Teaching young dogs new tricks

[rimsky82]

Moved from nolberto's thread.

So here are some codes that I thought would be somewhat challenging for you and that I'd really like to have made... especially the first code listed.

Like to have made? Have you suffered some kind of injury preventing you from learning how to hack?

No offense osg, but don't you find it a little odd that you're the moderator at a gamehacking website and you don't know how to hack? I believe you were promoted on the notion that you were not only becoming very active in the scene, but willing to learn and on your way to becoming one of us.

This may seem a bit harsh, but my only intent is to motivate you.

[OldSchoolGamer]

No offense osg, but don't you find it a little odd that you're the moderator at a gamehacking website and you don't know how to hack?

I accepted the offer to be a moderator of The Lounge. If I would have been offered a position in one of the hacking sub-forums, I would have respectfully declined because I do not know how to hack yet. The Lounge is unrelated to hacking as it's description states.

As for the rest of your comment...

As I've already said multiple times, I fully do intend to learn. But I want to start when I am ready and my heart is in it. Right now, I'm still in the process of playing the classics. There are still very popular games that I haven't beat yet. I haven't even beat (SNES) "Super Mario World 2 - Yoshi's Island" yet. All of yous had the opportunity and time to play/beat hundreds of games before you guys ever started to hack codes. I even asked that question in The Lounge... asking how long after you all got into the emulation scene did you guys learn how to hack. Most of yous answered that it was many years after they got into emulation that only then did they begin to hack. In fact, YOU personally said it took you 10-11 YEARS after discovering emulation did you begin to hack. LB was 10 years. Now, will it be 10 years before I begin?... of course not. But geez, let me enjoy myself first with something that I currently want to do, which is play. When I start getting alil tired of it, which I eventually get tired with everything I do (just like everyone else), then I will begin to hack.

I've barely been a year into emulation. It wasn't until recently did that Christmas morning feeling (OMG, I got all these games, I can't wait to play them feeling) start to decrease some. (That kid in a candy shop feeling.) So when the feeling decreases some more and I want to do something else, then that's when I will learn to hack and begin hacking. How do I know that I will hack? Because it interests me and I know I will want to do it. And when I do start, I want to jump in with both feet. But I'm not going to start just because somebody wants me to start now, or at a time when I'm not going to be fully committed because the whole time I'll be thinking that I don't really want to do this right now, I want to play. So when I start to get a lil tired of playing, then I will hack. And that will be in the near future.

[rimsky82]

Wow, what a passionate and heart-felt response.

It took me that long to get involved because I didn't even realize the possibility. As soon as I knew that it was possible for me, I dove in, and I couldn't wait.

I respect your response and your wanting to enjoy playing the games. However, hacking is not some killjoy, it enhances the playing experience. You don't even have to really "learn" anything before you start. The next time you play a game, just open the memory viewer and watch what happens behind the scenes. For a lot of NES games, you'll find life and health RAM addresses in the first 0x100 bytes.

Go at your own pace, but don't be afraid. It's not your fault.

[ReyVGM]

Wow, what a passionate and heart-felt response.

It took me that long to get involved because I didn't even realize the possibility. As soon as I knew that it was possible for me, I dove in, and I couldn't wait.

I respect your response and your wanting to enjoy playing the games. However, hacking is not some killjoy, it enhances the playing experience. You don't even have to really "learn" anything before you start. The next time you play a game, just open the memory viewer and watch what happens behind the scenes. For a lot of NES games, you'll find life and health RAM addresses in the first 0x100 bytes.

Go at your own pace, but don't be afraid. It's not your fault.

I already offered to teach him. And I know exactly how to teach him to make a simple code in less than 2 minutes. You guys, that are advanced cheat makers, can sometimes forget to mention some things are so simple and logical to you, but not to a newbie.

The way these hex codes finally "clicked" for me back then, was when I modified the value of an Infinite Life code and I saw the lives go from 9 to 5. Now I understood what values did.
And then, in a NES RPG, using an (incomplete) Item Modifier code, I was able to find more items by modifying the last numbers of the address. Now I understood what addresses did.

After OSG learns how to make his first code, it will "click" for him too. Problem is OSG usually wants more complicated codes that only advanced hackers know how to do.

[rimsky82]

I already offered to teach him. And I know exactly how to teach him to make a simple code in less than 2 minutes. You guys, that are advanced cheat makers, can sometimes forget to mention some things are so simple and logical to you, but not to a newbie.

You have a point. Learning things like the way RAM works and the hexadecimal system is a bit of a curve. But it's not something you need to plan for and take a vacation from work to learn. It's understanding the concept and then getting used to it. It won't "click" until he makes an attempt to pull the trigger.

I'm not telling you to dive in osg, just at least soak your feet a little.

[Lazy Bastard]

Another problem for new hackers, especially in an established hacking scene, is that there are plenty of advanced hackers already capable of making great codes, and many of them are always looking for a new challenge.

When most of us started, the fastest way (and sometimes the only way) to get the codes we wanted was to hack them ourselves. The ratio of hackers to desired codes was such that there simply weren't enough hackers to go around. As a result, if a hacker wasn't currently in love with the game you wanted a code for, you were on your own. You'd be lucky if you could grab the attention of a good hacker long enough for him to throw a two-sentence response to your hacking questions, and there were virtually no hacking guides out there (and yes, as ReyVGM mentioned, most of them assumed a large amount of experience that just doesn't make sense given the target audience).

In other words, though it's by no fault of their own, new members of the scene...are spoiled. That's not to say we shouldn't hack codes for those requesting them. Hell, that's half the fun of hacking. But it does help explain the hurdles of "teaching young dogs new tricks".

[Lazy Bastard]

Incidentally, rimsky82 is right: you don't need to learn everything at once, nor do you require any serious blocks of time. I taught my 12-year-old stepson how to hack in about two hours, and he makes his own codes for PC games using TSearch now. Every once in a while, he comes and asks me questions, and sometimes he outright can't figure something out (in which case, I usually point him to a guide, or give him a nudge in the right direction, and he then gets it). However, the trick is: the very basics are 90% of the skills you'll ever need, and they're quite easy to grasp once you sit down and learn them.

OldSchoolGamer: I'd be happy to teach you, and what's more, I think it would help refresh our memories as to what obstacles the new hacker faces, and how we can improve our guides and methods of advice. If you're ready, ask me any question, no matter how simple you may think it is. I believe the same would go for anyone here. We do have an entire forum dedicated to this very purpose, and if something's kept you from hacking, we want to know about that, so we can destroy it

[ReyVGM]

Ok, OSG. You are the kind of person that has to be pushed to do things. So, tomorrow night, you have a 5 minute lesson with me. You'll learn to hack your first Infinite Life code for Super Mario Bros. It will take you 30 seconds.

[OldSchoolGamer]

Ok, OSG. You are the kind of person that has to be pushed to do things. So, tomorrow night, you have a 5 minute lesson with me. You'll learn to hack your first Infinite Life code for Super Mario Bros. It will take you 30 seconds.

Okay

[silentkiller]

Ok, OSG. You are the kind of person that has to be pushed to do things. So, tomorrow night, you have a 5 minute lesson with me. You'll learn to hack your first Infinite Life code for Super Mario Bros. It will take you 30 seconds.

ReyVGM, I also want to learn from you.

Your hacking skills are better than me.

[Pyriel]

You have a point. Learning things like the way RAM works and the hexadecimal system is a bit of a curve. But it's not something you need to plan for and take a vacation from work to learn. It's understanding the concept and then getting used to it. It won't "click" until he makes an attempt to pull the trigger.

There used to be a weird little subculture of people who thought a rudimentary understanding of hexadecimal opened the world to them, and they were happy to explain it to anybody who'd listen. I remember one guy on, I think, Hellion's old website had a giant picture from Jak & Daxter or something with, "Wanna know about hex? Ask me!", in big, gold letters as a signature. Half of them would refer to cheat codes or the binary data in an executable as "hex programming". I wonder where they all went?

[ReyVGM]

ReyVGM, I also want to learn from you.

Your hacking skills are better than me.

You already know how to hack, and even more complicated codes than the ones I do.

I wonder where they all went?

Time and Life took them.

[Meijin]

I also just got involved in hacking scene a few months ago. And after experiencing a few things I think I can at least now do some basic RAM hacks ( infinite Health or Lives for some games ). If possible, Mr.ReyVGM, I would like you to teach me some intermediate and advanced stuffs that involve the assembly stuff. I still really don't understand how knowing ASM would help us making advanced codes as I read some instruction sets and when I looked at them in the debugger, I still don't get it and don't know what's going on.

Here's some of my hacks, those are only the types of codes I can hack.

[Lazy Bastard]

To get you started, and to explain how ASM hacks could prove useful, start with the simplest ASM hack, a nop.

'nop' stands for 'No Operation', and it essentially means, "don't do anything". So, if you found the ASM code that causes your character to lose health every time he gets hit, and changed the "sub" instruction (Subtract) to "nop" (No Operation), every time your character should lose health, nothing would happen. The processor would still waste its time going through the motions, and following its instructions ("OK, so when the character gets hit...do nothing. Done. OK, character got hit again...do nothing. Done"), but you wouldn't experience any decrease in health.

This concept is described in a working example for the Wii, in one of our hacking guides in the GameHacking.org Library, called Simple ASM Codes Final.

But now you're wondering..."Why not just hack a health mod, and set it to max?". First, some games utilize DMA (Dynamic Memory Allocation). Without going into detail about DMA (which you can read about in the Library and various other places online), this means that the addresses for things move around each time you start the game, change rooms, change levels, or do other things, depending on the game and its code. Therefore, you'd have to hack a new Infinite Health code each time you started the game, changed rooms, etc.

The way to solve this problem is by using breakpoints to determine what is causing health to decrease in the first place, and changing that through an ASM instruction. Generally, these pieces of code do not move around, and thus DMA isn't an issue.

Second, there are far more advanced codes that can be created using ASM instructions. Essentially, instead of setting certain values statically ("Always keep health at 255", "Always make strength 99", etc), you're re-programming the game on-the-fly, which is much more powerful. Granted, if you're clever, you can do quite a bit with simple RAM-hacks. But if there's a useful tool available, why not take advantage of it?

Incidentally, instead of changing "sub" to "nop", you could instead change it to "add". Every time your character got hurt, he would gain health

For one more example, at a high-level view, let's look at an imaginary game, and ignoring all code, just talk about theory. Just bear with me:

Event1: Character gets hit.
Event2: Character picks up Power potion.
Event3: Enemy gets hit.

Effect1: Character loses health.
Effect2: Character gets bigger.
Effect3: Enemy loses health.

Let's say that usually, Event1 causes Effect1, and so forth. With an ASM code, we could swap these around, or cause multiple events to cause the same effect. Perhaps we'd like it if every time we got hit, the enemy got hurt (that's always good for a laugh). Or perhaps every time we get hit, we get bigger, as if we've just picked up a Power potion. Or perhaps every time we hit the enemy, we get bigger. Or every time we do any of these, the enemy gets hurt. There are plenty of things to do, and this is just one set of events and effects.

I suggest you take a look at ASM-related guides in the GameHacking.org Library, and try a couple on your own. That said, feel free to ask us anything you're curious about. Have fun, and show us what you can hack.

[Meijin]

Thanks, to tell you the truth, almost every codes I made above using NOP also. And that's the only instruction I know how to use. Now I begin thinking of attempting more advanced types of codes but still don't know where or how to start. Some types like Walk Through Walls or No Random Encounter seem very interesting and that makes me hungrily want to get some ASM knowledge. But it seems knowing instruction sets is not enough. Some guides also require Addressing Modes, Registers, Flags etc... since the instructions have close ties with these and without knowing even one of them will cause people to not know how the codes work. Plus I've never programmed a code before so that's where the headache starts.