GBA and DS Rom hacking guide- 2012 rewrite

[FAST6191]

GBA and DS Rom hacking guide- 2012 rewrite

Here are GBAtemp we have a thriving rom hacking community with a focus on GBA and especially the DS (although all consoles and devices are welcome) and as with most sections we try to have a guide to the various things that can be done. A bit of free time allowed for a near total rewrite and although it is not yet complete there should be more than enough information on all the big areas (graphics, text, game logic- assembly, levels, cheating.... and multimedia) along with example hacks of many of the big formats seen on the GBA and DS to get a lot of things done. Right now it is in PDF format although a HTML version should be along at some point and hopefully even the source document.

Filetrip download

Corrections (hopefully there are few) as well fixes for typos, layout and suggestions for areas to be added or expanded upon are welcome.

 

[corenting]

Looks great but I cannot download it
The download isn't loading and when I click on "click here to stat the download manually" it's not working too.

 

[FAST6191]

I do not know what changed- it just worked fine for me (current firefox, most security options disabled on filetrip).

I put a version up on a site I control ( http://trastindustries.com/romhacking2012preview2.pdf ). I had wanted to use filetrip though so if you are going to share the link please use filetrip as I am probably not going to keep the others up to date right now... might stick the HTML version up there though (it will probably be different as I wanted to do videos but being PDF it was better to do static images).

On a different note a list of contents (most of the file formats are not really there and part III needs a fair bit of work but the rest should be there)

Spoiler: Contents list

I Introduction 11
II Rom hacking concepts 14
1 Basics 14
1.1 Hexadecimal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.1.1 Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.1.2 BCD (Binary coded decimal) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.1.3 Big and little endian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.1.4 Signed values, oating point and xed point . . . . . . . . 18
1.2 Hex operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.2.1 Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.2.2 Rotate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.2.3 Flip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
1.2.4 Boolean logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.2.5 Hex Mathematics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.3 Patching and patch making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.4 File systems and operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
1.4.1 GBA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
1.4.2 DS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
1.4.3 GC (gamecube) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.4.4 Wii . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1.4.5 Xbox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1.4.6 Xbox 360 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
1.4.7 PS1 and PS2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.4.8 PS3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.4.9 PSP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1.4.10 Saturn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.4.11 Dreamcast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.4.12 Amiga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.4.13 PC and related hardware. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
1.5 Finding the object of your interest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
1.6 Abstraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
1.7 Tools of the trade continued . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
1.7.1 Hex editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
1.7.2 Tile editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
1.7.3 Spreadsheet and command line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
1.7.4 Compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
1.7.5 Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
1.7.6 ASM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
1.8 Basic le format concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4
2 Graphics 64
2.0.1 Aliasing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.0.2 Haloing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.0.3 Bit depth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.1 Palettes and colours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.1.1 GBA colours (15 bit) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.2 Tiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.2.1 1Bpp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.2.2 4 Bpp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2.2.3 8Bpp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
2.2.4 GBA3 Xbpp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
2.2.5 GBA2 4BPP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
2.2.6 Bitmap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
2.2.7 Known formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
2.2.8 Crystaltile2 export and import. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
2.2.9 Avoiding gradients, AA, lossy/noise and such things. . . . 79
2.3 Layout, timing, OAM and special eects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
2.3.1 Introduction to the OAM and BG modes. . . . . . . . . . 79
2.3.2 Timing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
2.3.3 GBA and DS OAM (sprites) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
2.3.4 GBA and DS BG modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
2.3.5 Basic animation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
2.3.6 Window feature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
2.3.7 Special features (ipping, ane transformation, alpha and
such) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
2.3.8 Basic DS layout formats and mapping . . . . . . . . . . . 95
2.3.9 Video memory handling and alignment . . . . . . . . . . . 98
2.4 3d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
2.4.1 Basic 3d (bones, coordinates, keyframes) . . . . . . . . . . 99
2.4.2 Viewpoints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
2.4.3 Textures and material colours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
2.4.4 Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
2.4.5 Lighting/shadows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
2.4.6 3d smoke and fog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
2.4.7 Animations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
2.4.8 DS 3D hardware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
2.4.9 The shift of the 3D to DS 2d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
2.4.10 NSBMD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
2.4.11 Non NSBMD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
2.5 Notes and further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
3 Text 121
3.1 Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3.1.1 Relative searching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
3.1.2 Corruption and alteration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
3.1.3 Memory viewing and corruption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
5
3.1.4 Frequency analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
3.1.5 Language analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
3.1.6 Pointer and encoding/hex analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
3.1.7 Assembly tracing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
3.1.8 Font viewing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
3.1.9 Language comparing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
3.1.10 Table creation tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
3.2 Pointers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
3.2.1 Special cases and non pointer concepts . . . . . . . . . . . 142
3.2.2 Example reverse engineering of pointers . . . . . . . . . . 143
3.3 Markup, control codes and placeholders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
3.3.1 Worked example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
3.4 Fonts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
3.4.1 NFTR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
3.4.2 Common hacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
3.5 Scripting and layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
3.5.1 Layout and limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
3.6 Text extraction and insertion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
3.6.1 Text extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
3.6.2 Text insertion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
3.7 Language detection in DS games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
3.8 Translation hacking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
3.8.1 The types of Japanese characters and how they work - . 179
3.8.2 Japanese glyphs/characters and observations on the lan-guage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
3.8.3 On language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
3.9 Japanese text editors and translation tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
3.9.1 General Japanese capable text editors . . . . . . . . . . . 184
3.9.2 Rom hacking tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
3.9.3 CAT tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
4 Multimedia 186
4.1 Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
4.1.1 SDAT (NDS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
4.1.2 Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
4.1.3 Tracker formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
4.1.4 General rule of thumb for custom audio formats . . . . . 200
4.1.5 Common DS SDAT audio hacks (undubbing, injection,
tweaks and relinking) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
4.1.6 GBA audio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
4.2 Video . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
4.2.1 General video theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
4.2.2 Mods/VX/act imagine by Mobiclip. . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
4.2.3 RAD/Bink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
4.2.4 Criware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
4.3 Cut scenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
6
5 Game logic 229
5.1 Levels and Stats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
5.1.1 Example tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
5.1.2 Level editing techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
5.1.3 Stats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
5.2 Compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
5.2.1 Lossy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
5.2.2 Lossless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
5.2.3 Basic theory of the actual implementations . . . . . . . . 246
5.2.4 Compression at hexadecimal level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
5.3 Cheating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
5.3.1 General cheat making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
5.3.2 GBA cheat making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
5.3.3 DS cheat making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
5.3.4 Basic making of a cheat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
5.3.5 Cheat prevention methods and frustrations . . . . . . . . 265
5.3.6 Instruction editing cheating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
5.4 Programming concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
5.4.1 Functions and procedural programming. . . . . . . . . . . 272
5.4.2 IF ELSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
5.4.3 Recursion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
5.4.4 Iteration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
5.4.5 Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
5.4.6 Turing complete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
5.4.7 Fundamentals of Assembly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
5.5 Assembly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
5.5.1 ARM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
5.5.2 GBA Assembly specics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
5.5.3 DS Assembly specics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
5.5.4 The GBA and DS compared . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
5.5.5 On controls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
5.5.6 Hooking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
5.5.7 GBA cart as extra memory for DS hacks . . . . . . . . . . 292
5.6 Non specic assembly discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
5.6.1 Language mod example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
5.6.2 Non code in ASM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
5.6.3 Destructive vs non destructive assembly editing . . . . . . 296
5.6.4 Polymorphic and dynamic code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
5.6.5 Slowdown and speedup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
5.6.6 Cryptography (encryption, checksums and signatures) . . 300
5.6.7 Save editing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
5.6.8 Interpreted languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
5.6.9 Game AI, game logic and game theory . . . . . . . . . . . 307
5.7 Flash cart and emulator theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
5.7.1 GBA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
5.7.2 DS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
7
5.8 Rom hacking protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
III Examples, oddities and techniques. 319
6 Crystaltile2 general usage guide 319
7 GBA tracing 325
7.0.1 Worked examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326
8 DS tracing 326
8.1 Cart read command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
8.1.1 Basic lookup and methods for it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
8.1.2 Header reverse engineering/generated values . . . . . . . . 327
9 Reverse engineering various ROM images 327
9.1 Large archive on top of lesystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
9.1.1 Tony Hawk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
9.1.2 Star Wars - The Force Unleashed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
9.1.3 El Tigre Make my mule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
9.2 Compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
9.3 First Person Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
9.4 Platformer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
9.5 Fighting games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
9.6 Role playing games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
9.7 Racing games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
9.8 Puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
9.8.1 Mahjong game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
9.8.2 Tetris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
9.9 Other genres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
10 Developer leftovers 331
11 Workarounds 332
12 Moving to a new system 332
13 Developer tricks aka thinking like a game developer 333
13.0.1 Level and mechanism design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
13.0.2 Sprite and palette reuses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
13.0.3 Pre rendering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
13.0.4 Speed blur and fog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
13.0.5 Loading covers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
13.0.6 Optimisation of loading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
13.0.7 3d imagery in general . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
13.0.8 Procedural generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
8
13.0.9 Noise on images and sound. Some systems even allow for
this. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
13.0.10Using the limits of the system/working to them . . . . . . 338
13.0.11Network coding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
14 Game design and media 339
15 Python, batch les and programming for rom hacking 340
15.1 ROMulan Data Extractor/Injector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340
15.2 Programming languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
15.3 Python . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
16 PC program hacking 342
16.1 Debugging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
16.2 Decompilation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
17 Version control and project management. 344
17.1 Project and team management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
17.2 Version control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
18 Interesting links and further reading. 347
18.1 Links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
18.2 Further reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
IV File formats (specications, methods and known
formats). 349
19 General things about the DS 349
20 Generic DS nitro SDK format 349
21 General le reverse engineering 349
21.1 Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
21.2 File sizes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
21.3 Multiple versions of the game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
21.4 File names and extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
21.5 Tile viewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
21.6 Pointers and such . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
22 Sound 351
22.1 SDAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
22.2 SSEQ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
22.3 STRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
22.4 SWAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
22.5 SWAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
22.6 BANK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
9
22.7 Other formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
23 Graphics 354
23.1 NCER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354
23.2 NANR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
23.3 NCGR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
23.4 NSCR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
23.5 NMCR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
23.6 NFTR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
23.7 NSBMD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
23.8 NSBTX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
23.9 NSBCA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
24 Packing format 358
24.1 NARC, ARC and CARC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358
25 Text 358
25.1 BMG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358
V Glossary, index and such 360
26 Glossary 360

 

[pokefloote]

This looks like it is going to be very detailed and in-depth. Thank you for all the hard work.

 

[Javiryu]

Fast6191 thanks for all of your hard work creating this!

 

[Prof. 9]

This thing is absolutely monstrous. I'm giving it a read myself, but so far I have two tips. Use more commas! It makes some of your paragraphs read so much more smoothly. An example:

A hex editor. All computers you will probably deal with, unless quantum
computing appears and takes over tomorrow, boil down to binary, which
is very simply abstracted to hexadecimal. Although it is very hard (and
often ill advised) to do anything more than a simple change (be it a simple
edit of a line, a nd and replace, a basic operation or inserting something
new) in a hex editor, those small changes can be the thing that makes a
ROM hack work. 1a could be said to be a compression handling tool, as
compression is quite often standardised and often provides an immediate
and (these days at least) simply worked around barrier to seeing a format
as the program itself will see it.

The sentence in italics seems incomplete and is generally very hard to follow.

Also, try not interrupt your sentence to add in some meaningless detail or joke. Take the first sentence, for instance:

All computers you will probably deal with, unless quantum computing appears and takes over tomorrow, boil down to binary, which is very simply abstracted to hexadecimal.

The bit about quantum computing is, IMHO, better placed at the start of the sentence so it doesn't interrupt the flow of the sentence:

Unless quantum computing appears and takes over tomorrow, all computers you will probably deal with boil down to binary, which is very simply abstracted to hexadecimal.

You could also leave it out just as well:

All computers you will probably deal with boil down to binary, which is very simply abstracted to hexadecimal.

The sentence right after this is even interrupted twice

Anyway, this guide seems really fascinating and I'm definitely going to give it a read through. Thanks for the effort!

 

[FAST6191]

Thanks Prof. 9 and I agree some areas can stand to be reworded a bit. I really should stop remembering things and cooking up anecdotes midway through doing something else and forgetting to restructure the newly changed sentence as it does seriously impact readability (that is exactly what happened for that paragraph). Worse is I did it for an introduction which is something I really should not have thrown together (I make no promises but the rest of the document should be slightly better).

Equally now much of the actual text and images for part II (which is mainly there to cover basic concepts and a few example hacks using them) I can spend the time to edit things and do a lot more layout work (lyx is great but it fell a bit short here compared to most other times where defaults work pretty well).

 

[shakirmoledina]

tht is some amazing work! i will totally give it a read when i get the time. Will also suggest others to have a read too.

 

[FAST6191]

Thanks shakirmoledina

I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening as well as a bit of this morning working my way through it and playing editor (typos, grammar tweaks, section ordering, clarifications and fixing the odd missing line/picture) so there is now a second preview version, I did not add much of anything but it should be slightly less disjointed when reading although this often came at the cost of longer sentences. I did have to hold back on the margins tweak I had planned though as I did not have the patience to redo pictures where were sized relative to the text area.
The same filetrip link as before should net it but to save scrolling up http://filetrip.net/nds-downloads/utilities/latest-gba-and-ds-rom-hacking-guide-f30026.html .

I updated my version of lyx as well and it plays slightly better with HTML although it is still not ideal with it being a 9 meg or so page without any nice names for the links not to mention I want to redo some of the static pictures to have videos instead (OAM animation makes so much more sense when you see it in real time) so I am holding back on that for the time being, I could possibly be persuaded to do a zip of it though.