Legacy of the Wizards Hacking Document

By Netbrian

Welcome to my "Legacy of the Wizard" hacking document! At this point, it's mainly about level editing, but it's pretty comprehensive, and you can edit quite a bit with it. Unfortunately, editing things without an actual editor is utter heck.  Especially when dealing with those evil terrain pointers. 

Version list:

1.7 Character editing info added. Yipee.

1.5 Sprite Data vastly expanded, and I added music and store data as well.

1.0 Started this document. YAY!!!

The next things I hope to do are figure out where the music for a level is changed, and start making lists of things, so the person editing doesn't have to try each one.

Note: When editing, be sure to add the ten byte header first... I didn't include it here for my own purposes, but you do need it. And once you've finished the first level, you get to the second level

Beginning of level data capsule 1: $000

End Level Data capsule 1: $300

This data is basically the non-moving section of the level. Although a treasure chest like thing can be inserted, it doesn't do anything. This is how you put in stores... At this point, all data seems to react correctly, but I'm still experimenting. The included image details each byte used here. Also, the things are stored in columns, so the first byte is your upper left hand corner, and it works it's way down to the lower left hand corner before moving to the next column. The palette will be different for other levels (you can even change it), but the items stay the same. There are four different palettes used in each level for the background junk. The first one goes until 3F, the second one to 7F, the third one to BF, and the fourth to FF, repeating the same properties, but different colors. (Note.. I don't quite know if the picture of the princess works yet.. Anyone want to verify this?)

Beginning of level footer capsule 1: $301

Ending of level footer capsule 1: $39F

Beginning of level data capsule 2: $400

This stuff changes different properties of the level,

Beginning of level data capsule 1: $000

End Level Data capsule 1: $300

Beginning of level footer capsule 1: $301

Ending of level footer capsule 1: $39F

Beginning of level data capsule 2: $400

I think you can figure out the pattern from here. The dungeon is four capsules wide I think, so it just wraps around to the next level down on the left.

$301: Enemy Group

Starts at 24... Ends at thirty. Before twenty four, you get sort of gliched enemy sprites, and it can get pretty funny. =). After thirty, it's just these weird sphere like things resembling the ones the bosses shoot at you doing weird stuff. If you wanted to, you could probably do something in the ROM to add more enemy graphics, but it'd have to be before the normal graphics, not after.

$302 - $303: Disguise

These bytes allow the person editing to change which blocks disappear when touched. Byte 2 is what disappears, and byte three is what replaces it. For Byte 2, only use bytes that are from palette one, the other three won't do anything, but Byte 3 will change colour depending on the palette used.

$304, $305, $306, and $307: These bytes are nasty. They are the terrain graphics pointers. A pain to follow and a pain to find. At this point, I still am documenting how to manipulate these correctly. Until I am able to, I am posting an image with the terrian tiles for the first few levels...

Byte $308,$309: YAY!!! The object coordinates begin! Byte seven is the X coordinate, and it goes one block to the east every time you increase it, and Byte eight goes a little down every time you increase it.

Byte $30A: What's IN the treasure chest. To my knowledge, there is only one treasure chest per board, so this is all your gonna see of it.

Treasure Chest Bytes:

00: Bread

01: Magic

02: Money

03: Poison

04: Keys

05: Ring

06: Cross

07: Scroll

08: Wings

09: Armor

0A: Mattock

0B: Glove

0C: Rod

0D: Power Boots

0E: Jump Shoes

0F: Key stick

10: Power Knuckle

11: Fire Rod

12: Shield

13: Elixir

14: Magic Bottle

15: Crystal

16: Crown

17: Dragonslayer

$30B: The music byte!!!! It's a bit weird, so I'll list which bytes control music for a particular board.

00: Normal Dungeon

01: Xemn's Theme

02: Meyna's Theme

03: Lyll's Theme

04: Pochi's Theme

05: No clue.. Roas' theme possibly, but I haven't beaten the game, so I would not know.

06: Inn Music

07: Shop Music

08: Death Music

09: Intro Music, but a bit cut down, as the themes of the characters are gone.

0A: Dunno, really fast paced high pitched music. Anyone want to identify it for me?

0B: Boss Music

0C: Overworld Theme

0D: Item Selection Music

0E: Got Item music

0F: Dragon's Music, maybe. Haven't heard it before. No clue.

10: Same has 0A...

11: Silence...

Other bytes play music, but they are more or less the same tunes described above. There MIGHT be differences though, so I'll go through them later.

$310, $311, $312, $313: SHOPS!!! YAY!! The first byte is the first item, and

second is the price of it. The third if the second item, and fourth is price of THAT.

Don't ask me why, but the shop uses different item bytes then the chests do. Basically, subtract eight from them, and you'll get the store bytes.

$315: Music control byte. If you want the music to ALWAYS be the same as defined above, give it the value 00. If you want it to be whatever it last was, use 01 or above.

Byte $30C until...

$31F (of the footer)

I have no idea. Didn't seem to change a thing when I altered them. After I finish my first go around with the footer, I'll come back to these and compare them with other levels. Possibly unused space for special stuff.

$320: The sprites used by a specific enemy. Doesn't change the behavior, but does make it look good or weird.

For best results, use the values 41, 51, 61, or 71. These will reference the normal enemies, provided you set $301 properly. Here's a list of things that won't come up gliched with this, but aren't normal enemies.

01: Another clone of you, with your arm normal.

11: A clone of your character with arm upraised, like you're going to shoot something.

21: The Magic attack of your current character

31: Pretty useless...

41: Standard Enemy

51: Standard Enemy

61: Standard Enemy

71: Standard Enemy

81-D1: Items

E1: Erm... A cloud. An invincible cloud, that you can't touch. Wow.

F1: The shopkeeper and innkeeper. It sometimes turns into a monster egg, and dies sorta gliched.

I don't recommend using something for the second nibble (as in, in BA, A is the second nibble) other than 1. 5, 9, and D don't do anything terrible (heck, I can't tell the difference between them when used. I'm 90% certain these can easily be used interchangably.) Also, you can see the graphics that were loaded by use of the pattern tables in NESticle.

$321: The palette of an enemy! YAY!! I'm getting closer to finding there enemy data! This is which of the four sprite palettes the enemy uses.

If you use 00 as this, it'll use the current character's palette.

*Interesting... Use 11 as $320, and 00 as $321 to get a clone of your character as the enemy.

$322: X-Coordinate of enemy.

$323: Y-Coordinate of enemy.

$324: The first byte plus one seems to be the HP of the enemy

$325: Damage on contact of enemy.

$326: Death Sprite (Use the same four upper bits as the sprites for best results.)

$327: Another sprite used by a specific enemy.

$328: Behavior of the enemy. (YES! I found it!)

$329: The speed of the enemy.

From what I can tell, a three-byte buffer zone is in between each enemy "capsule", and then the next one begins.

$3E0-$3EF: Background palette!!!! Really helpful, as you can now change the level décor! The offsets $7F0, $7F4, $7F8, and $7FC do not seem to change anything, but they're there anyway. Note, each of these palettes correspond with any palettes mentioned earlier, the first one is 00, second 01, third 02, and fourth 03. Mainly used for stuff in level data

$3F0-$3FF: Sprite palette! The first four don't change anything, and neither do, $804, $808, and $80C. These correspond to almost any palette in the footer, especially for enemies/treasure chests. 00 is character palette (changes depending on current character), and the other three are 01, 02, 03, respectively, in four byte groups.

Graphics: I originally only bothered to work with the graphics to find out where level, character, or other interesting data WASN'T, but, for want of content, I catalogued the graphics. This may be a blessing, as it might help me decipher some of the bytes in level editing.

$20000 - $23FFF: The normal level graphics, for structures and stuff. A lot of things seem to appear twice which may allow graphics hacks to use more space.

$24000 - $24FFF: Mainly graphics for the Dragon, but some misc other graphics. Don't ask me why they are here. There also seems to be some symbol, anyone want to clue me in?

$25000 - 253FFF: Items and Weapons.

$25400 - $271FF: Mostly fonts (and there seem to be a high number of them), but maybe other stuff too.)

$27200 - $278FF: Titles Screen graphics. It's that simple.

$28400 - $2BFFF: Enemy sprites. They are stored like this:

$Byte 1: Top (My) left

$Byte 2: Bottom Left

$Byte 3: Top Right

$Byte 4: Bottom Right

$2C000 - $2CFFF: Boss graphics, I think.

$2D000 - $2DE00: The graphics of the people inside the house. Unless it's used when you beaten the game, most of these seem pretty unused... And there are even sprites of the grandparents!

Character Data:

With MUCHO thanks to SnowBro, I was able to convert game genie codes into editable data! YAY!!!

Byte 1: Jump

Byte 2: Power

Byte 3: ??? This one is odd... ALSO affects strength, but to a much weirder degree. I'd leave it alone, it seems to glich things. I do know that it is NOT how you give someone Poichi's immunity to monsters. That's a bummer, as it's the only attribute to this characters I'm unable to edit. =(

Byte 4: Range

Xemn: $1FFAB

Menya: $1FFAD

Roas: $1FFAF

Lyll: $1FFB3

Poci: $1FFB7

Items:

This details what characters can equip what items. Two bytes per character, and it uses bits. A 0 means it cannot equip it, and a 1 means it can. Read it left to right, top to bottom. So the first byte details the top row, the second the bottom.

Xemn: $1FFBB

Menya: $1FFBD

Roas: $1FFBF

Lyll: $1FFC1

Pochi: $1FFC3

Palettes?!?

I think I've found the character palettes! YAY!!!

For colour references, http://www.zophar.net/trans/docs/paletdat.html. The chart there REALLY helps. Oh, I wouldn't try editing the 0F at the beginning of each one... Affects other things too. But a good thing about this game is not much ELSE is affected.  (By the way, that document is Toma's  I'm just linking to it because of that colour chart.)

Xemn: $1FFC5

Menya: $1FFC9

Roas: $1FFCD

Lyll: $1FFD1

Pochi: $1FFD5

Well, hope I proved helpful to you!

By Netbrian. You can contact me at netbrian@aol.com, and ask me questions, bug me about data, etc. If you have something I don't have here, E-Mails are nice. Ask before using on your website, k?

Legacy of the Wizard and all names used here are trademarks of Broderbund Software Inc. and Falcom Software.