Y.I.P.E.S.
Yoshi's Island Phrase Editing System
Originally posted by Jeorge535 two years ago
Excellent! All we need now is a text editor
Well, here you go!
Keep in mind that this is still in beta (as proven by the non-functioning "Message space used" bar), but as far as I know everything else is perfectly functional as of now. Currently it can change text, change which levels can display messages (and which messages they display) and edit level names.
How to use: (WARNING: This will not work immediately with ROMs that have already had their messages edited manually. See below for instructions on how to fix that.)
1. Open your ROM. You will see a dialog box appear asking you how much space to set aside for level messages and names. The maximum is FFFF (a whole bank). A new file will be saved alongside your ROM (called "_romname.dat0"); open it up in a hex editor at any time to change the amount of free space to set aside. Note that any unused space is change to AF in the ROM so that Golden Egg doesn't read it as empty space, and these bytes are overwritten with AF every time you save.
2. Now click OK and wait a moment or two as the program reads all the data, gathers and sorts the relevant pointers, etc.
2. Instead of being listed by pointer, messages are listed by their order in the ROM. Find the message you want to edit, and type it in. If you install and use the included Yoshi's Island font set, you can estimate how much text can fit on a line.
3. Click the "Insert Message" button (or, if you have the "Compile Automatically" option disabled, click "Compile and Insert")
4. Your new message is now in the ROM. To change which levels use it, move to the next tab.
5. On the "Message Linking" tab, select the translevel you want to modify, then select the message or message number to use. Once you've finished, click the "Save Changes" button (clicking the "Insert" button on the previous or following tabs will also work).
6. To edit level names, go to the next tab.
7. Everything is identical to message editing, save for a couple of things. First off, the options labeled "nothing?" contain garbage data, feel free to delete their "text" (remember to click the "Insert" button after!) to free up some space.
8. Save ROM, test game, report bugs.
How to fix an already used ROM:
Y.I.P.E.S. does not read messages based on where they begin, but on where they end. Since all messages end in FFFF, every instance of FFFF is treated as its own message. Because the program auto-limits itself to x012B messages (four for each translevel) the FFFFs will fill up all the slots allocated for messages and many of your messages may not appear in the program (depending on how many FFFFs are between each message you've created). To fix this, replace all unimportant FFFF with 0000 (or any other byte, really). When you open your ROM in Y.I.P.E.S., some of the messages will now have long strings of "àààààààà" (if you used 0000). Just delete these strings, reinsert the messages, and hopefully everything should now be in order. Just be sure to back up your ROM in case anything goes wrong.
A few things to note for text editing veterans:
1. Most required commands ($FF$05, $FF$06, $FF$FF$0F$FF etc) are inserted automatically; you do not need to type them yourself. The exceptions to this rule are the $FF and $FE commands when used in level names, but only when they contain a non-zero horizontal shift. If either one of them do, then you will need to insert them both manually.
2. If you wish to insert a byte directly into your message, use $XX, where XX is the byte you want to insert at that point. Note that the Yoshi's Island font does not have a "$" character, so it will appear invisible unless you switch fonts. Also note that the byte must be two digits long; $5 would throw an error, for example.
3. You can directly edit the exact binary data before it is inserted into the ROM by editing the box to the right of the message box. This is useful for things that Y.I.P.E.S. doesn't support (read: no documentation on), such as scrolling to large fonts and other oddities.
4. I would not recommend pushing this program to its limits, so to speak. For example, randomly sticking $FF$FF in the middle of a message (or $FD in the middle of a level name) and then inserting it may cause some odd occurrences (I haven't actually tried it; it's just an example).
Alright, have fun and be sure to report any bugs to me!
P.S.: There is a way to get the icon at the top left of the program to animate; see if you can figure out how!
Yoshi's Island Sprite Set Editor
I literally just made this, not only on a complete whim, but within only a few hours. Major thanks to Yoshis Fan for sharing details on how sprite sets are stored, and to Mattrizzle for discovering the original information and capturing the images that he shared with Yoshis Fan.
Download now! Be sure to unzip it before using it.
Usage is very simple. Simply load your ROM, select the sprite set to edit on the right, select the slot number to change, then select the graphics to load into that slot on the left. The one thing to note is that certain sprites only work in certain slots; the ones Yoshis Fan told me about are included in the description for each sprite but there may possibly be others; just be aware.
Yoshi's Island Title Screen Editor
Don't you just love creative names?
Download here.
Instructions are included in the readme file; it's very simple to use.
I should get a new layout.
Probably won't, though.
Probably won't, though.