Today’s entry is based on stuff that happened yesterday, but I’m counting it for today because what happened then bled into the midnight hour. Basically it’s the first time in a while that I’ve gone through the process of trying to get a particular thing to work on my computer. I left out the details about it in yesterday’s entry, but now I can’t discuss it without spilling the beans.

I want to play FF9, but I want to play it a very specific way. When I played the game all those years ago I played it with a cheat that edits the player characters in battle based on their position. That code of course was used to have Freya as a permanent fixture in my battle party. I tried many codes and values last night, I even tried different emulators including the one that solely exists on my old Amazon Fire tablet. Getting that up and running after being turned off for years was its own headache, but it works now. The problem is that I know which code works to edit the party members, but I don’t know what parameter points to Freya specifically. I don’t have several lifetimes to try over 60000 possible combinations so I search and search through the internet to find these values but no one else seems to know. Every list of GameShark codes for this game is the same, some don’t even have the specific cheat I’m using. Another problem I’m facing is that there are apparently two of these cheats that have the same effect. The primary one listed on gamhacking.org does not work and I don’t know why. Probably because the code itself doesn’t match the pattern of any of the other GameShark codes for the game and doesn’t produce any effect.

So what I’m left with is either finding the right value, which I will probably have to ask for in some old message board, or rewrite the code that is meant to work with only a handful of possible values to punch in. My first step will be trying out the emu on my tablet to see if by some miracle that code works on there. But then I’d enter a rabbit hole of trying to find out why the code works on there but not on the same bin file with the same cheat code, running on a different emulator.

And so, that’s my work cut out for me, I have done stuff like this before. When I was younger I messed with my action replay for the DS all the time coming up with new codes that did different things. I even booted up Spyro 3 with cheat engine active and learned what values had what functions all by myself. I will keep going and I will persevere until I’ve exhausted every possible solution

As a conclusion to all this mess, I have figured it out, and am happily playing the game with rat lady