Homebrew How to start creating mods/cheats for mario kart 7

[Im_Sarcastic_JackAzz]

Hi im a noob when it comes to understanding game hacking I have a deep understanding of computers both at the software and hardware level but fail to understand game hacking I especially want to hack mario kart 7 for 3ds but I fail to understand what game ID's are I would assume same as a process ID I also don't understand why they are different based off region so confusing... I come from a deep knowledge for computer hacking I understand Operating systems, security, hardware, networking, programming and many more. Im all self taught in all of those skills.

Let's just say I wanted to hack mario kart 7 and wanted to create infinite item hack I would assume its not as easy as finding the memory address for the item after finding said address modifying the limit of said item but obviously seems to easy I know everything in memory has a address that changes evertime the game starts. So example every item in mk7 has an memory address let's say the red shell is at... 0xA0B401CF (red shell) value: 1 so the value is set to one because of 1 red shell if I wanted an infinite amount I would want the value for 0xA0B401CF (red shell) value: non changeable. That's just a basic understanding of what im talking about i could go into deeper detail but im lazy and don't want to keep typing. Also sorry for my bad grammar

 

[FAST6191]

https://web.archive.org/web/20080309104350/http://etk.scener.org/?op=tutorial is for the GBA but where I generally start when people want to learn cheats. it is fundamentally the same thing for every system old and new, and likely all ones into the future. Future ones might gain some odd quirks (the Switch was seen to join Windows XP in implementing ASLR that jumbles the memory around and needed something to penetrate that) or lean more into protections but still going to be about that memory representing something.

The 3ds, unlike most handhelds before it, has some measure of operating system underneath it with separated processes and whatnot. This opens up a few more avenues (can run a memory viewer in the background and have some good stuff done via it, where most people wanted extra hardware or just went for emulators which naturally have access to whatever they like). It also makes more use of pointers, both as seemingly an anti cheat measure and because the underlying system is powerful enough for languages that make greater use of such things and dynamic code in general.

Game IDs are just that -- games going back... decades have contained little serials or similar somewhere in the code to indicate what they are. Different regions (and sometimes different revisions, though the 3ds has game updates/patches rather than needing a whole new cart to be issued) have different code and thus tend to be a different ID to stop the wrong cheats being applied.

For infinite red shells I don't know if it would be the address of the item as a distinct entity or the address of the item slot the player/character has. For something as low count as the average mario kart game I would say you are more likely to get a item slot and a variable within that which contains what item the player is holding. For an RPG you might have a bit inventory that is either a long list of items held (think identifier and item count), or a big table with a tally count of how many items of this type the player has.
The basic cheat engine/concept ( https://doc.kodewerx.org/ covers many) is little more than a glorified "keep this location at this value". More advanced cheat systems having basic IF-ELSE type arrangements to do ranges or in game triggers from other memory areas, maybe some boolean logic/masks, reads of button states. Most times these cheat engines will be a "once per frame write this value" type deal, which is why sometimes infinite health is not enough and one shot attacks might still be a thing (assuming the one shot is not a game mechanic in and of itself). More advanced cheats will alter instructions, though this is usually those hacking things themselves. Mind you on the DS the binary was in RAM so you could use a RAM cheat to alter the binary, not sure what 3ds peeps generally do here as the binary and such is a bit separated.

 

[Im_Sarcastic_JackAzz]

Thank you that was very informative i appreciate you taking the time to help me out.