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Coding > Turning a raw binary gba rom into elf, for gdb?

#20552 - BeeWarloc - Thu May 13, 2004 12:40 am

For reverse engineering and research purposes, there are some carts that I would like to inspect.. And the vba disassembler works somehow, but I can't find a way to set breakpoints and stuff there..

What would be perfect was to be able to attach insight/gdb to it (using assembler view, and gdb also supports external symbol tables). However, gdb won't open the raw gba file, so I need to convert it to an elf binary..

Somebody who knows how to do this?

Thanks in Advance :)

-Karsten

#20578 - torne - Thu May 13, 2004 12:53 pm

You can't really convert a binary to an ELF file because all the sectioning information has been discarded. objcopy might be persuaded to dump the whole lot into one but .text segment (read its info file) but this is unlikely to help you tremendously. =)

#20590 - BeeWarloc - Thu May 13, 2004 2:42 pm

Ok, thanks, I'll check objcopy out..

Any other tricks on disassembling roms?

Cheers

#20591 - torne - Thu May 13, 2004 3:01 pm

My personal suggestion would be 'buy IDA Pro'. It's $400, though. Other than that, you just have a lot of work ahead. Use a debugger where possible rather than a disassembly.

If you can't figure out the VBA debugger, you are probably using the wrong version of VBA. The standard version has only the GDB debug stub and the basic ability to pause/resume execution. Get the SDL version - it has a full command-line debugger which is able to do most things that gdb can.

#20642 - BeeWarloc - Fri May 14, 2004 8:00 am

Thanks for the answer.. :)

I've been playing a bit around with IDA Pro before (x86 version), it totally rocks, and might even be worth $400 just for hobby purposes if I had the money right now, but unfortunanately I promised my girlfriend a vacation to some exotic country.. $$$ :P

Anyway it was really debugging I meant.. I didn't know SDL VBA had internal debugging capabilities too, but then again I'm pretty much a newbie to the gba dev scene..

#20648 - torne - Fri May 14, 2004 9:02 am

The debugger in the SDL VBA is pretty good. =)