top of page

Fire Emblem Hacking: Origins

Ya'll Got It Easy

"Things were way harder back in my day." Ever heard that before? It's probably not always true, you might even scoff when someone says it. Well that's not the case with Fire Emblem hacking. Confused? Don’t have a clue what the above sentence even means? Check out my previous installment where I laid out the basics of “Fire” and “Emblem” and “Hacking”. As you may have learned last time, there’s much we can learn by understanding our roots. For anyone who has been around a while, this may be a nostalgic jaunt. If you’re new here, maybe this will give you a greater appreciation for all the cool things you can do in 2018. Regardless, let’s embark on a trip down memory lane to see how much more complicated Fire Emblem hacking was for the pioneers.

(https://www.tes.com/lessons/dhQw1I6yXJeKtw/pioneer)

If the earliest hackers were pioneers, this lopsided, efforts-intensive, humble-looking wooden house was the culmination of their hacking efforts. The games hadn’t been so effectively dissected back then, and every discovery was another metaphorical log in place. Recoloring portraits, animation, or anything was a big deal…

A sprite recolor from '05 by Valm

In the housing industry today, advances have made the homebuilding process far easier, with a wide variety of tools that simplify labor. The same can be said for Fire Emblem hacking. Things that used to take ages, such as text insertion (parsing, editing, implementing) or graphics insertion (ripping artwork, modifying it, and inserting it), have been streamlined. So much so, in fact, that they often amount to a few clicks and a consultation of your offset document (and sometimes not even this!)

… Events are still quite a bit of work, however.

An Event Assembler Event File

Quintessential (Obsolete) Tools of the Trade

As many of you well-versed in hacking may know, we didn’t have access to wonderful tools like FEBuilder, Emblem Magic, or Event Assembler a decade ago. Still, there was a will and little issues like ease and convenience couldn’t stop our entrepreneurial base or their ingenuity. Hacks came out... many of them were bad but that still applies today. While some people swore by the tried and true method of hex editing to accomplish this, the vast majority used tools, many of which were developed by the community. In no particular order, some of the most popular were:

And finally entering this list in 2017:

From this...

To this

Swiss Army Knife - Wikipedia

This list is by no means complete, of course. Many of these tools have been rendered obsolete by improved new applications that accomplish what they did better or have simplified the process to not require so many different tools.

The Nightmare is Over…

Nightmare Editor - Blazer

… for some of us least. Nightmare is kind of like that one cold that you just can’t kick. It is one of the most enduring programs that the Fire Emblem hacking community has made use of. It provides a user-friendly interface to accomplish the same thing as opening a Hex Editor and modifying code. While it might not look particularly pleasing on the eyes, it is far easier to navigate than this:

HxD - A hex editing suite - https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

So why is it obsolete? Aside from limiting you to the space provided within the Nightmare Module (.nmm) it also only allows you to edit pieces of information one at a time. The former of which requires one to strictly adhere to a ROMs layout. The latter can be particularly tedious with large-scale hacking projects that involve replacing massive swaths of the code. Nightmare still has its uses, as each of the .nmm’s contain the address of code that you may need to hand edit. By and large, though, this old dog is no longer necessary. There are a plethora of new options that are either more efficient or more user friendly, such as FEbuilder, Emblem Magic, or Event Assembler.

I won’t lie, though, I still open up Nightmare every once in a while when I’m feeling nostalgic.

Painting a Mappy

Each tile of a map in the GBA Fire Emblem series is a 16x16 square made up of 4 8x8 sections. The paint method emphasizes just how painful map editing can be. It involved selecting these 16x16 squares or 8x8 sections from a template in paint application, pasting them into another and praying that you didn’t accidentally shift a tile a pixel or two in the last three hours. Mappy improved on this dramatically…

Mappy image https://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?/topic/47298-problem-with-map-in-fe7/)

A map made in Mappy by Pia Carrot

By making each selectable space a minimum of 16x16 and having all possible tile combinations represented as options, map-making became far easier with little fear of failure. Mappy still lacked several key features for simplicity’s sake, one of which being that it didn’t have a simple way to do map changes.

...Enter Tiled. Tiled is fairly unique amongst all these programs in that it still has common usage today. There is already a great tutorial on it by Markyjoe, so if you want to learn Tiled give him some love. Anyway, Tiled along with the optional FE Map Creator (by bwdyeti) made full-featured maps a breeze to create. Maybe I'll loop back to them in a blog to come.

The Rest of Them

Most of everything left to speak about was eliminated by a single program: FEditor.

Editor Portrait view Lisandra_Brave—http://feuniverse.us/t/help-with-portrait-pointers/1240/5

FEditor's Portrait Editor

FEditor was a big deal when it released. These are only some of the tools that became unnecessary with its release:

  • The Text Editing Suites

  • unLZ-GBA

  • Tile Layer Pro

  • GBA Color Picker

I’m likely forgetting some. Still, all these were deprecated by FEditor (with several more outdone by GBA Graphics Editor for the few functions that FEditor lacked). FEditor’s simple ui and easy expansion allowed even novices to accomplish previously challenging tasks with a simple series of clicks. From portrait insertion to animation insertion, spells, text edits and dumps, FEditor did it all. And it excelled at these tasks. However, FEditor had several bugs that often built up after a while of use and as such it's recommended that FEditor doesn't touch a final project rom at any point.

Nostalgia

If you're curious about any of the applications above, I've linked to download pages, but you'd have to be a masochist in this day and age to use them. Don't let that nostalgia take hold; Nightmare (optionally insert any other program I've discussed) is objectively slow/bad/lacks functionality/useless and your time is best spent elsewhere. What? Of course that doesn't make me sad.

Erhm... That wraps the history up. What fond memories do you have of the community? Share your thoughts; I'd love to hear them! Next time we’ll abandon the past and take an in-depth look at some of the modern tools that have made hacking Fire Emblem more exciting now than ever!

Until then, I'm Shindad the Great and you're pretty awesome, too.

bottom of page