News and Such

Greetings retro video game fans!

April has been a fairly productive month. I’ve released the fifth revision of the Wizardry 1st Trilogy mod. As I have continued to play it and document the changes (more on that later), I have tightened things up, streamlined a few more things, and most recently, increased the range of values for character attributes. This will likely be the final update, until I come up with a change worthy of an increment in version. Man, would it be nice to come up with a Item Property dialogue for items… that kind of thing might be over my head, though.

I also just released version 1.1 of Ludmeister’s Wizards and Warriors mod. As many issues as this game may suffer from, it is just fun. I have succeeded in attaching the WinDBG debugger to the game while it was running, and managed to modify a few key aspects related to skill development. I also incrementally increased the spawn rate for the monsters (though Seldom is still not too often). Set the game to “Often” for a real good challenge .

April has also seen a few site updates. Mostly I’ve been hard at work with getting the information pages up for my mod of Wizardry 1st Trilogy: Story of Llylgamyn. Check out the new pages dedicated to Characters, Magic, Items, and Monsters!

It seems that as I’ve been scanning my code in an effort to post information concerning character development and such for the rebalancing mod for Wizardry 1st Trilogy, I’ve been finding little bugs here and there that have needed fixing. We’re now up to the 3rd revision of the v1.0 release, and if you haven’t downloaded revision 3 (if you downloaded a version of the mod before 10:30 EST on March 30th) you need to update your ROM to this version. It’s perfectly fine to play any existing campaigns with a new ROM.

Today has been a busy day today at JeffLudwig.com!

A new mod has been released. This time I’ve improved a Super Nintendo compilation of early Wizardry titles, called Wizardry 1st Trilogy: Story of Llylgamyn. Gideon Zhi of Aeon Genesis Translations translated this game from Japanese to English a few years back, and without his expertise in Japanese and ROM hacking I would never have begun this project. All three titles (Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord -> “Overload”… ha!, Legacy of Llylgamyn, and Knight of Diamonds) have been improved. To see what’s changed and download the mod, visit the Wizardry 1 – 2 – 3 download page.

Today, I have also released a long-due update of Ludmeister’s Might and Magic 7 mod. It removes the arbitrary changes that the original version made to the locations of skill trainers and the like, and now supports Grayface’s MM7 patch! Trust me, that’s very cool. Take a look at what Grayface has accomplished. Also updated is the Information Spreadsheet; a few of you have let me know, and rightly so, that the previous iteration was simply incorrect on numerous points. It should be fixed now.

Just a quick note to say that version 2.1 of the Mod of Balance for Final Fantasy Dawn of Souls has been released. It fixes all known bugs to date, and provides a bonus for those who have felt that the gold shortage for weaponry was too extreme: weapons and armor have been completely re-valued, and in most cases that meant lowering their sale prices. Clicky to see the changes made, and download the current version. Version 2.1 is fully backward compatible with version 2.0.

I will update the weapons and armor pages with information for the new version soon.

And, now onto a happier topic.

I’ve provided a much more in-depth set of instructions concerning how to get Wizards and Warriors running on Windows XP or later. Well, actually, it’s how to get my mod running but you can skip the steps on extracting my mod to the directory if you just want to use stock Wizards and Warriors. Not only that, but I’ve also provided the necessary patches to do this. I hope this service helps out!

As a matter of convenience, ever since this site was launched I had been releasing my patches to various ROMs and executable files in .exe format (not .ips). This is because I had a tool which I used to convert the .ips patches I created to .exe format (called IPS2EXE). This convenience meant that you didn’t have to have any special know-how to patch your files; you simply needed to run the .exe and select the proper file to patch. You did not need a separate .ips patching program.

Unfortunately, while harmless (when run, they only patched the file you specified) those executable patches created by IPS2EXE have set off anti-virus/malware warnings. They were not flagged by ESET Personal Security, or Microsoft Security Essentials, or Trend Micro, but at present I am aware that Kaspersky Anti-Virus, at minimum, detected them as “Riskware”, but “not-a-virus”. I have therefore decided to remove all offending executable patches from all downloads on this site, and from my listings on Romhacking.net. All of this has been completed.

I hope that these measures, coupled with the transparency and seriousness with which I have documented this fiasco, helps to assure you that I am committed to giving you risk-free downloads, and providing the very highest quality that I can. Thank you for your patience and goodwill.

Hello video game fans!

Some of you have been requesting that I post detailed information of what has changed in my Breath of Fresh Fire mod. I have been wanting to do that for some time, and within the last week or so finally did the screenshots necessary and opened up the mod in my hex editor to do the necessary research. There’s info there on the player characters, weapons, armor, and an exhaustive list of shaman combinations.

Also of particular interest is the presence of a new hack on my site. My Monster Trainer mod for Dragon Quest 5: Hand of the Heavenly Bride has been released today. I’ve had a ton of fun playing Dragon Quest 5 and planning out the changes represented in the mod, and I wanted to share that with you all. Click on the link above to read about the patch.

Cheers!

It has come to my attention via a concerned downloader who uses Kaspersky security software that it detects some of the modification downloads available on this site (and elsewhere on romhacking.net) as malware (or “riskware”). What it is detecting is the .EXE files within the downloads, which is an executable patch for the ROMs to be modified; it is basically an IPS patch that has been converted to EXE format so you do not require an IPS patching program to apply the mod. What Kaspersky detects exactly is called not-a-virus:HEUR:Risktool.Win32.Patcher.gen. Thus, according to Kaspersky, the download is not a virus, but rather a “patcher”.

Here is a screenshot of Kaspersky detecting this:

Hopefully for those of you using Kaspersky, this will serve to calm your fears. You may also want to read my disclaimers, or sound off on this topic.

Not content to stay within the Final Fantasy/Wizardry/Might and Magic type of RPG, I’ve struck again. This time, Ultima 3 is the benefactor. Hopefully Ultima 3: A New Exodus makes this highly promising NES title very accessible and ultimately much more fun to play.

I have to admit that I have not had the opportunity to play the mod all the way through, but there should not be any showstopping bugs. As always, please feel free to tell me what you think, and if you happen to make it through the mod, please let me know that as well!

The Custom Classes mod has received quite an improvement. The Necromancer, Cannoneer, Oracle, and Gladiator jobs are now available after the Earth crystal! And that’s not all, go to the Final Fantasy 5 Downloads Page to see what has changed, and see whether or not you would want to download the new version!