The official guide on PSA ​

This will be a (somewhat) huge guide that will cover all subject regarding the program PSA, made by Phantom Wings. Currently the Guide is still small, because the program is only out for about 2 days. I will do my best to keep the guide up-to-date and in the end make it as complete as possible.

(Currently I'm still in the USA, lacking access to a Wii, so progress might be slowed)

IMPORTANT LINK:

Contents

-Important Things

-Terms and abbreviations

-Installation and first time startup

-The interface

-Attributes

-Action events

-Specials

-Sub Actions

-Sub Routines

-The Commands

-Links

Important Things

Ok, before we actually get started with PSA, you need to understand some things. Brawl, like most games, use hexadecimal to count. (For those who already know hex, just skip this paragraph.) So in order to use PSA, you need to be able to convert between hexadecimal and decimal. The easiest way to do this is using MS calculator (sorry Mac users). When you have MS calc open, go to View -> Scientific. Now the widow will expand with a couple buttons.

To convert from decimal to hex (I will refer to it as hex from now), check in the upper-left corner if "Dec" is selected. type in a number and click "Hex" in the upper-left. voíla.

To convert the other way round, just select Hex, type the number (you can now also type in letters) and click Dec.

Except Hex numbers, PSA sometimes uses a special number type called Floating Point (FP). When it does I will mention it. To convert between Decimal and FP, go to this link:

http://babbage.cs.qc.edu/IEEE-754/

To convert from Decimal to FP, go to the first of the links it shows up. In the box where it asks to type a number, type the number you want converted, and click "not rounded". Scroll down to "32-bit floating point representation" and the 8-digit number is the FP.

To convert from FP to Decimal, go to the second link it shows. Type in the FP, and click calculate, scroll to where it shows the decimal representation.

Terms and Abbreviations

Those who know the most terms used in PSA can skip this.

Hex – hexadecimal, the counting system used by Brawl.

FP – Floating Point, a way to represent rational numbers

IASA – Interruptible As Soon As. Some attacks can be prematurely interrupted. See "Allow Interrupt" in the command section.

Hitbox – an offensive, invisible bubble that represents attacks (for more on hitboxes, see my post at Brawlplus.net). PSA uses the name "(offensive) collision bubble" for this.

This list is currently very incomplete, but I don't want to put every single term in here, please tell me which I should put up here.

Installation and first time startup

First you will need the actual program:

download and extract the files to a place you can remember.

download and extract this to the "data" folder in side PSA. This contains the actuall data

files of the characters.

with that out of the way, double click the .exe file and you should be good.

The Interface

The interface of PSA looks like this:

Opening files:

go to File -> Open, as you are used to. locate the .pac file where you left it. (should be in the data folder if you did as told in the installation). Keep in mind that you need to use files without a number, so "FitMario.pac" would be correct, while "FitMario01.pac" would not.

Saving:

Saving is under File -> Save. IMPORTANT don't overwrite the original .pac files, since these are your base for everything. IF you managed to overwrite is anyway, redownload it.

To properly save a new file, choose File -> Save As, and pick a descriptive name like "FitMarioTest.pac".

The Buttons

On the lower side of the screen you will find a couple buttons.

Add

Will add a "nop" command on the end of the command list. Note that adding commands is not advised since it can cause memory errors.

Modify

Allows you to modify the currently selected line, both the type of command and the parameters can be edited.