Kodewerx

I am attempting to make an always have Item code for DKR and am running into problems with pointers. The address values seem to vary across courses and vehicles. Here are the ones I am working with:



Kenobi's tool was able to give me a pointer when I fed it the two ancient lake values and ram dumps but that pointer failed beyond ancient lake. When I gave it the two Jungle Falls values it gave me nothing. Any ideas besides creating a code for every course in every vehicle with every item?

sounds like you may need to try to search that pointer in jungle falls again. You may have messed something up.

Hmm. I did it again and double checked the addresses and it still turned up nothing. I tried Hot Top Volcano and it worked fine.

if i can get this to run on an emulator i may look into it later

Do it as a pointer-to-a-pointer. The pointers given to you by kenobi's tool... search for those as well. For example, locate the pointer for Ancient Lake and Jungle Falls separately -- you will have two different pointers. Now locate a pointer that points to those using the same method. So it goes Root Pointer -> Level Pointer -> Item Per Vehicle.

To make the final code (once you have this root pointer) just fill in the blanks in this code:

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Feed me a stray cat.

^ I thought about that at first, but he said he couldn't find any pointer for jungle falls, and he never said that the pointers changed. I guess a double pointer would be the best though because it will create a shorter code.

EDIT: haha...."point" me in the right direction para....

Originally, I was thinking that this was a pointer to a pointer as Parasyte pointed out however, I have run into another problem. From my understanding the pointer to pointer concept relies on the fact that the offset from the Level Pointer to the address is the same for every level but for this game it is not.

For example, Kenobi's tool came up with these pointers for Ancient Lake:

I am using the first one which creates an offset of 227C to the Ancient Lake addresses. For Fossil Canyon it came up with:

This creates an offset of 35F8 to the Fossil Canyon addresses.

EDIT: I decided to run the ram dumps and addresses for Jungle Falls in the Car and HC through the pointer tool (before I was using Car & Plane) and it came up with a lot of values:

I tried each one but they only worked between the Car and HC although I noted two of them (maybe more) worked for the Plane but only during the intro sequence for the race. Once the race started the pointer changed values and they stopped working.

My question is: Are those addresses the same every time the level loads, or might the variables move around entirely at random? This is a very important aspect have hacking pointers.

_________________
I have to return some video tapes.

Feed me a stray cat.

The address that controls items does not move around each race.

As for the pointers, the 0x020cfedc pointer seems to vary with some correlation between wether or not the pre-race intro is skipped as seen by this sampling. The one ambiguous case may explained by the time that the skip button was pressed perhaps:

(The pointer should be at 0239e4f8 to work to work with the offset)
It is also worth noting that when the pointer is not 0239e4f8 some strange graphical errors can occur.

The other pointer showed the same symptoms:

(Should be at 0239dda4 to work)

Pointers are the reason I failed C++.

Pointers are the reason I got hired to help students with C++. lol

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Pointers, are the reason it seems next to impossible to make codes for this game

I looked a bit into dkr, and indeed, it seems pretty confusing to hack.

Here what could work :
scan from 0x020cfde0 to ???, step every 0xc, and check that [address+ 5] = 0x08.
If it's true, check that 32bits at [address] <> 0
If it's true, load [address] to offset, add 0x38 to it, and you'll be at the items address.

For exemple, for the TT code handler only (ie. the following codes won't work on an AR), it means :



(tested a bit on the 4 first single player courses. It won't work on the adventure mode (seems to crash the game) ).
(edit : actually the first course of the adv mode crashes when you put items. maybe it'll work on other courses...).
(edit2: the codes indeed worked in the first adv mode 'real' race, behind the door).
(edit3: oh well, it seem to work well for the first player only (pipsy). Maybe the '0x08' that I check in the code if that player internal number... Tiptup seems to be '0x07', Diddy seems to be '0x0C'... )

This is just a demo code, to show how it could work.
One should replace the 'write item' codes value with other values, or make a code (using C4?) do change them during the game.
And I guess, to port this to the AR, one might have to use some custom asm routine...

If I get Kwurdi working again (I broke it by updating devkitpro and ndslib), this will be one of the games I'll look into. Meh, we'll see what happens.

_________________
I have to return some video tapes.

Feed me a stray cat.