Hey long time no chat.
Ya this enhancement has been on my radar for a long time but it was a daunting task to do. Years ago Ludmeister and I came up with this enhancement which allowed you to equip all the items for 1 officer:
http://doaerhguide.wikidot.com/destiny-of-an-emperor-rom-hacking-guide-page-2#toc45
But what I always wanted to do was what was done here. Even with a very experienced 6502 assembly modder (ludmeister) we struggled with it. With A.I. readily available I thought that would be what would get me over the hump. I overestimated how much help I would get from A.I. for sure. What I thought would take a couple of days took a week. I was shocked at how many times it gave me code revisions that were either flat out wrong, full of errors, or would keep breaking stuff. I even told it to check all the branches before giving me any code and it would still screw it up lol. I’d say the biggest benefit of A.I. was giving me some ideas that I hadn’t thought of before. Like edge detection which was actually really important or the game would interpret you hitting the left arrow as left left left left left. Apparantly all NES games have some kind of edge detection for the controller inputs.
I should probably update the guide and mention that this is an expanded ROM only feature. There’s simply no room to do this in the original ROM. The system page on the original ROM (page 0F) is jam packed with stuff. It’s actually impressive how much the original developers were able to squeeze into that one 16k page. But…apparantly not enough room for a good menu system like its counterpart Final Fantasy 1 had. I always wished DOAE could have a menu / item system like FF1. This solution is still not THAT good but it’s certainly better than what was in the original game where you had to tear down all the menus after doing anything. With this enhancement I figure players could do more of the fun stuff and less of the cumbersome menu/item swapping/equipping.
