Many consider Phantasy Star III for the Sega Genesis to be the
"black sheep" of the series. Personally,
I'm
a fan of the game but also acknowledge that it's not perfect. If you're
one who thinks they can improve upon Phantasy Star III then here's your
chance to finally prove it..
Aridia is a rom editor for Phantasy Star III. It has a mostly-friendly
interface that makes editing incredibly easy. No messing with hex
editors, decoding values, or any of that. If you can click and type then
you can hack away to your heart's contentment.
Aridia will be developed in a series of small releases,
see the project
roadmap for the schedule. Aridia is also free and open source; code
contributions will always be welcome if there's a feature you'd like to
add.
Aridia was not a solo effort, well the coding was but not discovering the
myriad of things that can be edited. I am always looking for
contributions, even small ones. If you'd like to pitch in, here are some
items I'd appreciate help with:
Palette Identification - If you've seen the palette editing
screen then you've noticed the large number of unidentified palettes.
I'd love to track down what each one is used for.
Gens
KMod is pretty handy for this because it can display the palettes
currently loaded. From there, it's a brute force effort to match
them to one of the unidentified palettes. They tend to be grouped
together so it's not extremely difficult to do, just time consuming.
Finding New Stuff to Edit - If you can figure out how to edit
something currently not supported in Aridia then I can probably figure
out how to add it to the UI. For example, I have a pretty good idea
where the map data is stored but haven't yet deciphered how it's stored.
Once that is determined, creating a screen to do the actual editing is
probably the easiest part.
Testing - I'm actually quite happy to get bug reports. I'm
certainly accident prone and would like to know when something isn't
working or is producing a result that just doesn't seem right.
Documentation - I try to keep the
tutorial
up to date but I'm sure there's some stuff I missed or explained poorly.
Creating a wiki seems like overkill so if you're interested you'll have
to install OpenOffice or something.
So what's in it for me if I contribute? I can't offer cash or fabulous prizes.
You will have the honor of appearing in the credits though. There's also
the satisfaction of working on what I intend to be the best ROM editor
for any game. Well, at least the best ROM editor for a Phantasy Star
game. Failing that, the best ROM editor for Phantasy Star III.
Everything on this site is free. I'll never use pop-ups or randomly
generated ads to support it. If you've found something here to be
especially helpful or entertaining please consider making a small
donation. This can be done through a secure PayPal transaction or by
purchasing one of the related items below.
Thanks for visiting my little web page!
