Hardware Game Genie to Action Replay converter

[Arrowbow1]

Exactly what it says. All I find are Game Genie cheats for Sonic 3, as well as Sonic & Knuckles and I want them to convert to Action Replay cheats


If that isn't possible, can the "Only One Blue Sphere needed for Chaos/Super Emerald" cheat be made? Those are for the NTSC-J versions of Sonic 3 (& Knuckles), I'm talking about.

 

[FAST6191]

Why are we in the Wii section for this?


Anyway in classic cheat making then game genies tended to be ROM editing cheats while action replay/gameshark/codebreaker/goldfinger/pelican/... tended to be RAM based.
That is to say the game genie stuff would sit on the cart, when the console asked for a specific section it was changing it would return the modified version instead.
The RAM based stuff would have various intercepts go out once a frame or something and write the memory to what it was told to write it to (or write it if a button combo was pressed).

Conversion between the two is sometimes tricky, maybe even impossible in some cases. Though if you want game genie stuff then do read on as you can hardpatch things.

Later on in life/on later consoles there was a bit of overlap, and some game genies on some consoles had a limited amount of RAM editing as well. Other devices on later consoles had limited amount of ROM editing (sometimes master codes are ROM edits), or the ways the consoles worked mean you could more easily convert (the DS for instance has its binary in RAM so you can edit the ROM data when it lands/sits in RAM and convert that back to ROM edits far more easily than hardpatching a RAM cheat, though there were tools for the GBA on up to hardpatch RAM cheats. Even more recently then many of those names (which got bought and sold many times over the years) instead became save editors.

Bonus for you is with the game genie being ROM patches you can patch them onto the ROM quite happily and have it run on anything that would otherwise have run the game. Game genie guy https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1054/ , cccgp https://gbatemp.net/threads/game-genie-game-patcher-tool.54539/ , and various other tools doing such things.

Links to guides/descriptions of codes
https://gamehacking.org/wiki/Hacking_Genesis
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/genesis/916377-genesis/faqs/11633

 

[Arrowbow1]

Why are we in the Wii section for this?


Anyway in classic cheat making then game genies tended to be ROM editing cheats while action replay/gameshark/codebreaker/goldfinger/pelican/... tended to be RAM based.
That is to say the game genie stuff would sit on the cart, when the console asked for a specific section it was changing it would return the modified version instead.
The RAM based stuff would have various intercepts go out once a frame or something and write the memory to what it was told to write it to (or write it if a button combo was pressed).

Conversion between the two is sometimes tricky, maybe even impossible in some cases. Though if you want game genie stuff then do read on as you can hardpatch things.

Later on in life/on later consoles there was a bit of overlap, and some game genies on some consoles had a limited amount of RAM editing as well. Other devices on later consoles had limited amount of ROM editing (sometimes master codes are ROM edits), or the ways the consoles worked mean you could more easily convert (the DS for instance has its binary in RAM so you can edit the ROM data when it lands/sits in RAM and convert that back to ROM edits far more easily than hardpatching a RAM cheat, though there were tools for the GBA on up to hardpatch RAM cheats. Even more recently then many of those names (which got bought and sold many times over the years) instead became save editors.

Bonus for you is with the game genie being ROM patches you can patch them onto the ROM quite happily and have it run on anything that would otherwise have run the game. Game genie guy https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1054/ , cccgp https://gbatemp.net/threads/game-genie-game-patcher-tool.54539/ , and various other tools doing such things.

Links to guides/descriptions of codes
https://gamehacking.org/wiki/Hacking_Genesis
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/genesis/916377-genesis/faqs/11633

Thanks for the help! It's in the Wii folder because I'm talking about the Japanese Wii VC versions for Dolphin. Dolphin only accepts AR cheats, not GG cheats. By the way, are there any other non homebrew save region converters? I'm tired of the Homebrew Channel. I want my NTSC Sonic 3 & Knuckles save to be a NTSC-J save without bothering with homebrew.

 

[FAST6191]

Fair enough.
Hopefully you can then have secondary versions of hardpatched ROMs and play whichever suits you.

Save region conversion is ever the fun topic.

Some games will work with just a rename of the file.
Some games might need a minor header tweak.
Some games might need you to sort the checksum/hash it does on the save file along with some minor things, which can be easier said than done (two main methods, assuming it is not obvious, are i. find out and replicate the hash or ii. make a modded version of the game to ignore hash failure which then tends to have the added bonus that saving in that modded version will make a valid save you can use again on stock as you are basically using it as a glorified save fixer).
Some games might have some issues with say custom names for save files.
Some games might need 50 hours of work to understand each respective save file and sort any differences between them (if there are say 50 sections and they are all using some slightly different encoding, have a few changes made for the translation and all are a few bytes, or indeed a lot of bytes, out from where the other region has it then you get to figure it out and repair/regenerate any broken data)


The Wii was something more of a modern system so might have had save files tied to a given game and thus you get to inject the actual save contents into the archive the Wii used or modify said archive to look like what it expects.

For something like Sonic 3 I would sooner replay the game, maybe with some cheats if you don't want to do some boring sections again, or straight edit the save file. Save conversion in earnest I tend to save for the epic RPGs or something.

 

[Arrowbow1]

Fair enough.
Hopefully you can then have secondary versions of hardpatched ROMs and play whichever suits you.

Save region conversion is ever the fun topic.

Some games will work with just a rename of the file.
Some games might need a minor header tweak.
Some games might need you to sort the checksum/hash it does on the save file along with some minor things, which can be easier said than done (two main methods, assuming it is not obvious, are i. find out and replicate the hash or ii. make a modded version of the game to ignore hash failure which then tends to have the added bonus that saving in that modded version will make a valid save you can use again on stock as you are basically using it as a glorified save fixer).
Some games might have some issues with say custom names for save files.
Some games might need 50 hours of work to understand each respective save file and sort any differences between them (if there are say 50 sections and they are all using some slightly different encoding, have a few changes made for the translation and all are a few bytes, or indeed a lot of bytes, out from where the other region has it then you get to figure it out and repair/regenerate any broken data)


The Wii was something more of a modern system so might have had save files tied to a given game and thus you get to inject the actual save contents into the archive the Wii used or modify said archive to look like what it expects.

For something like Sonic 3 I would sooner replay the game, maybe with some cheats if you don't want to do some boring sections again, or straight edit the save file. Save conversion in earnest I tend to save for the epic RPGs or something.

I tried all of that and it failed. I am new to all of this. It would be great if some one can make the "One Blue Sphere For Emerald" and "All Emeralds After Getting One" cheats for the Japanese versions, since I requested that on cheat requests but people ignore my requests......

 

[FAST6191]

For newer systems that is not so bad if you have conditionals*.
If you are restricted to more old school cheat styles without such things then that is harder and presumably why they were game genie codes as conditionals are basic programming really and you can edit the game's programming with them.


*this is the if greater/less than, if equal to, if between range... type things later cheat formats. In that case finding the counter for blue spheres is the same as any other cheat finding
https://web.archive.org/web/20080309104350/http://etk.scener.org/?op=tutorial
Easy enough then to either set it to 99 or to 0 depending upon what needs doing.
One emerald to get them all might be harder. If memory serves it does one after the other regardless of level (though maybe not two in the same act) depending upon how many you got before then. That means a counter is more likely but it could still be an inventory.
Anyway that might be getting ahead of things.
There are two ways for the game to store emeralds
1) The game treats it like any other counter (rings, lives, continues, score, timer...) and just adds one for every successful run.
2) Each emerald is its own entry in the "inventory" for the game. This sort of thing is normally reserved for key items in games but there are perks to doing it for something as simple as emeralds.
What I would do is make a savestate before going into a bonus stage. Start the cheat search. Jump into it (preferably from below or with minimal movement). Get the emerald and immediately upon being returned to the level then do a cheat search for anything different. It is only one item though so can be harder to narrow down compared to rings, time, lives and things you can easily manipulate. To that end you might try an alternative route -- chances are the emerald storage is right near the rings, lives, continues, score and whatever else location in memory (it is all user data after all and will need to be saved so better to have it all together). Find where score, rings, lives and whatnot is located and look nearby there after bonus stages.
You can even use the other region cheats here to see what goes -- changing such things between regions is not really the done thing so what works for NTSC-U and PAL will likely also be similar in nature for NTSC-J.
The third route is get all 8 emeralds. When you press the combo to turn into super sonic it will have to check you have enough emeralds to do it and that will also key off the key presses and maybe a ring counter (can't remember if you need a minimum count to start) so you could then do a breakpoint (break on read most likely) for anything touching the ring counter, assuming you did not manage to land on an enemy or spikes after you set the breakpoint then the next thing to touch the ring counter will either be the activation or the ring consumption mechanic.


I don't know what goes for the disassembly of such games either (I know Sonic 1 megadrive has been done but have not looked for the rest and the remakes do their own thing most of the time) but if they are available then they might shine a light on what goes.