Phantasy Star IV: Lua script for extended party HUD

I recently made my first Lua script, an extended party stat display for use with Phantasy Star IV for Sega Genesis. It's probably really badly coded but I think it at least looks nice. If you want a better look at it, this is the video for you.

The script is currently available at http://en.pastebin.ca/1733426

Apologies for the low quality in the video - trust me that these statistics are all pretty legible when you're actually using this, although yes, the font used is much smaller than the default used by the game.

This video uses some gameplay segments from janus' tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) of this game, which can be viewed in full at http://tasvideos.org/1420M.html

There are a few cuts that aren't very noticeable, these were caused by my video editing and have nothing to do with janus' TAS.

Check out other detailed Phantasy Star IV information at http://www.wrftpb.com/psiv/

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• phantasy
• star
• four
• psiv
• end
• millenium
• lua
• script
• dark
• force

[BlitzkriegBR]

Very cool. Is was nice of your part to make the script available, too. Some people are way selfish and never provide source code of what they do.

Is it possible to make that permanent to the rom?

Also, I you said in your notes you don't know where the odds of a enemy dropping an item are stored. Since you can hack the rom to make enemies always drop items, don't you think those odds are equal to everybody?

[FreshChapleton]

@BlitzkriegBR It's not possible to make permanent to the ROM - the ROM is totally unmodified. The lua script runs in the emulator and reads the game's memory to display the window in the emulator overtop of the action. If the stuff interests you there are some really crazy HUD scripts available for other games, like the Sonic series.

I don't know about any way to hack a rom to make enemies always drop items. If you know of a way to do that, please share!

[Cheiftain2]

dude this is amazing

how do u get it to work ?

[FreshChapleton]

Most is explained in the comments. You need a Genesis emulator called "Gens" that can run the lua script, and then you can use the lua script that's linked in the comments.

Does that help? Any other questions?

[BlitzkriegBR]

@FreshChapleton Oh, I didn't mean the cart, I meant the ROM (.bin) dumped and played in an emulator.

To make them always drop, change bytes 0x3174 and the next one to 0x60 and 0x06 in the ROM.

If an enemy has nothing to drop it will tell that a dagger was dropped, even though it was not.

I'm not sure what those numbers mean exactly. I thought it could be the odds of items being dropped (equal for all enemies), but IIRC items like ShadowBlade were very hard to get.

Please share what you find.