Gaming AR code for Boktai 1 Sky Tower?

[Yorrick]

Hello,

Has anyone anywhere made an ActionReplay/GameShark/misc-cheating-device code that will let you skip floors of the Azure Sky Tower in the first Boktai game?

I have all 7 emblems on my save file on my cartridge, but I REALLY don't want to spend my life running up that tower over and over and Over and OVER AND.#$%^$#

Could you hack the counter of how many times you had gone up, tell the game that I'd already gone up 98 times so I'd only have to go up the last time to fight the Knight?

Or a code that makes the warp in the tower take you straight to the top (you'd have to warp and fight the Knight a couple dozen times, but hey, no in between floors).

I'm too stupid to make AR codes for myself. =(

How would you go about doing that?

 

[FAST6191]

I assume you checked the various gamefaqs listings and whatnot.

Warp codes will likely be harder to make than a tripping a simple counter, though if you can then potentially quicker and less fiddly. This even more so if you want to fiddle with the encounter logic (as you go through the door or possibly start the whole thing then it will have a check, one aspect of this will be checking the counter to see what it does).

https://web.archive.org/web/20080309104350/http://etk.scener.org/?op=tutorial is my usual suggestion for learning cheat making in general, bonus here is it is for the GBA.
https://gamehacking.org/wiki/Hacking_Game_Boy_Advance is also worth having.
It is something I suggest all flash cart and emulator users learn. Need not be the really crazy stuff it covers there with encryption (though it is not beyond reason) but a basic infinite items and appreciation for the general idea of cheats.

General idea for most counters (usually more for score, lives, inventory items, money, time to a lesser extent...) is you do as little as you can, change the counter (lose a life, use an item, buy something... depending upon what you are aiming at) and then do a search for anything that changed, repeat the change, repeat the search until the list you have is small enough to test. If you have a specific number you can search for that, and if you are sure something is counting up or going down you can do less than/greater than but encounters hidden like this have a nasty habit of either counting up or counting down until 0 depending upon the whims of the dev.
This is far more tedious if you have a 5 minute gameplay segment between each search, even more so if said 5 minutes is going to change things somewhat (might want to do some elimination in that case), though nothing says you can't do it on an emulator with turbo button held down with infinite health, max damage, infinite ammo to make it as painless as you can (possibly also eliminating some of the changes if you hold the health, score and whatnot constant, or otherwise know where they are if you have cheats telling you exactly that, on top of doing nothing and searching for a change to say eliminate the background audio functions).

 

[Yorrick]

Thank you for the info!! it was great to help get me started.

Just a bit of a progress update, I've discovered two addresses for the Azure Sky Tower

0203e8dd:00 is what floor of the tower you are currently on. If you're out and about in the game world, it reads as 01.

Playing around with this is fine in an emulator, but I really wouldn't want to mess around with this on my actual cartridge since it has a tendency to mess things up. Fun for testing though; it let me warp up the tower pretty fast.

0203e8e0:00 is how many times you have completed the tower

I'm pretty sure that's what it does. After a couple of testing runs it read as 02 and then incremented to 03 when I beat the knight; when I set it to 30 and warped up the tower again the knight gave me the infinite battery after the fight.

It was actually rather a let down. No extra cutscene to no congratulatory notice, just his regular after fight spiel and the the item acquisition notice.

I think I want to test these out some more with a New Game + file so I can check the counters at the Solar Tree. Make sure I'm not messing anything up before trying to figure out how to make it happen on my physical cartridge.