v1.8.4

Superseded. This is an older release; install the latest release instead.

A Reddit tester playing Episode 3 found that at the Zodiac Art Gallery's Fountain Patio, choosing Talk on Ms. Bound opened Larry's scene and his topics instead of hers. He sent his save. It reproduced on 1.8.3 in the emulator, and the same save on the fan ROM talks to her correctly, so it was mine.

The cause was one unit. The talk script for that area holds a four-unit string that is nothing but a command sending the game to the string with her conversation. The command's last argument, that string's number, sits just past the string's declared length, in the slot where a string normally ends with a zero. The fan ROM keeps it there and the engine reads it. The injector rebuilt the entry from the declared lengths and wrote a zero in that slot, which pointed the talk at string 0: Larry's scene. Every release I could still check has it, 1.4.4 and 1.7.0 included.

The rebuild now keeps whatever the fan ROM stores after a string's declared end whenever the string itself is unchanged. Across the whole script the fan ROM stores something there in 11 places. Nine were already kept, one is a stray newline after text I replace, which the game doesn't read, and this was the one I lost. Only two strings in the fan ROM have a command whose arguments run past their declared end, and the other one has a zero there anyway. Read back against 1.8.3, one unit in one file changes.

None of the seven audits could see this: they all read strings up to their declared length and stop. A new one, audits/audit_tails.py, compares those slots with the fan ROM and reports 1.8.3's lost unit; its fixture in audit_fixtures.py proves it can fail. Checked in the emulator with the tester's own save: talking to Ms. Bound now opens her conversation in Capcom's words.

Reference sha256 for 1.8.4 is 3bcd80c0....