Posted: 1/29/2014 5:11 PM
Post subject: GBC reverse engineering process
Quote
Ouroboros2Grace
Joined: 1/29/2014
Posts: 4
I am working on reverse engineering a GBC game, "Revelations the Demon Slayer" (an RPG). It isn't very popular but it has a lot of childhood nostalgia for me. I'm looking for tools that would help me in this process. I have/know about/employ bizhawk and bgb debugging, breakpoints on memory read/write, tracelogging, lua scripting, and RAM searches. Are there any tools to make this a bit easier? Specifically I'm looking for some features that FCEUX has like code/data logging that integrates with a hex editor for smart coloring of bytes or with the trace logger to selectively log code. I have a general sense of what assembly is and how to back trace through of tracelog to find where memory values are calculated but the process is very tedious for my limited knowledge of assembly. A tool that could automate that and basically come up with the steps a value goes through before it gets written to a memory address would be nice. Sorry if these are really easy to find and I'm just an idiot for not being able to. I've spent several hours trying to find tools like what I'm describing. Sidenote: I understand that diving this deep into the assembly of the game will mostly likely not be worth the time/trouble from a TASing standpoint. However I'd still like to do it just for the sake of knowledge about the game's inner workings. Hopefully it will result in finding glitches (there are currently none known) and will have massive TAS benefits but I don't have my hopes up.
Posted: 1/29/2014 5:39 PM
Quote
MESHUGGAH
Other
Skilled player (1920)
Joined: 11/14/2009
Posts: 1353
Location: 𝔐𝔞𝔤𝑦𝔞𝔯
NES TASer of 2013 NES TAS of 2013 NES TAS of 2012 NES TAS of 2011
According to Wiki: ReverseEngineering, VisualBoyAdvance (and probably BizHawk) has these features, so I guess you want a more powerful solution like the IDA Debugger (the NES Battletoads scientist team also used this). There's also a script that logs each newly executed code (IIRC written for fceux but shouldn't be a huge thing to rename a few functions) located somewhere in the Tool-assisted laboratory, but I can't remember what was it's name/a link to that post.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...