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Beginners > Inspecting working memory to write a bot

#178199 - xconspirisist - Sun Jul 20, 2014 9:05 pm

Hi folks. I'm very interested in writing a little project with vba-m - A pokemon [yellow] bot, that plays (and completes) the game from start to finish. I enjoyed playing the games as a kid, and now-a-days enjoy a slightly more productive past-time - writing AI related personal projects as a personal challenge.

Part of this personal challenge is that I'll need to learn how to read (and potentially, but probably not necessarily, manipulate) the memory of a running ROM. I know that I can start vba-m with gdb, but I've not even looked into the first step and have come to the forums to ask for any advice that could save me some research time.

Architecturally, I think the bot code to play the Pokemon games would have what gameplay state am I in as the first step - character dialog, free roaming, battle and hopefully I can find this by simply reading a few fixed addresses of working memory. Eventually I can build a controller plugin which issues top, down, left, up, etc. I've managed to compile vba-m with no problems (cmake rocks) and my platform is Linux. Is this enough useful information to ask for general help?

Many thanks in advance for your advice Wink