specifically, the game i want to edit is dillon’s dead heat breakers so that i can change my main character’s mii. does anyone here know how to do that? any help is appreciated, thank you!! 
Hacking how do you save edit games?
- Thread starter strawberry_tiger
- Start date
- Views 1,895
- Replies 5
Save editing is 95% the same as conventional memory cheats. The 5%, which like most last 5% things can take up to 95% of the work, is figuring out save hashing/checksums.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080309104350/http://etk.scener.org/?op=tutorial for the time being is my cheat making guide of choice for linking up to people. For the 3ds many will use hardware approaches but emulators are more than good enough here to perform.
That said the short version of that is make a change and try to make it only that change in the game (usually impossible but the thought does count and make your life easier) and use/compare memory dumps (aka what your emulator's cheat search is doing) to get where you want to go.
You can try to narrow down searches -- rather than change then greater than/less than might be a thing (sometimes it is not what you expect, especially if the devs delve into anti cheat territory), specific numbers might be a thing, ranges...
You can also move sideways and find something easier -- in hypothetical RPG you are making a cheat for then luck might only increase every 10 levels but chances are the luck value is a set distance away from atk which you might even be able to change by equipping a ring or something.
Do also remember you have cheats available to you -- if infinite health and ammo make finding something else easier than give yourself that first. Alternatively if I want to make an inventory cheat I don't go earning 30 end game weapons (assuming I even can) to give me a fighting chance in conventional cheat search, I give myself infinite money and go to the first starting shop to buy infinite starting dagger and maybe first upgrade; that will give me an idea whether the inventory is fixed location (think spreadsheet where every cell corresponds to a given item, usually what "key items" separate screens might be but can be normal inventory too, or whether each entry in the list has an identifier and number owned value, which is usually what things with limited or arrangeable inventory might do) and thus I can then check other values/locations to find that end game weapon, and maybe a hidden test one. Similar things are also how hidden characters or "play as boss" are found in fighting games and the like
There are further tricks, and finding flags can be a more creative exercise but said flags are also how many moon jump cheats come to pass.
Save games, largely being dumps of memory, then work in a similar manner but take a bit longer to make if you have to run off and save. You might also encounter wear levelling -- writing one section of memory every time is bad so games might cycle between sections, which also provides a quasi backup as you might then lose a few hours of progress rather than a whole save.
Checksums you might also encounter in the anti cheat one -- mirrored and inverted values are crude versions of the concept. Anyway if I said how many characters/words are in this post (15 we shall say) you can look and see if that makes sense. Computers can do similar things -- the odd/even thing is called parity and tends not to be used for long values (signals packets is a different matter), byte sum (literally add up every byte) is the next most primitive but was odd hat even by the NES, if you have ever seen CRC32 in a zip file or something then this is another form and starting to get better (you can brute force a matching result in pretty quick time). For the 3ds you might encounter something in the cryptographic/hash world (MD5, sha1, sha256 being things you might have heard of there, and variously deemed insecure) but that gets less common. For some modern devices this save checksum business is kicked to the console maker themselves which provide it at firmware level, for older stuff you both have to figure out what is being included in the checksum and how it is done (and it can be very custom/impossible to guess from simple observation of results). This leaves you either breaking the checksum (the check will be [some complicated maths] followed by a yay or nay after a compare, quite possible to force a valid/good path to be taken, with the added bonus of it probably fixing the same for unmodified ROMs next save) or observing the code in action to figure it out (assembly coding and debugging with it being the end boss of learning ROM hacking for good reason, quite possible to learn but it is a far cry from the cheat lark above).
https://web.archive.org/web/20080309104350/http://etk.scener.org/?op=tutorial for the time being is my cheat making guide of choice for linking up to people. For the 3ds many will use hardware approaches but emulators are more than good enough here to perform.
That said the short version of that is make a change and try to make it only that change in the game (usually impossible but the thought does count and make your life easier) and use/compare memory dumps (aka what your emulator's cheat search is doing) to get where you want to go.
You can try to narrow down searches -- rather than change then greater than/less than might be a thing (sometimes it is not what you expect, especially if the devs delve into anti cheat territory), specific numbers might be a thing, ranges...
You can also move sideways and find something easier -- in hypothetical RPG you are making a cheat for then luck might only increase every 10 levels but chances are the luck value is a set distance away from atk which you might even be able to change by equipping a ring or something.
Do also remember you have cheats available to you -- if infinite health and ammo make finding something else easier than give yourself that first. Alternatively if I want to make an inventory cheat I don't go earning 30 end game weapons (assuming I even can) to give me a fighting chance in conventional cheat search, I give myself infinite money and go to the first starting shop to buy infinite starting dagger and maybe first upgrade; that will give me an idea whether the inventory is fixed location (think spreadsheet where every cell corresponds to a given item, usually what "key items" separate screens might be but can be normal inventory too, or whether each entry in the list has an identifier and number owned value, which is usually what things with limited or arrangeable inventory might do) and thus I can then check other values/locations to find that end game weapon, and maybe a hidden test one. Similar things are also how hidden characters or "play as boss" are found in fighting games and the like
There are further tricks, and finding flags can be a more creative exercise but said flags are also how many moon jump cheats come to pass.
Save games, largely being dumps of memory, then work in a similar manner but take a bit longer to make if you have to run off and save. You might also encounter wear levelling -- writing one section of memory every time is bad so games might cycle between sections, which also provides a quasi backup as you might then lose a few hours of progress rather than a whole save.
Checksums you might also encounter in the anti cheat one -- mirrored and inverted values are crude versions of the concept. Anyway if I said how many characters/words are in this post (15 we shall say) you can look and see if that makes sense. Computers can do similar things -- the odd/even thing is called parity and tends not to be used for long values (signals packets is a different matter), byte sum (literally add up every byte) is the next most primitive but was odd hat even by the NES, if you have ever seen CRC32 in a zip file or something then this is another form and starting to get better (you can brute force a matching result in pretty quick time). For the 3ds you might encounter something in the cryptographic/hash world (MD5, sha1, sha256 being things you might have heard of there, and variously deemed insecure) but that gets less common. For some modern devices this save checksum business is kicked to the console maker themselves which provide it at firmware level, for older stuff you both have to figure out what is being included in the checksum and how it is done (and it can be very custom/impossible to guess from simple observation of results). This leaves you either breaking the checksum (the check will be [some complicated maths] followed by a yay or nay after a compare, quite possible to force a valid/good path to be taken, with the added bonus of it probably fixing the same for unmodified ROMs next save) or observing the code in action to figure it out (assembly coding and debugging with it being the end boss of learning ROM hacking for good reason, quite possible to learn but it is a far cry from the cheat lark above).
okay, thank you so much! i’ll try this out when i have the time, which will most likely be a long time from now ;-;
Try at least the cheat making side of things -- I still think basic cheat making is a skill that any reading a site like this should have.
As noted above you could probably even edit the mii aspect as well -- start a game with radically different miis and compare. Hopefully finds the info and you can edit things or match things to your choice (after finding then start a game with your mii of choice, copy data from one memory dump/savestate to the other and hopefully it saves it back to the save when it next saves*).
*sometimes data that is assumed to be fixed will not be copied back to the save. In which case you do have some options, mostly editing the save yourself (should be easy enough to find mii data in those too -- it will either be what is in the memory or found via the same cheat search method but using saves, that is to say new game and compare) and hoping it fixes the checksum for you when it next saves.
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