FF4VM?

Has the idea occured to anyone else (particularily programmers) of a Free Software RPG engine that can parse decompiled FF4 script files and execute them like a playable game? Seeing as FF4 is extremely disected I thought this wouldn't be near impossible to do.

Basically it'd would have been like how ScummVM deals with Maniac Mansion's NES version, requiring the original ROM file and using a tool specialized at decompiling it into readable ascii files with human-readable syntaxes and variables, which would then be executed by the engine. It would also be all nicely sorted and modular too, for mods, new games (that do not use FF4 data) and such.

It could have extra features like hi-res tile/sprite/sound replacements, or maybe even a 3d opengl renderer for battle scenes, with md3 model support in addition.

Not saying that I want someone here to do this but has anyone else ever thought of the same idea?


It would certainly be better than any RPG2000/2003/XP games and make it easier than hacking ROMS for producing new 'unofficial fan adventures', oh and portability too don't forget that :P (though data would be restricted, and distribution of the data prohibited as it would be deriving from copyrighted material. The source code of the engine would be under the GPL v2 though)


It's because I thought it would rule to run FF4 under a non-SNES/PSX system, natively, no emulation, with Woolsleyisms and networked multiplayer.

I can imagine the hard bits would be the sound effects (the ripping of them and dumping them to WAV file by decompiler) and stats calculation.

Well, the idea sounds a little complicated to me. You would want to, essentially, completely gut the ROM and use the coding, graphics, and sound for any type of project?

I think that they have done something similar to this for a few games — Super Mario World, for example, appears to have numerous hacks and stages built out by an external program, yet they still require the original ROM to do so, I imagine —

Can't current emulators already do graphics replacement? I know I've seen it with N64 emus.

It'd probably be doable. I've seen a project out there that's an engine for running FF7 PS1 discs on PC without emulation. It's on Linux Game Tome somewhere.

Dunno about replacement MD3 models, though. Not only would that be a huge-scale undertaking, but it'd require the game to be changed in so many ways to not look really goofy, and at that point it'd probably be better to just buy FFIV DS :p

One could theoretically hack the ROM and change the image files to more hi-resolution ones, though any hacker would be severely limited due to the limitations within the SNES system itself.

Not necessarily. A video plugin for an emulator could just parse out image references and use them to load different textures out of a directory on your disk without ever modifying the ROM directly.