ROM Hack GBA decompiler?

[AxelLea]

Hello,

I need to find a way to look at the code of a few games (mainly sonic advance 1 and 2). The reason why I want to do this is because I'm making a game that will have a similar move set and I need something to go off of. Tank you in advance.

PS Excuse my English if I made any mistakes.

 

[FAST6191]

If you mean decompiler as in program to turn compiled code back into some kind of source code then good luck with that. I suppose technically it could happen one day (the GBA did quite a bit with plain C) but there is nothing terribly useful right now. https://www.hex-rays.com/products/decompiler/ would be somewhere to watch for that to eventually happen though.

If you mean decompiler as in something like ndstool on the DS that explodes the ROM into all the different files that make it up then commercial GBA games did not do that. There are a few tricks to various formats, you can find the binary with relative ease and there are things like compression searching, however it is all in one file and does not have sub files like the DS does. You can however trace things http://www.romhacking.net/documents/361/

If you mean disassembler then I am not sure what one I suggest for the GBA right now. For most things on the GBA I tend to get by with the no$gba and vba emulators and disassembly options of crystaltile2, though I tend not to deal in massive disassemblies for the GBA and usually do more small cheats and tweaks so I can get away with that one more.

"that will have a similar move set and I need something to go off of"
You might not need to disassemble anything for that, you can quite happily record movements, watch memory and more in emulators and count pixels moved per frame/time period.

 

[AxelLea]

If you mean decompiler as in program to turn compiled code back into some kind of source code then good luck with that. I suppose technically it could happen one day (the GBA did quite a bit with plain C) but there is nothing terribly useful right now. https://www.hex-rays.com/products/decompiler/ would be somewhere to watch for that to eventually happen though.

If you mean decompiler as in something like ndstool on the DS that explodes the ROM into all the different files that make it up then commercial GBA games did not do that. There are a few tricks to various formats, you can find the binary with relative ease and there are things like compression searching, however it is all in one file and does not have sub files like the DS does. You can however trace things http://www.romhacking.net/documents/361/

If you mean disassembler then I am not sure what one I suggest for the GBA right now. For most things on the GBA I tend to get by with the no$gba and vba emulators and disassembly options of crystaltile2, though I tend not to deal in massive disassemblies for the GBA and usually do more small cheats and tweaks so I can get away with that one more.

"that will have a similar move set and I need something to go off of"
You might not need to disassemble anything for that, you can quite happily record movements, watch memory and more in emulators and count pixels moved per frame/time period.

OK, thank you for the links. It didn't help much since I need the programing (source) code as a reference for the move set (I want to base the code structure on the way its made in the game and modify it to my liking), but the help is appreciated!