Release: Star Ocean (Canoe Patch)

Saturday, March 31, 2018

Several months ago I set about creating a patch for Star Ocean to allow it to be played on canoe. In doing so I had to dust off my barely used ROM hacking skills, advance said skills, unlock the format of the data storage in the ROM, reverse engineer the SDA pointer format used by SFA2, and write code to dump and generate a patch in the same fashion.

I would have hoped the testing period would have been shorter, but I've decided that it's now time to release it to the public. I can't say that there won't be issues. Crashes, soft locks or bad tiles. I can only say that testing of the current patch shows no such issues. If you do find such an issue, please provide me with a description on how to reproduce, and most importantly save files!

That said, I'll try to keep this post short, and instead probably post details later of the journey (I took notes).

Enjoy! =)

P.S. #1: FYI, this is of course exclusively a SFROM Tool patch, and thus requires SFROM Tool.

P.S. #2: If you're interested in the story behind the development of this patch, you can find it here.

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Release: SFROM Tool v1.1.1.0

Friday, March 30, 2018

This is a small update consisting of mainly just minor improvements and fixes.

You can download the new version over on the SFROM Tool page.

Update Notes:

• Advanced window will refresh if you select a new file while its open.
• Added a menu option to force the database.xml to reimport/recompile.
• Fixed the database.xml to now check and reimport as needed when the program is run via command line.
• Fixed detection/compatibility for "Space Football - One on One".
• Fixed a issue with the patch select popup always defaulting to the first option, no mater which you chose. 
• Added console output messages for the various steps of the patching process, so CE users can better know when and what has happened.