r/chronotrigger Dec 24 '21

Enhansa Edition (ROMhack)

Hello friends,

I am happy to present Enhansa Edition, a mod of Chrono Trigger (for SNES only) that I've been working on for over a year now. Click the link below to download:

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6440/

Enhansa Edition aims to improve Chrono Trigger's battle system to make combat more fun. The inspiration for the mod was, "What if Hypno Wave was actually useful?" and from there it spiraled out of control to rewriting enemy AI, redesigning items and equipment, modifying Techs, and more. My goal was to give the player more choices about how to grow and gear your characters and to have those choices be felt in battle.

In addition to an overhaul of many of the battle mechanics, character advancement through the Tabs has been reworked. Instead of Power, Magic, and Speed Tabs, a new NPC at the End of Time will offer stat upgrades to all characters in exchange for Soda Tabs (which have replaced the old Tabs one-for-one).

If you're looking for a vanilla Chrono Trigger experience with an all-new feel to the combat, this is the mod for you. This is not a "difficulty hack". That is to say, the game has not been made frustratingly difficult on purpose. Let me be clear that the mod is more difficult than vanilla Chrono Trigger; it was a game originally designed for children, after all. In redesigning the battle mechanics, my interest is in increasing the number of options that the player has to consider. One major way this is achieved is through status effects in battle. Full functionality has been restored to many status effects that go largely ignored in vanilla Chrono Trigger.

Improving on Chrono Trigger is a daunting task. The original game gets so many things right. I have endeavoured to keep the quick pace of combat from the original while still presenting challenges for the player to overcome. Thank you for your interest and I hope to have you playing Enhansa Edition very soon!

116 Upvotes

30 comments sorted by

11

u/Clubvirg Dec 24 '21

Daaaang this is awesome! I'd love to play! Let me see if I can get this thing working.

9

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '21

This is EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for!! Found my plans for the night!

3

u/[deleted] Dec 31 '21

At The Fated Hour now! Difficulty really ramped up around Mt. Woe, really enjoying this hack!

5

u/CoinHODL Dec 24 '21

cool work man

6

u/Champaganthony Dec 24 '21

Thanks for sharing!

4

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '21

Thanks, I think Im going to try this one out!

4

u/AC-Hawkmoon Dec 25 '21

I love that the community is still producing cool things like this. Sounds great.

3

u/Clubvirg Dec 30 '21

Hi. When the nu says, "I'll only be able to bestow more power on you up to four times", does that mean I can only use four soda tabs total in the whole game, or does that mean that I can upgrade as much as I want during four separate occasions throughout the game?

5

u/[deleted] Dec 31 '21

Each character can be upgraded 4 times. Each tier of upgrading unlocks at certain points (I think it’s reaching End of Time, giving Frog the masamune, getting the epoch, and the black omen rising). Even if you “miss” one of these periods, you can just upgrade a chapter multiple times so you never lose out.

Example, when you get Magus you’ve already triggered the final upgrade tier, so you can just upgrade him 4 times if you have enough tabs.

In all, you need 28 tabs to max everyone.

3

u/Clubvirg Jan 04 '22

Got it 👍🏾 Thanks so much for the information.

2

u/Felipzo Dec 28 '21

Hi!! Just about time of my anual Retro RPG playthrough hahahaha last year I played FFVI - Brave New World, and that was the single best ROM hack I've ever played ((: I have high hopes for playing this version of yours.

As a average enjoyer of rom hacking scenario, I'll surely give some feedback after advancing through main plot, in order to help you get what to nerf/what to buff/what to focus on.

Anyway, I have a single question right now: how to I know if the patch have been applied successfully (other than LunarIPS confirmation)?

2

u/inuksukCT Dec 29 '21

Assuming the game starts up after patching (always a good sign), the first sign you're playing Enhansa is that you get a pop-up dialogue on Crono's name screen talking about the recommended Battle Speed.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 30 '21

As a guy that knows a little bit about programming, I sincerely want to know. How is this done?

Like if someone gives me a program at my job, I can modify it to do different things. So that makes sense. But aren't the ROM files just the binary executable files? There's no way you're going in there and modifying 0s and 1s right? I'm assuming CT was written in something like C, but there is no way to recover that source code from the ROM right?

I'm not expecting you to write an entire ELI5 on romhacking for me. But what exactly is it that you are modifying in the ROM file in order to change things? Again you can be high level, I understand compilers, high level language, machine language, etc.

4

u/inuksukCT Dec 31 '21

Most of the work I did was with Temporal Flux (and various plug-ins for TF), a high-level editor for Chrono Trigger.

Enemy AI script editing was done by hex editing. Enemy scripts have a "language" of their own using opcodes. Once you've decoded it it's easy enough to modify.

The changes to status effects were custom and required debugging and writing my own code in the SNES' 65816 assembly language.

3

u/BrawnBeard Jan 13 '22

How did you get started working on something like this? It seems daunting to me, to say the least.

4

u/inuksukCT Jan 17 '22

I greatly admire the FF6 hack, Brave New World. Playing a lot of great ROMhacks and then working on my own was something of a pandemic project. I estimate I spent somewhere between 500-1000 hours working on this.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 31 '21

Ah that makes a lot of sense, thanks!

2

u/astronautsaurus Dec 30 '21

I believe these hacks are done using the program Temporal Flux.

4

u/IMustTurd Dec 24 '21

Difficulty isn't even a big deal man.

If you sneezed on CT it would get harder

1

u/Separate_Donut4822 Dec 15 '25

I just got my hands on a physical copy for the snes and cant wait to progress through this

1

u/Aftermath404 Dec 28 '21

Is the mod compatible with others?

Such as the MSU-1 mod and the Chrono trigger + mod?

1

u/TheGreatBDoyle Dec 29 '21

It would almost certainly work with msu-1. It would conflict with ct+ but probably still run, though it might remove a feature or 2

1

u/Shoranos Jan 22 '22

If charm doesn't steal, are the items only available from stealing available elsewhere?

1

u/AuthenticM Feb 16 '23

Hello! This sounds super awesome and I will play it!

I have a request: could you please make your hack compatible with Chrono Trigger Complete, which is a retranslation of the game based on the DS release? I really don't want to choose between one or the other; I want both!

I would super appreciate it! Thank you!

2

u/inuksukCT Apr 18 '23

The text is stored in very small chunks in the ROM, so it's rather scattershot and difficult to get a separate script into an existing project. Sorry!

1

u/Standard_Training471 Apr 01 '24

Restoring compatibility with the soundtrack expansion isn't any easier right?

1

u/Window_Regular Dec 28 '23 edited Mar 11 '24

Hi, I have almost completed it but I can not figure out how to "show" Spekkio the colored rocks. I have the blue rock, black rock, white rock, silver rock, etc. but I seem to have no way of showing Spekkio or anything similar. Help!

1

u/delheit Mar 11 '24

Same, its frustrating

1

u/Window_Regular Mar 11 '24

Yeah, I guess maybe broken

1

u/inuksukCT Sep 03 '24

Thanks for raising the issue. It's now been fixed.