hacking on the Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas GBA game.
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STOP HAVING MORE MAPS
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@foone Wait, you type these injections by hand? You do this so often, I'd figured you would have a "textInjections.txt" file filled with every character you might ever want to extract
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@Canageek I do the injections automatically, but often that gives me the letters in a different order than I expect, so I have to map them back to unicode. thus the typing of special characters
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ugh. this game doesn't seem to have any walkthroughs, I'd have to watch longplays.
and this game is longer than I thought. I might need to cheat flagrantly
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@foone not sure how helpful this is to you, but I found https://web.archive.org/web/20201230132118/http://forum.tnbc.eu/pumpkinking/walkthrough via the GameFAQs boards
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@silentium thanks!
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So @silentium pointed me at an old walkthrough on the wayback machine, so I'm continuing.
I got the next weapon, and it's so crap that I've reached Ghidra O'Clock just to see if I can make this gun better -
Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by [email protected]
my theory: figure out where enemy health is in ram, set a watch on it, find out what code changes it, then use ghidra to understand that code, then patch the gun to do way more damage
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My final problem with this generator could be solved by just shutting up and beating the game manually, but unfortunately, my brain thinks reverse engineering GBA games is more fun than playing them
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so I'm gonna reverse engineer it more so I don't have to play it as much
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arg. the addresses in the BizHawk ram watch system are segmented, and the addresses in the debugger are not!
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it's like 16-bit DOS all over again!
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so I gotta figure out which domain I'm in and then look up the memory map to figure out what the linear address is
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fortunately this is trivial if you're using any segment other than the "combined WRAM" pseudo-segment, which does terrible merging of RAM segments to make cheats easier.
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unfortunately that's exactly what I'm doing.
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okay the enemy health is in IWRAM, at offset 5850h.
And according to GBATEK, the memory address for IWRAM is...nonexistent! there's no such thing as IWRAM!
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at least according to GBATEK.
SEE, the GBA has two main rams: on-chip and on-board.
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but what you call these two are... inconsistent.
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BizHawk uses IWRAM and EWRAM, as does corrupt.wiki.
GBATEK says "WRAM - On-chip Work RAM" and "WRAM - On-board Work RAM".
mGBA internally calls them "iwram" and "wram". -
so whatever. iwram aka WRAM - On-chip Work RAM is at 0x03000000.
so 0x03005850 is the address I need to watch.
