ROM Hack How do I disassemble 3ds games with Ghidra

Sammyueru

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I was wondering how I would disassemble a 3DS game (Pokemon X to be more specific even though I don't think that matters) with Ghidra. Also if I have to do it with something else (that's not paid for) then that's fine with me too.
Thanks in advance.
 

BinaryGears

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It looks like there is a loader, an open-source one, that is supposed to work for 3ds that is located on github; I have not used the loader or have any experience in reverse engineering 3ds games so I am not sure if it really does work. I have not done much with ARM assembly but a quick search turns up that the 3ds uses an ARM11 or some variation of it. I know Ghidra has some ARM support but I don't know how well it supports that version of ARM processor.

Have you tried opening up your binary with Ghidra to see what happens?

Assuming you open it up and can get some form of disassembly, you would have to know more about the internals of a 3ds I would assume. The function calls and various other parts of the code will be hard to read as it especially without knowing much about the 3ds OS and hardware. I would look to the homebrew scene for this console, as well as reverse engineering docs or any docs in general that might lend to a better understanding of how the console works. You could possibly find some homebrew game that is open source, this would be a pretty big win because you could compare the source to the de-compiled code and also learn more about the internals of the system at the same time.

It depends on what you want to do with the disassembly what you will do from there, look to the disassembly of OOT for the N64. I am not sure how many people worked on it but it took a while and a lot of tools to accomplish porting the code to a readable and ready to compile version of C.
 

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