Hey all, the Compendium is finalizing its Guile > Magil hack; thanks for the help on patching!
I've found that *really* interesting Chrono Cross hacks will require pointer changing. Say you want to paste an enemy model's data over a main character's data -- unless the enemy file size is smaller than the player character's, it will likely run into other data and the game will freeze in real-time. But with pointers, I imagine it would be possible to alter where the game looks for data. Or better yet, perhaps it would be possible to accomplish a model switch just by swapping the appropriate pointers.
I've examined the first game CD's Table of Contents and found that these aren't real "pointers" -- the TOC seems to be a list of file locations measured in 2048-byte sectors, but changing values in the TOC has absolutely no effect in-game.
If anyone's curious about the Chrono Cross Table of Contents, you can see our investigation at the Compendium:
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,5181.0.html
But on to my question for you all -- is there any "best" way for a hacker to go about finding pointers for graphical data in a PlayStation game?
I've read Duo's PlayStation pointer doc (http://www.romhacking.net/docs/372/), which says that one needs to dump memory from pSX using the debugger. I dumped the r3000 processor memory, and got what appears to be 940kb of data from the game executable. Duo's doc was for text though, and I'm not sure how much it's going to help in finding graphical pointers.
In the game executable, I can see instructions like ()kzgetmodel in the ASCII sidebar of my hex editor. Pointers wouldn't directly follow these instruction sets by any chance, would they?
EDIT: From what Gemini tells me at the Compendium, there's no surefire method to finding pointers. I guess I'd be interested in knowing what pointers other people here have encountered in specific games and generally where in the game CD these pointers were stored.