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* Final Fantasy V advance : Sound Restoration Hack  *
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** By Bregalad **
November 4th, 2010
Version 2.0a

1) Introduction

While Final Fantasy V advance is a pretty decent port of the SNES game Final Fantasy V, it's pretty much arguable that the sound port was bad. In Final Fantasy Anthology for the PlayStation, it already sounded significantly less good than the SNES version, but there it's really not acceptable to ruin this soundtrack like that.

While the the original SNES has 38 instruments, they made the remake with hundreds of different instruments, for the large majority sounding much worse. New instruments sounds very aggressive and fuzzy, and just completely ruin the feel of the original songs in most tracks. Not only that, but the new samples are longer and take much more ROM space, for a total of about 3 minutes of samples at 18kHz. When I think the SNES samples only takes about 20 seconds in total at a similar rate, using them Square could have used the last 2.5 minutes of ROM space for a cool streamed intro with a real orchestra, etc... When I think about that it really make me want to push the programmers of FF5 advance in their face. But instead of this I might as well hack the game to fix that problem.

After this original hack, I found a new technique to "mushack" GBA games, by inserting completely new songs instead of just altering existing sequences. I used this technique for my Final Fantasy VI Advance hack, then I was really unsatisfied by my old FF5 advance hack, so I decided to re-do it completely from scratch using this new faster and cleaner technique.

NOTE : This hack was tested meant to be played on real hardware. It will work in emulators, but the GBA sound tends to be very poorly emulated.

2) Changes that make this hack.

- All musical tunes were completely re-sequenced to match the SNES originals as closely as possible
- The sound engine was configured to use less CPU time, to prevent the game from slowing down during battle animations
- The sound is not in stereo any longer. This was sacrificed for the above point.
- A small set of SFX now matches the SNES originals, others were just synchronised better with the on-screen animations.
- A streamed music, preformed by Tokyo's philharmonic orchestra plays during the intro. (The synchronisation is fixed since the original hack)
- There is another surprise

3) Bugs

When playing music, an instrument can play too early/too late randomly or not play at all.
This bug is in FF5's sound engine, and it was already there before my hack so I'm for nothing. Please don't blame me about that. This is very rare tough.

4) FAQ

Q: I've never played the SNES version of FF5, or even any SNES game, should I use this hack ?
A: Yes. Most of the instruments of FF5 advance sounds horrible anyway. Even if SNES instruments doesn't sounds incredibly good by modern standards, they definitely sound better. So even if you never played the original SNES game and want to play FF5 advance, I strongly recommend you apply this patch on your ROM. However, to fully hear all sounds, you must use headphones that are able to reproduce bass sounds that the small GBA/SP/DS speakers can't.
Original GBA's and DS have a headphone jack, but for the SP you'll have to use a stupid adapter (stupid because mine broke). This patch also fixes some lagging problems.

Q: Does this hack affect anything else than the music in any way ?
A: Yes, the original game was lagging during many battle animations (Shiva, Holy, ....) and even sometimes in town, due to terrible programing. My hack fixes most of that by reducing CPU usage for sound, but the game still lags during the last battle and during screen fade in/out.

Q: Will you make a hack that restores the font/dialogue boxes/translation/etc.. of the SNES game ?
A: No I won't and I'm unable to. If you want that you should as well play the SNES original.

Q: Will you make a hack that restores the music of any other game in the Final Fantasy Advance series ?
A: A similar hack for Final Fantasy 6 advance also exists. FF1&2 and FF4 advance probably doesn't sound bad enough for the need of such a hack in my opinion, but if I get hundreds of requests I might reconsider. This is also unlikely because those games were re-re-released again on PSP and DS respectively, while FF5 and FF6 weren't re-re-released since the GBA re-release.

Q: Will you make a hack that restores the music of any other SNES game ported to the GBA ?
A: Most likely not, unless they have a similar music player such as the one found in the Final Fantasy Advance series that allows to listen the whole soundtrack easily.

Q: I want to improve this hack/make my own hack for another GBA game. How do you do it ?
A: Before contacting me read my GBA sappy sound engine doccument, available on http://www.romhacking.net

Q: Will you send me a ROM ?
A: No, it's a IPS patch for legal reasons. You should be big enough to find a way to get a ROM by yourself.

Q: I can't apply your IPS patch to my ROM / It crashes when loading.
Q: On which ROM should the patch apply ?
A: You should use an European version of Final Fantasy V advance only. The reason for this is that you can play it in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, so more people are targeted by the hack. I did it on a file I dumped myself with my GBA linker, and it should be compatible with ROMs floating around the undernet. It won't work with a USA or Japanese ROM (but saves seems to be compatible, although don't blame me if they aren't).

Q: Is it normal that the IPS patch is that large ?
A: Yes, the patch is about 7MB large. The streamed orchestral intro, which uses about 3.5MB of space, is the reason for that. The remaining 3.5MB are various changes in sound samples and music data.

5) Versions

2.0a (November 4th 2011) : Fixes a crashing bug in version 2.0 (the game was crashing when a particular song should be played)

2.0 (October 29th 2011) : Completely redone the hack from scratch.

1.1 (September 6th 2010) : Another update. Fixes minor errors of version 1.0 and new (unreleased) songs are inserted in the ROM. Polyphony increased to 10 (hopefully doesn't cause too much slowdowns ?)

1.0 (July 6th 2009) : All music tunes are fixed and sound very close to their SNES counterpart, 10 sound effects are replaced by something close to their SNES version. First version to become public

0.9 (June 25th 2009) : All music instruments replaced or copied. Some songs still sounds wrong.

6) Special thanks :

- Square for making the Final Fantasy series

- Nobuo Uematsu for composing the music of this game

- Whoever at Square Enix who decided to implement the cool music player available once you beat the game (this hack wouldn't have been possible without it)

- Autors of GoldWave

- Autors of Audacity

- Tokyo's orchestra for the streamed intro

- ipatix for supporting me in reverse engineering the sappy engine

7) Special non-thanks :
- TOSE for sucking at making ports of Final Fantasy games