Secret of Mana Editor...

After several years of sitting on my hard drive, SOMEdit may actually be worked on again.  Here are some screenshots that were posted on acmlm a couple years ago:



Basic map editor w/ event/object locations


World map editor with full view on the left and resizable zoomed view on the right.  
 

Audio sample editor w/ zoom-in capability


Old screenshot of the event editor (Looks a little cleaner now)


Older screenshot of music editor (Somewhat cleaner now also)



Screenshot of dialogue in imported Courier New font.  Oddly/conveniently enough the font is monochrome and that black outline is added procedurally by SOM.


Stats menu with Mr. Saturn dialogue font from Earthbound (From a TTF I made long ago.. not from.. the game itself.)

Whether this thing will actually make it to release this time I'm not sure.  I'm not actively looking for people, but I could probably use someone familiar with 65816, romhacking in general, and/or C# to help fill in the missing pieces (there are a lot) and speed up a release.  It's currently under redesign, but actual features will be worked on soon.  Important things that still need to be worked out include:

Title screen background image format.  I know approximately where this sits in the rom, but it's in some crazy-ass 8bit compressed format.  This doesn't apply to the gold "Secret of Mana" logo, which uses a simpler RLE compression and is already loadable by somedit.

Fully decode the composite map format, particularly the header.  There are a mess of bits on the map header that indicate what order the layers should be drawn in, which layers should use transparency, whether the transparency should be additive, etc.  They seem needlessly complex and I probably need to do some debugging to figure out what the hell they all mean.

Boss graphics.  Haven't seen these yet.  I suspect they're down at the bottom of the rom with the rest of the sprites, but may be compressed.

Fix up the MIDI importer.  I've gotten a couple songs to import smoothly, including Marle's theme from Chrono Trigger ("A far off promise").  Most of the problems with this are related to converting the speed of the song.

A better audio sample writing routine.  Everytime I compress samples down for SPC700 they lose a bit of quality, even if they were never modified.  

Patch some of the holes in event processing.  There are a lot of "Unknown" types still.

A number of compression routines need to be written for SOM items that are only viewable rather than editable at the moment.  These include map pieces (Pretty basic RLE), 8x8 tilesets (Also RLE), World Map (RLE...) and 16x16 tilesets (Ugh).  Speaking of which, 16x16 tilesets are compressed in a format I have yet to understand.  My load routine for them works because it is a direct translation of SOM code, but it is pretty complex and I honestly haven't got a clue what it does.  I probably also need to find a decent spot for most of these in the rom that provides decent expansion room.  Somedit auto-expands the rom to 32 megabit (from 16) so there's plenty of edit-space to work with.

Once all that shit gets fixed up I suppose we could finally see a release of Somedit.  Feel free to offer your help if you're knowledgeable in.. well, anything useful.

Mop