The webapp ff6tools can edit multiple Final Fantasy games’ roms without using a hex editor or even looking at bytecode. It is written by everything8215, and has proven to be a fantastic and helpful editor for testing new images and text in both FFV and FFIV.

I pondered whether it can cause some minor gameplay issues with repeated use.

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Yet I’ve realized this is unlikely upon learning more about the bytes I tested, from a romhacking mentor (chillyfeez). It’s unclear what’s caused the glitches seen here at this time.

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Visual Glitches observed in edited FFIV roms

Custscene when claiming second Airship was glitched on a transparency layer; gameplay unaffected and it cleared after the next scene loaded. This happened to a version I had edited and was playtesting.

Walking through an impassable wall after beating Storm Dragon (FF4 Ultima), Cecil can move 1 or 2 tiles left of the door frame. Reported and documented by Guysons667.

Investigation

I begin with a patched FFIV rom that has this adjusted image for Edge in battle (it’s from the Record Keeper game):

The game plays fine with no bugs using this RK graphics patch (created by T92).

I used ff6tools to import a customized version of this image, giving the character purple tabi versus brown boots, into the rom. This image was in PNG format! It’s brilliant how this webapp can translate both the pixel and palette data into the bytecode! I saved the edited rom.

I then made a patch file (IPS) to log the changes made by ff6tools to the bytecode of the rom when this new graphic was added over the old one.