achievement so far is writing programs to export the map and world-map backgrounds. (Just the static backgrounds, no effects or animations yet.) That's something though! Examples attached below.
I understand there's still interest in working on/improving editors for GS and GS2. I think I'd be interested in contributing to that sort of thing once I've learned more.
Looking forward to getting to know you all, and sharing my progress as I go.
Cheers!
Hey there, welcome to the forum!
Nice work with the rips! Teawater has been working on gsmagic, which is the current WIP editor; it has little overlap with the original editor but it has stuff like map editing and the like. He'd be the one you want to chat with about doing editor work.
Also, let us know if you need any assistance (i.e. links to the documentation and such). We're fairly active on the Discord server if you wanna pop over at some point, so if we don't respond quickly on here then that is where you can find us.
Awesome!!
I love seeing people come into hacking GS! It's always nice.
And yeah, I created gsmagic. (Known as Fox here, but better known as Teawater.)
gsmagic also features world map display... for both games... unless I messed something up between then and now. Should be possible to edit GS2's world map (at least graphic tilemap.).... not sure how bug-proned... been awhile since I last checked.... it's not user-friendly, though.
When using my editor, you may notice the blend layer works in GS2 but not GS1. This is because I didn't load in the blend data.(BLDMOD value) (Still lazy.) Both games do it the same way, though.
And editing is with GS2, but not with GS1. GS1 is mainly just a map viewer.
GS2 is receiving all the attention---most of the attention.
And gsmagic is also open-sourced. I am happily willing to accept anyone and everyone to the gsmagic team. :)
Quote(i.e. links to the documentation and such).
^Yeah. I have the main ones in my sig.... so I guess it is good for easy access. (GS2 being the most complete, but still incomplete.) A lot of functions from GS2 may still need to be doc'd in the GS1 one, but that's a lot of effort. Hopefully eventually I shall work on it. Or at least a cut-down version? (shrug)
Quote from: Fox on 14, February, 2020, 10:11:36 PM
And gsmagic is also open-sourced. I am happily willing to accept anyone and everyone to the gsmagic team. :)
Is https://github.com/adituv/gsmagic your repo? It says "uploaded with his permission" at the bottom so maybe not? C# is interesting... I don't run Windows and don't have access to Visual Studio... I don't suppose it supports dotnet core? :)
My own project continues to progress slowly... Figured out the text (strings) compression and managed to reproduce the Huffman encoder, so my disassembly can rebuild the original ROM from just the plaintext strings. :)
No, it isn't. But we did have that discussion, yeah. I don't exactly use github for my projects, but I know I should. It probably wouldn't make much difference right now, though.
QuoteI don't suppose it supports dotnet core? :)
Hm? It might? (???) If not, it shouldn't be too hard to make it so. I think I might have picked .NET Framework/WinForms project at the time?
Either way, the source files are like text documents, so things could be changed around if needed.
I see. Sorry if I'm being dense or missed an obvious search result, but where do I find your sources (and potentially submit contributions)? The GSMagic board (http://forum.goldensunhacking.net/index.php?board=84.0) here looks empty...
Yeah.
I'd say there's not really a "stable" version of gsmagic, yet... so that may be one reason I haven't bothered yet.
(And by non-stable, I mean there are a few things I'd like to do to polish some stuff... such as making it fully compatible with Atrius's editor, or maybe not. I think I'm rather lazy.)
I try to put my versions in a folder on Google Drive, but my latest one isn't in there, so I'll just attach it to this post.
I've been tweeting my updates and forgetting to post them here. But I am still making bits of slow progress... Portraits, heightmaps, and many sprites are all working nicely. Pretty pleased!
I really need to take a break from hacking and focus on cleaning up my code so I could be less ashamed to post it on github...
I guess I should move this to the projects forum!
Got into extracting animations too, thanks to giflib!