[Strife]

Hopefully this is in the right section. xD; So anyhoo, I've got my Gamecube games working in the Dolphin emulator, but I'm having difficulty making my own Action Replay codes. Stuff involving concrete values like money is easy enough, but the difficulty comes when dealing with things like coordinates, time remaining, etc.

Say, for example, I want to create an Infinite Time code for Burnout. I've used both the Cheats Manager and Cheat Engine to search for the number of seconds remaining and I can usually find it, but fixing it to a specific value does nothing. I'm guessing that I would need to stop it from decreasing in the first place, but I can't find the pointer for that no matter how hard I try.

I'd like to find someone who's experienced with memory/hex editing to help me figure this out - though, I never get any replies posting on forums, so I'll probably need to contact someone directly, but I don't know anybody aside from the folks on Retro who dabble with Sonic Adventure DX/2 hacking. Any pointers?

[sonicblur]

Strife, on 29 March 2013 - 07:51 AM, said:

Hopefully this is in the right section. xD; So anyhoo, I've got my Gamecube games working in the Dolphin emulator, but I'm having difficulty making my own Action Replay codes. Stuff involving concrete values like money is easy enough, but the difficulty comes when dealing with things like coordinates, time remaining, etc.

Say, for example, I want to create an Infinite Time code for Burnout. I've used both the Cheats Manager and Cheat Engine to search for the number of seconds remaining and I can usually find it, but fixing it to a specific value does nothing. I'm guessing that I would need to stop it from decreasing in the first place, but I can't find the pointer for that no matter how hard I try.

I'd like to find someone who's experienced with memory/hex editing to help me figure this out - though, I never get any replies posting on forums, so I'll probably need to contact someone directly, but I don't know anybody aside from the folks on Retro who dabble with Sonic Adventure DX/2 hacking. Any pointers?

1. Don't use an emulator to hack codes for a console, unless cheat search is built into the emulator. You're almost always going to run into the problems you're running into, because the memory addresses you find won't be the same the next time you run the emulator.
2. The Gamecube uses a Big endian processor, and you're using an x86 PC which is Little Endian. When you're using an external tool to search, everything is going to be stored in the opposite order that it's expecting, so you're not going to have any luck searching for something more than 8 bits in size.

The actual tools for hacking Wii and GCN directly on hardware (GCNrd/WiiRd) have a built in pointer search tool which will assist you when you run into pointer problems. Trying to use tools that aren't designed for what you're doing is going to give you a hard time. I don't want to discourage you, but actually using the real thing is the easiest way to do it unless someone builds tools into Dolphin for it.