A pointer points to a value stored at a an address in memory.
In order for us to change the player's health, we have to first find the address at which the address is referenced. If you're on PC you can just use Cheat Engine to do this, or on the 3DS you can use NTR or possibly even gateway, but I don't know how that works, so I can't tell you about that.
Once we find the place a value is referenced, we can just edit the value to what we want. But notice if you make the health 9999/1000, and the player gets hit, he might drop to 9998/1000 or even 999/1000 which would mean you will have to use the cheat again before the player dies. But what if we wanted the player to be invincible? Well depending on how you're cheating, you may be able to freeze the value. Cheat Engine can do this, but that's not a 3DS tool. So what we need to do is find out what is telling the value what to be. This is a 'pointer'. The pointer tells the references what the value should be. If you only edit a reference, the pointer will just continue with what it knows how to do. But what happens if we give the pointer new instructions? Then it will relay our message to all of the child references, so in this case when the player gets hurt or drinks a health potion, they will be invincible health-wise without having to edit every single reference everytime the health is updated.
But how do you find pointers?
Well, it can be quite difficult, especially for a beginner. If you don't know how memory works, I suggest watching some YouTube videos about it, as well as reading up on basic hex values. You should know 0-F and what they mean in integer format (e.g. 1 is 1, A is 10, and 10 is 16). After that, you need some way of reading the memory in a way that allows you to analyze the data between sequences. Breakpoints are very often used in debugging to find out what's going on with the program. When we set a breakpoint, the program will be stalled when it reaches a certain point in memory, and we can read all of the information it has before it continues. This allows us to analyze the data with as much time as we need. After we're done analyzing, we can step the program ('continue' is a loose word), and it will continue until the next breakpoint or the next memory change (it depends on the program you're using to debug). Programs like Cheat Engine are easy to use to find pointers, because they have a simple option to 'find where this address is written to
from', which can help you find a pointer in a matter of minutes. But if we don't have such an option, which I'm more than certain we don't on 3DS memory debuggers, then we have to find the pointer the old fashioned way. Set a breakpoint, dump the data, pass the breakpoint, dump the data, then analyze the dumps.. I'm not sure how well that works, but it'd probably be a mess if it even works.
Here's a
tutorial in Chinese for NTR, but the translation will be broken and likely confusing in English if you use Google Translate, though that's your best option.
http://www.speedfly.cn/9892.html
Note that in that
tutorial, NTR 2.2 is being used, with debugger 2.2 DEX which a Chinese user custom-made including the ntr.bin file but is only available on the o3DS (As versions of NTR below 3.0 are only compatible with N3DS).
Sorry my explanation is kind of shitty, you'll likely find a better explanation on Google.
