SpritesMind.Net

Since I got my Sega CD I've been bummed that I can't play the third scenario of Shining Force CD on my CD unit. As I'd imagine everyone here knows, SFCD requires that the first two completed scenarios are saved to internal or backup cart, to allow starting the 3rd scenario. But, the save files are too big to save all 3 to the internal BRAM, so you need to have the backup cart. I have a Megacart but you cannot save BRAM directly to it, only transfer to it.

I feel that a hack for this should be very small. The routine the reads the saved files simply needs to always set the ram address to a value the that program uses to say both first completed scenarios are found.

Of course, the hard part is finding where this code is. Fortunately, I do have a BRAM file for Gens that has the first 2 scenario's saved. I would like to get it working in an emu first and then burn the modded files to a CD.

I'm a proficient NES and FDS translation hacker. I am somewhat familiar with the 68000 as I took a class on it 100 years ago on Macs when I was in college. I think I even still have my notes. But, maybe I'm crazy to want to attempt this.

What would people suggest I do to accomplish this?
- What development emulator should I use?
- What documents and/or pages should I read? I did download the megaCD manual that has a number of scans of pages, but it's not easy to search.
- Which file format for the CD should I use? I assume bin/cue would not be good.
- Would anyone be willing to work with me on this?

I had thought about doing this. But since I am not a big Shining Force fan it wasn't worth it to me. But it would be cool if someone did do this.

Do you think you only need to hack something like
I assume if they saved the entire scenarios it's to use some data of this scenario no ?
like isOptionalItemFound

I don't know how SFCD works but I doubt it would as easy.
Else, you'll have 2 thinks to find
1/ the code to patch
2/ the correct way to create a valid iso (crc, files sort, ...)