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Basic ROM Corruption by InVerse

Started by blablabla, April 26, 2011, 04:55:13 PM

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blablabla

hi,

in section 5 of "The Definitive Guide to ROM Hacking for Complete Beginners" by InVerse, there are several mentions of a document called Basic ROM Corruption by InVerse, however i couldn't find it in the document section. can someone help me out?
(i want to create a hack for harvest moon (gbc))

Yauch

According to Inverse:

Quote
I blame the asshole who wrote "The Definitive Guide to ROM Hacking for Complete Beginners" and recommended that people who wanted to learn about corruption should read "Basic ROM Corruption" which doesn't actually exist because the author of the first document thought he would finish the second document very soon after the release of the aforementioned first document. Nearly six years later, said "Basic ROM Corruption" doesn't exist. Well, it does, technically. There is a file named romcorruption.txt that contains a short introduction and the beginning of a step-by-step process description. In fact, said document has actually be edited within the last 3 months. Unfortunately, it is far from usable at this point. However, whenever the subject comes up, said author talks shit about himself in the third person, thus motivating himself a bit more and possibly eventually leading to an actual completed document.

blablabla

well... is there any other document that would teach me what i need to know?
(i want to rearrange the map, change prices, change the amount of time it takes for crops to grow and some other stuff)

snarfblam

Corruption is not the only technique. You can find and dissect data through all sorts of techniques. It does have its uses, but corruption is a brute-force technique that I've never been very fond of.

Disassembling a game is a very effective technique, but also probably the most difficult and requires experience. Another is to just search for data. If you see a situation where you can make an educated guess about what the binary data might look like and you have an effective search tool, you can get a lot done this way. (I dissected all of the tile-layout data in Super-C in a very short time using this approach.) Cheat searches can be useful in some cases, especially in conjunction with other methods.

creeperton

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#4
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RyanfaeScotland

Quote from: blablabla on April 27, 2011, 12:01:58 AM
well... is there any other document that would teach me what i need to know?
(i want to rearrange the map, change prices, change the amount of time it takes for crops to grow and some other stuff)

Out of interest what game you looking at?

Sawakita

I support GB hacking


Celice

I never put in the effort to learn how to actually deal with game code (though I have messed around with it now and then when forced to)... so corruption's still been a bit useful.  But it is the brute-force method to editing.  It can also be very misleading.  The best way to use corruption for finding data (not seeing how it works, though), is to corrupt the data in half-increments.  If the game breaks in one of the halves when you're trying see if your corruption messed up what you wanted, your further divide up your corruption, bringing you to smaller and smaller containment areas, until hopefully, you've corrupted just the area relative to your data.  I say this is misleading, because it's not like one part out of the entire game will always mess up in that one spot--several different bits of code can be ruined and make your game crash where you're looking for your data.  It's not really misleading--it's just extremely brute force. 

blablabla

@snarfblam & celice
you seem to be overestimating my knowledge on the subject of rom hacking. simply put, there's a reason i read "The Definitive Guide to ROM Hacking for Complete Beginners" ^^

@creeperton
thx, i'll take a look at that when i find the time

hanhnn


RedComet

Twilight Translations - More than just Dragonball Z. :P