#104869 - pas - Tue Oct 03, 2006 6:35 pm
Hello,
Just another quick question:
Is there a tool that works like Darkfaders NDStool on Gbagames ?
I mean that you can extract the Game Contenst, then maybe edit them and then recompile the game ?
Hope you can help:
Pas
#104891 - tepples - Tue Oct 03, 2006 8:55 pm
Commercial games:
Commercial GBA games do not use a standardized "file system" in the sense that most DS games do. Traditionally, standard file systems are more common on block devices than on word-addressed devices, and unlike the DS Game Card, the GBA Game Pak is a word-addressed memory. The linker can generally put things wherever it wants in the 4 to 32 megabytes of ROM. Even for those developers that recognize the value of a file system, which allows the programmers and asset developers to work more independently, the structure of such a file system varies from company to company.
Homebrew:
A lot of .gba and ds.gba games use GBFS or Zip archives.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#105230 - pas - Fri Oct 06, 2006 9:38 pm
And because they are NOT using a common, standart File System, a Tool like NDStool would not be able to create ?
#105238 - tepples - Fri Oct 06, 2006 10:05 pm
Correct. You'll have to use traditional rom-hacking techniques (see Google) if you want to edit GBA games.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#105243 - pas - Fri Oct 06, 2006 10:31 pm
With Hexeditors maybe ?
#105263 - sgeos - Sat Oct 07, 2006 3:01 am
With a whole lot of research. It depends on what you want do. Do you want to dump all the monster stats, change them and then patch the ROM? I'd dump them to a spreadsheet and write a utility that can patch the ROM using the spreadsheet.
To do this, you'll need to spend (read: waste) a whole lot of time figuring out where the datatable lives and how it is work. I doubt most games protect the ROM datatables with CRC. If they do, you'll have to waste a bunch more time with that. (Unless they use a cook-book solution.) Then you'd have to write extraction and patch utilities- not very hard when you know what you are dealing with.
Wouldn't that be neat- CRC your LUTs and drop checks all over the place. =) I'd flip a "cheater" flag instead of freezing the ROM... ok, thats a lie. If I were to bother I'd do both- just at different places. Soft reset and savefile corruption could be fun too. ("Broken Data - Please Delete") Admittedly, I don't think ROM hacking or hacker prevention schemes are a productive use of time.
Has anyone dropped tamper checks in any of their games? Does this affect debug?
-Brendan