answered Red Rescue Team: Adding Portraits?

[BlueLeafeon]

I really love PMD1, but its biggest flaw to me was the lack of portraits for many of the starters' evolved forms. I would like to add a few of them into the rom just for the sake of it, by using PMD2's face portraits (as, so far as I can tell, they are the same size and still have the 16 color limit) but the problem is that I am not precisely sure how to get started.

I've delved into the rom before, and found that EVERY Pokemon has a "starter level up" quote in the data, even though it's stuff like partner_level_133 or whatever, and it was likely input as a failsafe. Seeing as how this sort of thing exists, I'm wondering if a similar system is present with the face portraits. As in, there's an actual table to portraits listed somewhere, with likely a byte to tell the game to not try loading for certain Pokemon. If this is true, it would be possible to edit the table, insert a new portrait into clear space and point the game to the image.

However, I actually cannot seem to find any sort of hacking notes on PMD1. If anyone could help me by pointing me in the right direction. (Either to hacking notes, or directly telling me if this is or is not possible, and if it is, where to look.)

[evandixon]

It might be possible.

@psy_commando knows a lot about the portraits in the Explorers games. The portraits look like they're stored in monster.sbin. The format might be similar, but I don't think any research has been done on it yet.

[psy_commando]

It might be possible.

@psy_commando knows a lot about the portraits in the Explorers games. The portraits look like they're stored in monster.sbin. The format might be similar, but I don't think any research has been done on it yet.

Red Rescue Team is on the GBA though, so there's no filesystem like in Blue Rescue Team.

I haven't messed around much with those, but modding RRT would be much more complicated than modding BRT IMO.

I know that its possible to add pokemon portrait in PMD2, but in BRT or RRT it seems like only pokemon that needs them have portraits "slots"..

If you look at the monster.sbin file, there's a long table of content at the beginning. The files beginning with "kao" and ending with a pokemon number are all the faces for a given pokemon. But you'll notice there are a lot missing.

It all depends on whether the game code and game script looks for a kao file that matches a pokemon's id or not. Otherwise, the format for the portraits is nearly identical to how it was in EoS. Its just that each pokemon has a SIR0 container with a table of content pointing to each of its portraits. And each portrait has its palette right before, just like in EoS.

My suggestion would be to try to add a kao file for a pokemon manually into the sbin, maybe just copy one of the existing pokemon's, and name it after another pokemon's id. Then find a way to talk to that pokemon. You'll see if it works.

As far as hacking notes go, there's this thing:

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Mystery_Dungeon

You need to use a hex editor with a 30 days trial on it though, or you can also just read the XML yourself and use another hex editor.

But, a lot of things are very similar to how they are in PMD2. Besides that, I think I remember that antylamon and a few others have posted some interesting RRT/BRT notes in the PMD2 thread. It might be worth digging into it.