I have been playing a super-extensive ROM hack of Final Fantasy VI, the T-Edition, by a gentleman named tsushiy, which is available here (Japanese only).
Things have been going smoothly for a while and I’m about 30 hours into the game. I’m now in the World of Ruin and now looking to take advantage of the item upgrades offered by the Dragon’s Neck Coliseum.
Normally you can easily find guides to the Coliseum on GameFAQs or Final Fantasy VI-specific fan sites. My quandary comes as a result of the many changes made by tsushiy. Aside from adding tons of items, tsushiy has also modified the stakes of the Coliseum. He has changed which monsters you face, the victor’s spoils, and even the behavior of the battles. So all those Coliseum guides are fairly useless for the T-Edition.
Luckily I got some sagely advice from Mato of starmen.net fame, a thoroughly accomplished ROM hacker himself. Mato suggested using BNE files, included by tsushiy in the T-Edition package. These BNE files, when used by the BNE2 program, offer an analysis of the ROM data. That includes, among other things, the Coliseum information I needed.
Unfortunately, documentation on how to use BNE2 in English is hard to come by. So after tinkering and finally figuring it out, hopefully I can provide some help. I’ll be following up this post with a dedicated post about using BNE2, so that people who just need the information won’t have to sit through a rambling description of why I got into it.
UPDATE: The short howto has been posted.