Part 1: QUICK GUIDE TO DOING YOUR OWN CHALLENGE RUN

Mega64 posted:

Since several people are considering doing runs, here's the cheats I've been using. This is using the "Code" part of the Cheat menu in VBA.

All Jobs for Bartz:

0200DF7C:FFFFFFFF

All Abilities for Bartz:

0200E054:FFFF
0200E056:FFFF
0200E058:FFFF
0200E05A:FFFF
0200E05C:FFFF
0200E05E:FFFF
0200E060:FFFF
0200E062:FFFF
0200E064:FFFF
0200E066:FFFF
0200E068:FFFF
0200E06A:FFFF
0200E06C:FFFF
0200E06E:FFFF
0200E070:FFFF
0200E072:FFFF

Lenna/Galuf/Faris always at 0HP (disable to revive them for plot reasons or whatever)

0200DB28:0000
0200DB8C:0000
0200DBF0:0000

If you want other codes (like if you want to use Lenna or Faris or Galuf for your solo guy or to change their names or whatever the hell you want to do) this guide is a great resource for doing so.

Quick and Dirty Technical Advice:

* The Tech Support Fort has a ton of great advice for doing Let's Plays. You'll get much better advice there than I'm going to give here. Definitely check out the resources if you don't want to just jump in. Otherwise...

* Regular VBA is pretty bad for videos since its AVI recording feature has audio desync. I know VBA-rr doesn't have this since that's what I use. No clue about VBA-M or other GBA emulators. Experiment a bit and see if your emulator of choice has this issue.

* Best thing to do is use the built-in AVI Recording feature of your emulator of choice. For codec, use Lagarith, which is lossless and will give you pretty small file sizes compared to other lossless codecs. Then you can take the screenshots from the video however you want. I use AvsPmod with AviSynth, but you can just use VirtualDub or your media player of choice as well.

* If you don't want to/can't record video, use IrfanView to take screenshots with the press of a button. You should be able to do similar things as well with your emulator of choice, I assume. You want your images in PNG preferably.

* After getting your screenshots, you can easily resize them all at once in IrfanView using its Batch Conversion (under File menu, or just press B). Do Batch Conversion (and rename if you want), Output as PNG, and enable Advanced Options. The main things are "Resize" at 200% of original size (or 300% if you want larger images) and "Use Resample Function" is unchecked. This is a great guide for using IrfanView.

* Use Rightload to upload all images at once. I recommend using LPix for your image host since it's designed for hosting Let's Play images. This is Rightload and this is the LPix plug-in.

* Practice a workflow so future updates aren't a pain in the ass.

Hopefully it'll be a quick and dirty enough start to get you started on a FF5 run. I don't recommend this process for future LP's personally, but for a megathread it's fine. Good luck!