Kodewerx

But Para, I've been busting my ass to get into Gamecube hacking without spending any money on unnecessary crap, and I'm not any closer than I was a week ago! How am I supposed to help?

First, I split your post because it really didn't relate to unhacked or impossible codes!

Second, I didn't know you were trying to get into GameCube hacking, but it sounds good!

Finally, you didn't state any stumbling blocks!

My best guess is you can't find a broadband adapter for a decent price? I paid $40 for mine direct from Nintendo's online store back in the day. I see some on eBay for even less. Or, maybe it's PSO? You don't need PSO. AR + SD adapter works even better! The official SD adapters are expensive, but they are really easy to build. What gets me is how expensive the old GameCube ARs are; Datel was practically giving them away.

Well, all I have is a Wii, a USB Gecko, and my PC which seems capable of running Dolphin, which actually has a mostly "complete" debugging interface (i.e. with all of the basic needs like breakpoints (it doesn't support r/w breaks yet), cheat search (doesn't have this at all, but it could probably be implemented through the buggy Lua interface), disassembler and a memory viewer).

But Dolphin's latest versions that actually have those features also has a video plugin that is no longer working for me (older Dolphin versions have near perfect video display but are missing the features I want; I think it'd be faster to wait for a video fix than to try writing up some hacking features into an older version of Dolphin).

As for my Wii, apparently GCN games can't be hacked on the Wii yet. I no longer own a Gamecube, either. I've seen a homebrew app for the Wii that can patch the MIOS and do other things related to successfully booting Gamecube games, which could probably be modified to inject some sort of PC communication stub, but I'd rather not go editing those parts of my Wii's software if I can avoid it.

Finally, I don't see why I should spend even a penny what with how close I am. I really don't like paying for hacking utilities. One beauty of reverse engineering software is not needing to throw money into the hobby. So I'd like to avoid that as well.

Anyway, in my case it seems like Dolphin is the way to go. I reported a bug in the Lua interface as well as my video plugin issue to the Google Code repository a couple hours ago.

My suggestions is this: Don't let money be an object. Skip your McDonalds lunch for a day and use the money you save to fund a hobby that's important to you.

Or don't. See if I care.

Wait, it's plugins? Can you not just copy the video plugin from the old version and use it in the new one?

I was pondering the idea of GCN hacking on Wii the other day, and if I were more interested in GCN/Wii, I'd take a shot at hacking MIOS. However that could be made difficult by the fact that, for some reason, you still need to buy additional hardware to debug on the Wii - there's no debugging over LAN or even USB. WTF?

I tried that. The older plugin didn't work.

Older versions of the emulator don't build and newer versions display the graphics incorrectly.

Why wouldn't it be the plugin? Where else would the code they changed even be?

Generally the video plugin is responsible for all video-related tasks, from creating and managing the window to emulating the GPU and VRAM. If a plugin stops working with a newer version, likely they either broke the plugin API or emulation regressed such that nothing is getting put in VRAM anymore.
I imagine GCN and Wii emulation are using HLE out the wazoo, so they may have simply broken the HLE implementation of video-related functions, so nothing meaningful is actually reaching the GPU.
I assume you've confirmed that the game is in fact running despite the lack of video output.

It's not that the video output isn't there. It's rendering things with an inverted Z order. But only for billboards. Or something.

Well you have the source, look for glDepthFunc and fix it.


who fucked up my tags and why was I not informed

GL? How will that help fix D3D?

My card doesn't support OGL.

Perhaps the driver vendors don't support OpenGL... But I guarantee OpenGL is very much capable of running on the card.

I had a feeling I said that wrong.

In any case, attempting to use the OGL plugin just has the thing bitch at me.

That's sick.

If the card is not older than 10 years, I suggest you boycott that manufacturer.

If it is older than 10 years, I suggest you drop the hammer and modernize a bit.

Should be 6 years old.

"Can't create opengl renderer. You might be missing some required opengl extensions, check the logs for more info"

"The instruction at \"[some address]\" referenced memory at \"[null]\". The memory could not be \"written\".

Click OK to terminate the program"

Yay

I've tried updating OGL stuff but it never fixed anything. Maybe I'm Doing It Wrong[sup]TM[/sup]

Awesome, a crash! Usually that means the program is doing something bad, not so much that your hardware/drivers doesn't support it. The typical action taken when something is unsupported is to warn the user, and then exit cleanly.

Have you tried GPU Caps Viewer or similar? It will tell you the OpenGL version supported. OpenGL 1.1 is enough to get 2D and some 3D support. 2.0 is where you want to be.

If that crashes too, lol WTF. Boycott!

Sexy.
You should talk to Brkirch about this; he's looked into hacking GCN on Wii too.

I would LOVE to be able to hack GCN again.

Indeed Wii has the nice extra memory, faster CPU, more buttons, I/O... much like the N64 days.