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Tutorial 'Crash on Character Naming Screen' FIX!

Keif

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So, to everyone who has used the editor, many of you at some point or another have come upon the after-mentioned crash when testing your hack; you fly through Simone's text and when she ask's what you do you want to name the Hero, the game suddenly goes black and locks up.

This happened to me with a recent not-for-release project I've been fiddling with before starting into finishing an old one and it had me stumped for a while, until I found out the rough cause of the issue.

At some point when working on a heavily edited ROM, the editor seemingly reads some data in the Character's section specifically wrong. And when saving, it screws up a few bytes that leads to the game crash. Note that it's possible that this may not be your issue specifically, but this is the most likely cause.

Personally, I have lost so many minor projects and one major to this issue, so lemme tell you, I am beyond glad I found this fix.


HOW TO FIX:
1. First and foremost, you'll need a Hex Editor and your ROM. For Hex Editing, I recommend HxD, as it's lightweight and super user friendly. (Even though your ROM that you're using for this is presumably broken, I cannot stress enough to MAKE. A. BACKUP. BEFORE DOING THIS!)

2. Get your ROM loaded up in the hex editor of your choice. There's 5 addresses we'll need to go and write to in order to fix the garbage data that the editor inserted at those points to fix the crash.

21B25: AF 12 D8 51 C8 (Go to this address and type in these exact bytes. DO NOT COPY AND PASTE AS THAT WILL MAKE THE FILE BIGGER AND SCREW IT UP EVEN MORE!)

21B3F: 0F FD 52 34 01 42

22033: 1D 61 00 00 82

221B6: FE 88 4E 71 01 C1 21 C1 9C 8A

24D13: 1D 4E B9 00 02 00 A8


After saving these bytes, test your ROM! If you make it to naming the hero with no black screen then that means you've successfully fixed the issue the editor caused!


REASONS IT COULD'VE NOT WORKED:
1. You didn't follow the instructions. As I said, go one by one to the listed addresses (in Hex) and write the bytes over the ones there and save.

2. You have another issue rooted somewhere else in your mod.

While this is a one-size fits many fix, that doesn't mean it'll work for EVERYTHING that causes the black screen at naming issue.


The next thing I want to take a jab at is Extended Characters. I make 0 promises however, as I am not nearly as talented as Xeno or RubixCuber. I hope this fix helps some people out though!
 
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