I had tried to get into ROM hacking a few times before Chrono Trigger, but it never really stuck. The standard method of start a tutorial for a game the author liked and learn from there didn't hook me as much as changing a game I was actually interested in.
It started back in 2008 when I heard of a little hack called Prophet's Guile, made on a site called Chrono Compendium (anyone here ever heard of that?). I found the Kajar Laboratories board, and started peeking around the CT hacking topics.
My first contribution was to the 6 letter names project. I found some small information on how the menu worked, and things progressed a little.
My next contribution was to the 8th character project. At the time it had discontinued due to an update to Geiger's offsets guide that corrected “incomplete character data” to “tech to learn next” and “techs learned.” I found a way to move character data to free space and stick in an extra data set while preserving that tech data. It wasn't a super huge discovery, but all of us working on the project were still new at hacking, so it was a stumbling block at the time.
I was slowly learning a lot more about hacking with the community was forced to move underground after the Crimson Echoes incident. Unfortunately we lost a great hacker in that.
Since the original tech editor for Chrono Trigger could no longer be continued, I started my own. At first it was a standalone program, but after two versions it became a Temporal Flux plugin, allowing it to expand techs beyond their original size limitations.
I slowly expanded my list of Temporal Flux plugins, allowing most known data to be edited from within Temporal Flux.
My understanding of Chrono Trigger's internals has gone from “That's a pointer” to having a fairly decent documentation of battle code slowly developing, and a working understanding of 65816 Assembly.
I've discovered a couple bugs here and there, but most don't come up unless you've hacked the game. The biggest one is that HP to 1 attacks disable Barrier and Shield status for the rest of the battle, not just for the attack (otherwise they wouldn't always be HP to 1).
When the Architect of Kajar status was first given out to hackers, I was quite proud, especially since I never thought I'd do anything worth getting Guru status. I was way off on that one.
In the end, my goal, or my Dream of Zeal, is to completely document Chrono Trigger, and make as much of the game as possible easily editable with readily available tools.
My tech editor is almost complete, and should be done except for updating unknowns in the next month or two. The largest delay on that is updating Super Command descriptions to remove the unknowns and incorrect descriptions, such as all the “freezes game” ones.
The 8th character patch remains close to being done, mostly working out a few bugs and getting both a fresh ROM and existing hack version completed.
After that I plan to make an AI editor, and will look into Sound and Music hacking, and an expandable sprite assembly editor.
Maybe in another 10 years I'll have to look for a new game to hack.
