Anatomy of a Dreamcast Hack

[ateam]

Chapter 1
RAM inspection, debugging, disassembling, modifying assembly



Twitter Post: https://twitter.com/DerekPascarella/status/1621894493778710530

[colgate]

Oh joy!

[Impacto]

Hey, could you create a video explain how to write my own codebreaker code? Im trying to create an infinite boost code for 4 wheel thunder for a long time with no luck. I cant even find the RAM address where the boost time is stored with cheat engine using an emulator.

[fraggle200]

Derek this is amazing. stuff like this has always seemed like a dark art to me so actually seeing the moving parts really helps to understand it.

[ateam]

Hey, could you create a video explain how to write my own codebreaker code? Im trying to create an infinite boost code for 4 wheel thunder for a long time with no luck. I cant even find the RAM address where the boost time is stored with cheat engine using an emulator.

Finding the parameters in RAM responsible for storing the value you want to modify is an absolute prerequisite to any form of hack, including writing a CodeBreaker cheat. You have to at least get that far.

From there, unfortunately I can’t do much to help you, as I’ve not touched writing CodeBreaker cheats in ages. However, these two guides could likely get you going once you know what address to overwrite and with what value(s):

https://macrox.gshi.org/The%20Hacking%20Text.htm

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/dreamcast ... faqs/11357

[MoeFoh]

Project for someone to find changes made when Max Brightness is set to ON in Metal Slug 6's Debug Menu. Maybe we can patch the binary executable to keep the setting permanent?

viewtopic.php?f=74&t=13563&start=380#p169831

[Impacto]

Hey, could you create a video explain how to write my own codebreaker code? Im trying to create an infinite boost code for 4 wheel thunder for a long time with no luck. I cant even find the RAM address where the boost time is stored with cheat engine using an emulator.

Finding the parameters in RAM responsible for storing the value you want to modify is an absolute prerequisite to any form of hack, including writing a CodeBreaker cheat. You have to at least get that far.

From there, unfortunately I can’t do much to help you, as I’ve not touched writing CodeBreaker cheats in ages. However, these two guides could likely get you going once you know what address to overwrite and with what value(s):

https://macrox.gshi.org/The%20Hacking%20Text.htm

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/dreamcast ... faqs/11357

Hey, thank you for these faqs. I was able to creat a codebreaker myself after read them.

Infinite boost 4 Wheel Thunder US

016438A2
00003f80

*The problem is..... Its only working with Jeep Type 2 and in the first arcade indoor track, as soon as the track or the car change, the cheat stop to work. Any tip how to make it permanent and for all vehicles?

[ateam]

*The problem is..... Its only working with Jeep Type 2 and in the first arcade indoor track, as soon as the track or the car change, the cheat stop to work. Any tip how to make it permanent and for all vehicles?

You need to figure out the right RAM value responsible for all cars and all tracks.

[cicadas]

thank you very much for making this video! i've been very interested in trying this sort of thing lately, so seeing all the steps laid out all in one place is very helpful.

around 0:45 you mentioned tools to "unpack and re-pack [...] one-off proprietary custom archives."
this caught my attention since the game i'm most interested in trying to translate extracts mostly into a single 948 MB DATA.IMG file.

(for what it's worth, this is a virtual pet/monster-raising sim called Mercurius Pretty.)

it sounds like extracting this sort of archive is case-by-case, but i've found it difficult to find relevant answers just from searching around.
would you mind touching briefly on your experience with opening this sort of custom archive?

[ateam]

around 0:45 you mentioned tools to "unpack and re-pack [...] one-off proprietary custom archives."
this caught my attention since the game i'm most interested in trying to translate extracts mostly into a single 948 MB DATA.IMG file.

it sounds like extracting this sort of archive is case-by-case, but i've found it difficult to find relevant answers just from searching around.
would you mind touching briefly on your experience with opening this sort of custom archive?

You're correct that it's often case-by-case. However, many Dreamcast games use the AFS container format, for which there are already plenty of extract/rebuild tools available. That being said, this DATA.IMG file is more-or-less your standard packed archive. It's actually many nested archives inside possibly many other archives, all residing in the top-level archive that is DATA.IMG.

Below, we see the file signature PACK (#1), followed by a slew of pointers storing the address of files contained within the archive (#2 and #3, for example).



Interestingly, this file uses big-endian format to store its pointers, which is extremely atypical for the Dreamcast. The Hitachi SH4 is little-endian, and you can do a quick Google search to understand the difference. For quick-and-dirty purposes, let's say we want to store the decimal number 415 in four bytes (hexadecimal 0x19f).

• Little-endian: 9F 01 00 00
• Big-endian: 00 00 01 9F

"Mercurius Pretty" here is using BE for its stored offsets/pointers inside this master PACK file, so if we look at #2 and #3 from the above image, we get some example offsets:

• 00 00 F8 00
• 00 1C 19 E0
• 00 1D 13 40
• 00 2A 10 E0

If we open DATA.IMG inside a hex editor and go to each of those addresses (e.g., 0x0000f800), we see the start of contained files (in this case, yet another PACK archive).



What about some of these other pointers?



• 00 06 CB E0
• 00 06 F5 A0

Going to those addresses reveals contained files with a different signature, GN.



From here, one would either use something like QuickBMS to write an extractor script, or use a programming language of choice to write an extractor/rebuilder. This involves reading in pointer tables, extracting individual files, dealing with nested containers, etc. For the rebuild, this involves adjusting pointer tables (and any other size-specific data) to reflect the new size/location of modified files.

However I must say that at a quick-ish glance, I don't see any easily recognizable texture or text data stored anywhere in this game. And when I say quick, I mean quick. I spent the majority of my time on this post wanting to explain the basics of containers/archives. On the one hand, you can consider yourself lucky that these are all absolute pointers with a very basic indexing layout, rather than a jumbled mess of relative pointers and "pagination" (for lack of better term). Although, the nested archive stuff does get hairy...

On the other hand, there appear to be no off-the-shelf PVR textures. They could be headerless PVRs, or they could be compressed. This could make doing texture modifications difficult without time and experience. That said, I'm sure 1ST_READ.BIN has some Shift-JIS text strings embedded in it here and there, or perhaps the entire game uses a custom character encoding.