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Author Topic: GBA script pointers  (Read 409 times)
Aeris130
Guest
« on: November 04, 2006, 04:07:45 pm »

I've been looking at GBA pointers in Advance Wars lately, only to learn that they were surprisingly easy to find. But unlike Nes/Snes pointers, these ones seems to be "spread out" a little. The first pointer is located at 2F0B7C, the second one at 2F0BCC, and the third one at 2F0C0C. Not too far away from eachother, but not as neatly lined up as Nes/Snes pointertables can be either.

If I wanted to dump a script that automatically recalculated these pointers upon insertion, how would I go about to define where the pointers begin/end (seeing as there is no specific part of the rom consisting only of lined-up pointers)? Do I have to point them out one by one manually, and is there any program that allows me to do this?

PS. This might not be GBA-related at all, but so far the pointers I've found have either been gathered nice and neat, or not present at all. I've only used French-tickler UHR to dump my scripts up until now, but it doesn't seem to keen on working with GBA roms...
« Last Edit: November 04, 2006, 04:14:12 pm by Aeris130 »
Ryusui
Guest
« Reply #1 on: November 04, 2006, 06:41:59 pm »

Rght now, I have only one serious GBA project in progress, and yes, assuming no batty arithmetic is done to them, GBA pointers are easy to work with. Just add $08000000 to the ROM address and you've got what the GBA's hardware will look for. No fumbling with banks! ^_^

So anyways. Your issues with Advance Wars are specific to the one game: Sylvanian Families 4 has all its pointers lined up nice and neat. What you're looking at is probably "event code": the stuff between the pointers handles character pics, sound effects and the other funky details of where the dialogue is actually displayed. (This has the side benefit that you can theoretically do far more to the game than simply edit the text.)

Event code pointers are a pain to deal with: I'm currently working with them in Patlabor - The Mobile Police for SNES. I don't know if there are any tools to help you sort them out (I created my own >_>), but if you can do it yourself, Atlas has many features for handling pointers in scripts.
Aeris130
Guest
« Reply #2 on: November 05, 2006, 03:27:05 am »

Ok, thanks. And thank god they weren't GBA specific (for good or worse).
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