Pointer finding

[q-tipper]

im trying to find pointers in a gba game, how do I find them?

 

[FAST6191]

Three general approaches.

1) Chances are the pointers are just before or after the data you care about. Well worth checking as it is quick and easy.

2) Most pointers are of the form 08?????? where ?????? is the location within the ROM give or take a bit of flipping to account for endianness. Search for 08 in a hex editor and anywhere where 08 generally has a 6 byte gap between them is likely a series of pointers.

3) Tracing. If you know where it is in the ROM, or where it lands in memory you have enough info to do a tracing session. Put a relevant break on read or write to the area in question, when it reads it then before that the pointer will have had to be read/generated.


For something like text you might be able to match lengths of things but that is not very useful in stuff like this, more for file level stuff on the DS.