Final Fantasy III: FF3j PAL fix

This patch will make smooth playing of Final Fantasy 3 on PAL 50 Hz NES consoles possible. It fixes graphics glitches and music tuning that would originally causes problems.

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*** Final Fantasy 1-2-3 to 50 Hz PAL fix patch ***
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By Bregalad, 8th september 2009
readme.txt file common to all 3 patches

*** What are these patches ***

Playing Final Fantasy 1,2 or 3 on a 50 Hz PAL Nintendo Entertainment System "as-it" would give pretty dissapointing results (altough in all 3 cases the games would be technically playable).
Effectively there would be graphical glitches, the music would be played slowly and one key lower than normal. In FF1 the textboxes wouldn't even be entierely visible due to graphical glitches. All this is because the games have been designed for a 60 Hz NTSC console and their engine rely to timed synchronisation with the vido monitor to do some additional effects that wouldn't be possible to do otherwise (also known as "raster effects").

So I've made patches that does the following fixes to make the games fully enjoyable on PAL consoles :

- Music pitch is adjusted
- All rasters effects are adjusted to PAL timing
- Partial graphical glitches on the top and bottom rows when scrolling vertically (these also exists on NTSC monitors but are usually "overscan" (hidden by the TV borders))

These patches does NOT fix the following points (and never will because it this would require entiere rewrites of some parts of the game engine) :
- Music tempo would still be 5/6 slower
- Gameplay, animation speed 5/6 slower
- Maybe I missed very uncommon raster effects ? (if you find any please contact me)

*** Technical notes about the patches ***

They should be applicable to Final Fantasy 1 (U), Final Fantasy 2 (J) translation by Nedo-demiforce and Final Fantasy 3 (J) translation by Alex W. Jackson, Neill Corlett, SoM2Freak.

Since a ".ips" file only records what changed from an old file to a new file, the patches should normally apply before or after all patched translations in all languages (altough they are only confirmed to work with the mentionned above), since I only do modifications to the core engine, which translations doesn't touch, and even ROM hacks of them.

You shouldn't try applying any patch to Final Fatnasy 1+2 (J) or Final Fantasy 1 (J) this will never work. I doubt anyone is really willing to play the games in japanese language and a PAL console at the same time anyway.

The patch for Final Fantasy 2 also fixes the intro so that it work on real hardware (it orininally had glitches in the intro), and make sure the mapper is effectively MMC1 not mapper 2 (it shouldn't hurt if it already way MMC1), because a mapper 2 hack distribution was (and still is) very common, and it's not possible to make a cart out of it. For this reason, it's not recommended applying the PAL fix patch before the english translation because it's not likely to work. But it should work with other translations in various european languages based on this english translation as well (there is plenty of them).

*** APPLYING THE PATCH ***

Apply the patch with your favourite ips patcher, some are availales arround the internet. You can use emulators to automatically patch the game when running it, but if you want to get the data on a real cart you must apply the patch with a patcher, downloading it isn't enough.
I used samIPS to make my patches.

Before putting the code on a real hardware cart you must test the patched ROM in emulators to make sure it works like exepted.
Please set your emulator in *PAL* mode before doing so ! If your emulator doesn't have a PAL mode then you should get one who has. Nestopia, VirtuaNES and FCEUltra all have PAL modes which are accurate enough to play FF1/2/3 PAL fixes as exepted.
If it doesn't work as exepted, either the data of a translation patch/hack you used on the game is conflicting with my hack, or you patched the IPS incorrectly. Contact me if you get something that don't work after applying my patch. Don't contact me if you don't know how to apply a patch, I won't answer you.
My e mail adress is jmasur (at) microclub (dot) ch.

**** Versions ***

1.0 26th sept 2008
First release

1.1 2nd sept 2009
Improvement of scrolling engine to reduce graphical glitches at top/bottom of the screen a little. Fixed graphic glitches on FF3's map screen that version 1.0 didn't fix.

1.2 8th sept 2009
Fix a bug in FF3's scolling engine which would mess up with the airship that goes very fast.

eof

Final Fantasy 3 (J) [T-Eng1.0]
CRC32: 47AA6456
MD5: 6D65CA9BF4D2262E00C95574B843B269
SHA-1: 5EE88D3347AAEA3054A9A37FDADDE19CED925BBE