Zelda Parallel Worlds v1.2 public beta

This is the official public beta release of Zelda Parallel Worlds ahead of the expected December 31st final release.  I could really use some more eyes and ears on this one to check for bugs.

Current patches

[==Added features==]

-MSU-1 Audio
-Able To Save From The Beginning Of The Game (don't have to get the sword first)
-Stun Enemies With Fist (huge help in the Guardhouse)
-Pegasus Boots Upgrade
-Break Pots with Sword
-Collect Items with Sword
-Death Counter Fix
-Flute Cancel
-FastROM Conversion Greatly Reduces/Eliminates Slowdowns
-Shovel is now available in Zelda's Cell
-Able to randomly dig up heart/arrow/bomb/blue rupee
-Load game with full health

[==Vanilla aLttP Bug Fixes==]
(might not all actually do anything)

-Kholdstare Shell Fade
-Mothula L4 Sword Invincibility (doesn't fix the stop firing glitch)
-Glove and Shield Palette Bugs
-Cane of Somaria Magic Meter Underflow
-Magic Cape Statue Pulling
-Start/Select Menu Flickering Fixed

[==Parallel Worlds Bug Fixes==]

-Title Screen Gfx Glitch
-Able To Collect Both Red/Blue Boomerangs
-Able To Collect Mushroom With Magic Powder In Inventory
-Glitched Door in Blind's Room Removed
-Impa's Ways Crystal Glitch Fixed
-Overworld Staircase Exit Y-Coordinate Fixed
-Bunny Change Sprite Palette Bug Fixed
-Minor Link Sprite Repixel (Fix Silver Face)
-Indoor Staircase Layer Priority Fix
-Hylian Shield Overworld Sprite Recolored (i.e. when stolen by Pikit)
-Minor Staircase Block Selection Corrections
-Minor Text Edits/Corrections

[==To Do==]
-A few remaining text fixes
*Title screen copyright date
*Remove secret message warning about the mushroom

-A few remaining trapdoors need to be re-ordered

**Download Link**

MSU-1 Audio Pack Download

Code:

http://www.mediafire.com/?8tj1zf3mymbtzld

Oh heck yes.  Fist stun is definitely happening.  I'm removing the net stun though, no need for that.  This COMPLETELY rebalances the guardhouse from nigh-on-impossible-hellhole to difficult-but-still-completely-reasonable-dungeon.  THANK YOU, CONN

Edit: Gonna do a bit more playtesting before uploading, but I'll put the patch up soon. All of the DX patches are in, plus the fist stun, no problems so far.

Nice. Also if you are using the original PW it would be wise to remove that door in Saria's Gardents at the boss, which crashes the game if you go through. Seems like another PW remodel is comming along. Hopefully players will be satisfied, since the general population did not accept PW or the Remodel well.

By the way, Conn also fixed that glitch with one empty space in the inventory specifically adopted for PW menu (and you can now have the Shovel there while also having the Flute). Of course you then also need to insert the shovel in some chest and the digging ASM (if I recall correctly I did this a while back and released the unofficial PW 1.2 here
https://www.zeldix.net/t824-zelda3-parallel-worlds-and-remodel-v1-2


This is what was done
Features:
1.) title screen fix (also tested)
2.) shovel in menu closes the gap (ASM hack by Conn specifically for PW)
3.) inserted the chest via hex into Zelda's cell (ideal, since you get the shovel early but after at least one item), 2+3 also basic test done, also tested to allow ocarina+shovel in menu
4.) random treasures hack insterted, but further adopt of treasure: default was 20 rupees, 5 rupees, 1 rupee, magic (magic was obsolete, because of the green magic autofill, 20 rupees was too much - could get rich too early; changed treasures to: heart, 5 rupees, 1 bomb, 5 arrows) basic test done
5.) flute fix - implemented, but in practice no need, since area 2A, which has the flute dig, gets absorbed by big area 21 (so no area 2A), flute can not be in the ground.

Maybe this is a fine base for the DX to bring the players yet another remodeled version of PW, which will they finally be satisfied with (since now you can dig for hearts etc etc).

I don't think I'm able to edit rooms in PW, even with the patch that allows me to view them in HM, so I can't really fix the door in Saria's Gardens.  I may look into the shovel patch, we'll see.  The patch should easily integrate with Parallel Remodel and PW 1.2, the code is at 0x10FA80-FDB0.

One bug I have found is that there is an issue caused by allowing you to save before getting the sword, combined with the MSU-1.  If you do that, you reload at your house with no background track playing, then when you exit your house, the music fade code kicks in and plays about a half second of whatever the last track loaded was.  I have a feeling that it's a simple matter of checking whether or not the MSU-1 is playing at the beginning of the fade in/out routine, but I haven't looked at that code in so long... :/

Ok, turns out it was the same issue Colines already figured out here so, that's fixed.  If anybody wants to give this a try, here's the patch file (based on ZPW1.1, apply to a headerless vanilla aLttP ROM)

Download here

Important note, I have not yet completed a full playthrough of this patch, there may be bugs. In fact, I just realized I neglected to modify the graphics for the flute cancel patch, so that at least isn't right. If there are any other issues, please let me know.

Ok, new bugfixes added

-Now possible to collect both the blue and red boomerang
-Game-crashing door removed from Blind's room in Saria's Gardens
-Impa's Ways crystal now falls even if not all floor tiles have moved (still needs more testing to check for possible side effects in other floor tile rooms).

I'll update the OP with the current patch list and a download link.

Ok, so this is cool.  Got the FastROM patch working.  Makes a HUGE difference in slowdown areas.  It's not quite ready to go yet, all I've done so far is fix the few addresses in the original patch that got changed in PW, so I still need to track down all of the JSR's in any of the code that PW added.  This will also require extensive playtesting, due to the sheer number of changes to the ROM.  I'm not going to release this patch yet until I've managed to get it converted from xkas to bass and integrated into my main build script so I can ensure consistency in my build process, but rest assured, I will post it.

Edit: Ok, it's uploaded. I still have quite a few to track down in the PW code, but I at least converted all of the JSL's in the rest of the DX code. I did already have one GFX glitch as a result of the HiROM conversion, which I've fixed, but there may be more bugs. If you do give this a try and happen to find an issue, please report it.

I can Not recomend you to update to FastROM, this will bring in various new bugs and Conn fixed some of them - but on vanilla Alttp - this is PW, which has a lot of code realocated and the Rom is not so stable as Alttp.

Basically it is not worth it - the amount of new bugs which will appear with FastRom outweights the slowdowns - which can easily be fixed by a simple reduction of sprites. A smart game designer will always put as much sprites in the room as the original hardware can handle without slowing down - and the Fastrom can handle only slightly more sprite movements than the original and will also make slowdowns if too many sprites are on screen, it can just handle a sprite or two more, than what the original can.

Right now, only the native code has been altered to run in FastROM, none of the PW code has. I may just leave it at that and not alter the PW subroutines for the reasons you mentioned, but I do think it's worth it. As far as the amount of code being moved, I did a hex comparison with the original when I was working on importing the patch, and there were exactly 4 subroutines modified by the patch that had been moved in PW. I did also include Conn's bug fixes.

Hmm... looks like the title screen glitches out with FastROM, but only in combination with the MSU-1 patch, and only when the MSU-1 isn't present. When the MSU-1 is present, no glitches, even when the track is missing and it falls back to SPC playback. So, Snes9x glitches. Higan without MSU-1 in the manifest glitches. Higan with MSU-1 in the manifest, but no PCM files is fine. Higan with MSU-1 in the manifest and the PCM files present is fine. Time to do some tracing.

Ok, fixed the glitch. I remembered enough about what caused the original glitches in the title screen to suspect it was a timing issue, and the fact that it only happened with a specific combination of MSU-1 factors led me to believe I had a long code path somewhere, and sure enough, the case where the MSU-1 isn't present ended up being exactly that, so all I had to do was shorten up the code path for that case and we're back in business. The patch has been updated.

I've added the shovel and random treasure dig-up patches from Conn.  Treasure options are heart/arrow/bomb/blue rupee.  I've been wanting to get those in for quite awhile now, so I'm glad to finally have that added.  I modified Puzzledude's item insertion slightly, by assigning the shovel as the alternate to the lantern, rather than overwriting the lantern in Zelda's cell, but seeing as it's essentially impossible to reach Zelda without the lantern, the end result is the same.  However, if you *did* then Zelda's cell would give you the lantern, and the shovel would be found in your house.  I also made a few minor text edits.  The patch has been updated.

I also refactored a bunch of stuff which shouldn't have affected anything, but I'm a bit out of it today, so who knows... :/

Found and fixed a game-crashing bug in the FastROM patch (one of the jump tables was shifted one byte too early in the ROM... chaos ensued). Patch is updated.

If you find a bug which is also occuring in the native alttp fastrom let me know

I was planning to test that and report back. It was in the tables file, one of the orgs was off by one. I'll look into it tomorrow.

Hi everyone. Been lurking this forum for over 4 years, finally made an account so I could download the PW DX hack.

I discovered Parallel Worlds back in 2008, and have been tracking it's progress ever since. Highly impressed with the overworld, not so much with the dungeons. (wasn't the difficulty that bothered me too much, it was how sloppy they looked compared to the rest of the hack).

I spent the last 3 hours trying to get MSU-1 working for PWDX (first time using MSU-1), ended up using bsnes 0.70 to get it working (apparently the problem was the .xml file was missing from the game folder).

I have little to no knowledge of hacking, but thought I'd drop by and say hi .

I added a setup guide for MSU-1 in higan to the OP.  There have been reports of crashing in higan v098, so you might want to use v097 instead.  Eventually, I'll get around to writing one up for the SD2SNES, but the main difference there is the file naming scheme.

romname.sfc
romname.srm
romname.msu (just an empty dummy file to enable detection)
romname-1.pcm
romname-2.pcm
. . .
romname-x.pcm

As you can probably tell from my pcm filenames in the track pack, I originally made that pack with this patch in mind (which is also why you have to delete track 29).

I think the thing that stumped me the most with MSU was renaming the folder to have a file extension after it.

I would try playing it with Higan, but I have a 32bit OS lol. Thanks for the updated tutorial though, much clearer and simpler than anything I've read so far.

EDIT: Been playing through the hack, when I die in the guardhouse it starts me right at Links house again playing the cutscene. Forget if this happened in the original version or not.

Zanak wrote:EDIT: Been playing through the hack, when I die in the guardhouse it starts me right at Links house again playing the cutscene. Forget if this happened in the original version or not.

That should happen unless you save. There's a "checkpoint" when you get your sword from your uncle, and in the original it's not possible to die before then. In PW 1.1 you couldn't even save until then (also in the original), but now you can save at any time, which will cause you to come back at your house, but no cutscene.

If that's not the case, you saved and still saw the cutscene, then that's a bug.

Ah yes forgot, you have to get the sword first.

Either that or save. Probably the best place to do that is right after you get the lantern, since save and quit does bring you back to your house.

Ok, so despite the fact that I told myself that I had given up on that pesky door in the guardhouse where you walk through the closed shutter, it really started to bother me, so I looked into it further, and I've finally narrowed down the responsible code path. The key lies in address $0460, and instruction $01ABE4, which is ldx $0460. I was able to make the same door arrangement (type 12 on the right hand side of one room, type 0 on the left hand side of the adjacent room) by placing a breakpoint at that instruction. Walking through that door in PW, $0460 is set to $000C. However, recreating that same door arrangement in HM, but in a different room, then breaking on that instruction, $0460 is $0002, and the shutter works correctly. So, going back to PW, I placed the breakpoint there, stepped over the instruction so $000C was loaded into X, then I overwrote it with $0002 in the register editor, then hit run, and the door worked perfectly. Now, I just have to dig through backtraces and try to understand what's going on with $0460 a little better, and we'll go from there. I could just hard code in a hook jump and overwrite the value only if you're in that room, but that feels like a really dirty hack, so I'm going to see if I can't fix it elsewhere.

Ok, tried the dirty hack just for kicks, and although it did work, it broke the door above it, so you can't walk through it.  Still, it's a starting point...

Nice, but you see, the problem is, that this door stands on the break of two global Hyrule Magic rooms, not just any two rooms, like for instance 2 rooms that are in fact quarter or half in the same global Hyrule magic room. Usually you thus need to insert the same type of door twice in both rooms (in this case left door in the right room and right door in the left room). Sometimes the combo needs to be unique and different.

I suggest you look up Alttp where you have a normal door in one room and a shutter door in the other global room and look at the door-types (namely there are multiple types of doors who look alike).