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DS development > taking apart a rom

#149537 - fatman999 - Mon Jan 21, 2008 9:29 pm

ok, so i legally own a rom of lost magic and want to take it apart so that i can look at the code of the touch screen input and the graphics to get some coding examples and wanted to know if it is possible to take a rom apart and what tools i would need
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#149538 - Kyoufu Kawa - Mon Jan 21, 2008 9:35 pm

Now why would you do that? The best you'll get from that is a probably hard to read disassembly, while there's plenty touch screen and graphics sample code all over the 'tubes.

#149541 - simonjhall - Mon Jan 21, 2008 9:56 pm

Ditto -----^
Pulling apart and then understanding a program which has no debugging info (eg code) is very difficult. If you do want to have a go, extract the separate programs from the rom with objcopy and then convert them to elf files. Then fire up IDA Pro (not cheap though) and get going!
Make sure you have a pen and paper handy to take notes.
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#149558 - tepples - Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:16 pm

Unlike most commercial GBA games, commercial DS games have a file system (commonly called NitroFS) appended to them. Because of this file system, it might actually be easier to find the assets (models, textures, maps, sounds, text, etc.) in a DS game than in a GBA game. But gbadev.org isn't a ROM hacking site, so I'll leave it at that.

(back to topic)
If you want examples of some specific coding technique, and the libnds examples available through devkitPro Updater aren't enough, please let us know.
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#149564 - fatman999 - Tue Jan 22, 2008 12:09 am

the reason i wanted lost magics touch screen input is because it was so advanced and complicated , as soon as you wrote something on the touch screen it compared it to all of the pictures in its database and than activated what ever it was supposed to activate based on what picture the users input was closest to
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#149565 - tepples - Tue Jan 22, 2008 12:14 am

So what you really want is gesture recognition. Try searching the forum for the word "gesture".
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.