Phantasy Star Cave Message Board

So, I finally got around to editing the disassembly to store the dialogues and battle formations uncompressed in the ROM. You can find the project here:

https://github.com/lory90/ps4disasm-uncomp

You can find them in the "script" and "formation" folders.

It's mostly untested, so you may run into issues. If that's the case, let me know.

This seems pretty cool. I’ll look into it sometime this week. It’s been a while since I did something Phantasy Star related.

Great news! Good work!

I tested out some stuff with this. Here are some of things I found out:

-Enemies don’t have individual escape rates, the formations do.
-It’s possible for as much as 3 Sandworm types to appear on the screen at one.
-Some methods can make enemy Alys’ name appear - which is Ryre, her name in Japanese.
-Enemies themselves don’t drop items, as they’re also contained in formations.
-Some vehicle enemies have extroardinarily high attack power, being able to do as much as 360 damage at times.

Another funfact I learned today:

The Grasshound enemies can paralyse you, only this is never shown in the vanilla game due to them being vehicle only.

I guess Grasshounds were originally intended to appear as "normal", non-vechile enemy.
While you're at it, could you also check all the other vechile-enemies for any strange bits?

Yep, I found another - the Forced Flies can poison you. There doesn’t seem to be any other occurences with vehicle enemies have an after effect with physical while in actual battles other than the two I found out.

I have a question: Why do some enemies cause colour glitches when placed next to others?

Dimension Worms with Blind Heads is fine, but I tried Dimension Worms with Shadow Mirages, and it causes a glitch to copy the Dimension Worms’ colours onto the Shadow Mirages. Some enemies create glitches no matter who they’re next to, like Mini Worms with any Sworm Flies in my tries.

So, what causes? Why do some enemies cause palette glitches when next to others, but not all of them do?

Some enemies use more colors than others, so they were designed to be alone. If you put them with other enemies, they would share the same values. Besides there are certain enemies that have cycling colors so they require more palettes slots.

I’ll try have a go at this again and hope that I can do something interesting with formations.

Also, I’m not sure why, but I always get in the mood to do Phantasy Star stuff a few days before my school holidays end XD

I was testing some formations and I can confirm that an Igglanova is fine as a regular enemy, so long as the Xanafalgues are listed too, but they won’t appear until Fission is used.

I found out what was causing the palette issues! It was by next changing the 2nd last value (before $FF). It was to split up enemy groups. I noticed this when I make 3 Chaos Bringers appear at once, the game made their name appear on both sides as the value wasn’t edited so it would appear they’re the same group (I edited over groups, like copy pasting and then editing).

Been doing a bit of testing, and I found something interesting - a Sandworm can’t appear alongside another enemy, because when you escape, the screen will go black. Infantworms can appear next to other enemies though, so I guess that’s the closest thing.

While reading in the formation data, I used the number of enemies byte to read in the enemy data, came upon an error.

On formation $177:
$31, $31, $10, ItemID_Trimate, $04, $01, $06, EnemyID_BladeRight, $89, EnemyID_FrostSaber, $14, EnemyID_FrostSaber, $1F, $FF

The 5th byte reads in as 4 enemies, but there are only 3. Just a fyi.