12-09-2017, 06:41 AM
TL;DR - I ultimately want to know more about looking inside a game's memory and manipulating values.
So I'm playing SA2B and I dropped off my chao in the classroom.
The wait time is 30 off-island minutes to retrieve the chao from the classroom.
I want to bypass this wait time, and there are a number of ways that I think I can do this, but I need some advice nonetheless.
One way, of course, would be to just brute-force the emulator while I'm playing in some level somewhere. In this case, I want some advice on how to speed up time as much as possible without destroying my computer
The better way would be to just trick the game into thinking that 30 off-island minutes have passed, or to trick it into thinking that a significantly lower amount of time needs to pass. These values must be stored somewhere in the game's memory in some form, but using the cheat engine search method isn't ideal since I have no way of knowing the exact amount of time that's passed, whether it's an integer or float, etc... and the 30 minute max time is a constant and those are probably impossible to find with that method. I have no way of even knowing how the values are tracked or if they're even stored as their own separate values in memory. It could be tracked as the sum of the playtimes for each stage played off-island for all I know, which, incidentally, I can track with the search method, but that's neither here nor there.
I want some advice on how to actually look inside the game's memory (or, if someone already has done so, where I can find their work) and identify these values (or any related values) manually. Then I'd need to know how to modify them from there. If I know how to change this one thing, I might have the knowledge to basically change anything I want about a game, and I think that's pretty awesome. Dolphin may not exactly be the means by which I do this, but I'm not really sure where else I could pose this question, and I'm not entirely familiar with every feature that Dolphin might have.
Then there are some roundabout ways for this, which would be to modify other things, like just modifying the chao so that they have learned everything in the classroom (which raises the same issues as manipulating the hypothetical time variable).
If any of you have done work on these sorts of things, or at least know about where I can find more information about it, then I'd greatly appreciate the advice!
So I'm playing SA2B and I dropped off my chao in the classroom.
The wait time is 30 off-island minutes to retrieve the chao from the classroom.
I want to bypass this wait time, and there are a number of ways that I think I can do this, but I need some advice nonetheless.
One way, of course, would be to just brute-force the emulator while I'm playing in some level somewhere. In this case, I want some advice on how to speed up time as much as possible without destroying my computer
The better way would be to just trick the game into thinking that 30 off-island minutes have passed, or to trick it into thinking that a significantly lower amount of time needs to pass. These values must be stored somewhere in the game's memory in some form, but using the cheat engine search method isn't ideal since I have no way of knowing the exact amount of time that's passed, whether it's an integer or float, etc... and the 30 minute max time is a constant and those are probably impossible to find with that method. I have no way of even knowing how the values are tracked or if they're even stored as their own separate values in memory. It could be tracked as the sum of the playtimes for each stage played off-island for all I know, which, incidentally, I can track with the search method, but that's neither here nor there.
I want some advice on how to actually look inside the game's memory (or, if someone already has done so, where I can find their work) and identify these values (or any related values) manually. Then I'd need to know how to modify them from there. If I know how to change this one thing, I might have the knowledge to basically change anything I want about a game, and I think that's pretty awesome. Dolphin may not exactly be the means by which I do this, but I'm not really sure where else I could pose this question, and I'm not entirely familiar with every feature that Dolphin might have.
Then there are some roundabout ways for this, which would be to modify other things, like just modifying the chao so that they have learned everything in the classroom (which raises the same issues as manipulating the hypothetical time variable).
If any of you have done work on these sorts of things, or at least know about where I can find more information about it, then I'd greatly appreciate the advice!