A easy way to Implement Cheat Support into the EverDrive 64

You'd have to learn how to go about making your own trainers since those who made the existing ones have likely moved on and won't be making more. But that is good to point out that the games with trainers do work on the ED64.

 

Sadly my CD64 died and went to silicon heaven a long time ago, to say it was made with cheap components and put together with
a hot glue gun it was pretty awesome for its price (I got min for £120 w\o a cd drive), it also had a lot of advances over some of the
more expensive copiers out there at the time.


people give the CD64 a bad rep because of the cheap components and it had a tendency to overheat a little (I modded mine and
fitted a little fan inside) but it was pretty awesome (I miss my CD64) :grief:

As for making trainer, I now you can download most of the source code for the Crazy-Nation trainers from here

http://n64.icequake.net/mirror/www.dextrose.com/files/n64/sources_n64/

Crazy-Nations source "czn-int3.zip", is a pretty good trainer source you can even compile it and try it on the EverDrive 64 but for
me its written in pure assembly and that goes right over my head, maybe someone with assembly knowledge can take a look and
make some trainers from the source code.

 

To Four_X
Just believe me, everdrive products line support is much more hard thing than it may looks from the outside, it is not a programming only, programming probably take around 30% from all time.


Four_X: I mean, come on Krikzz (I don't have time, huge to-do list) it would take 2 maybe 3 hours max
Ok, as i said i already have huge to-do list, most of tasks in this list can be done in one day, or may be in few hours, your offer is just one of such tasks, let say, today i can done any of those tasks, but why it should be exactly mentioned cheats patcher? Why it more important than other tasks? This explanes why even very small piece of work can not be done right now, the only exceptions is a something very important. May be it hard to understand till you not be in situation like mine.



Bugfix has highest priority, some other tasks has middle priority, cheats definately has lowest priority. I did not ever used cheats in games, so i don't feel a lot of ardour for cheats implementation. Yeah, i know that a lot of people can not live without cheats or shiny graphics interface, but this two things have lowest priority

 

I know now were your coming from, and like I mentioned in a post I made after the post you're talking about

I can only say SORRY if I offended you in any way.

I just had some bad news in my life and I vented some of that anger at you, witch you did not deserve
in any way.

so again, Sorry KRIKzz.

 

No problems

 

Anyone know if the cheat device Xplorer 64 got hacked to boot without a cart on top for any of the old copier back in the day,
I know it only works if a cart was on top that's why I'm asking if it was hacked to work without one.


The reason I'm asking is because when you started a game with cheat codes using a Xplorer 64 even if you pressed reset half
way through the game the codes would still be active, it never went back to the Xplorer 64 menu it just reset the game, you
have to do a hard power off \ on to get back to the Xplorer 64 menu, I know this because I have one.


if we had a hacked Xplorer 64 ROM Image the procedure to get cheating would be this.

1) Tuned on the N64
1) Loaded the hacked Xplorer 64 ROM Image using the ED64
2) added, enable the codes we wanted for a desired game
3) booted the Xplorer 64 (we would get a black screen because there's no game on top)
4) after a couple of sec pressed the reset button on the N64
5) The ED64 menu would pop back up
6) we chose the desired game from the ED64 menu
7) Game starts and the codes would still be active.

Unless the ED64 resets the N64's RAM on boot, then it would be a waste of time to even attempting it.

The reason in asking about the Xplorer 64 is I know other cheat device suffer from bricking when used with the ED64, I know
this is not true with the Xplorer 64, the Xplorer 64 does not get bricked then on top of the EverDrive 64, like the GS and AR do.


[FONT=&quot]I know this because like I mentioned in my first post I have tried the Xplorer 64 and ED64 together and they suffer no ill effects afterwards they
both continue to function perfectly afterwards, just the ED64 Cannot read the SD Card when on top of the Xplorer 64, Bummer.[/FONT]

 

"Cheat" is kinda of a wrong word to use in my case. Usually I never use cheats that takes away the fun and challenge, what I like to use it for is "hacking" the games and exploid them, see stuff you are not supposed to and such.
Cheat support is pretty much the only thing I really miss from the Everdrive series, but as Krikzz says, it's a luxury thing and stability is a more important aspect. I hope that it will be implementet at some point though.

 

Same here - for me it was more about making the games do thing they didn't otherwise do, mainly Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, with custom made levels and weapons (usually either using codes I found on the 'net, or at most modifying codes I found on the 'net, but I spent a lot of time trying to make my own codes too, and managed some interesting results). PD and GE are my two favourite weapons, and there is so much you can alter/explore in those games.

I too hope to see Gameshark support on the ED64, but hopefully with the code-making software built in, so you're not limited to just using other peoples' codes.

 

Same here it not for cheating but for hacking to make games harder and to find thing not seen before in the games

And if KRIKzz came out with a new ED64 with the software or hardware built in to it I buy it. that if it Gamrshark/Action Replay

supported.

 

I'd suspect the reason you don't see code support is it requires runtime modification.

The GS works by decompressing one of two different trainers in memory, setting up a watch event, then booting the original game from it's startup address. In this way the GS is always present and the trainer will be called periodically, like a very, very small monitor program.
Dev devices did something similiar, except instead of embedding themselves in rdram they exploited that the flashcart was RW capable. The big difference here is that debug builds of games has several threads dedicated to reading and writing the various data tables in the extended ROM segment.

To implement cheat support requires tacking in a trainer. If you aren't going to make a hack for every game, that either requires dualbooting ROMs (requiring a major BIOS update) or a ROM-based trainer that can be appened onto the end of any ROM (pushing 512Mb games up further) with the simple watchLo/Hi hook added to the boot sequence.

Incidentally, part of the reason why those 512Mb games didn't have trainers made for them is because this would push them over the 512Mb limit of the devices back then. You'd have to make room within the cart, and that does restrict how much stuff you can pack in there.
Does the Everdrive allow ROMs over 512Mb? Hardware specs appear to support a much, much lager mappable range.

 

I think you are right, that adding generic trainers to the rom in the sdram is no fun at all.
i even made my own OS64.v64 to expermiment with function hooking.
http://n64dev.50megs.com/trainer.html
in my opinion it's no very practicable to just search for example 'osWritebackDCacheA', because you can't even tell if libultra is used.

if there isn't something hardware-based running in the background that keeps updating the values, you have to patch every game with a trainer (or like the gs with a second exception handler).

but at this point the easiest way would be, redundant patched copies of the roms on the sdcard. sdcards are cheap
- this will only work for static patches

cheers, saturnu

 

ChillyWilly has added Gameshark support to the 64Drive, and says it is possible to do so for the ED64, See http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic=229.msg1777#msg1777 for his detailed explanation. I do really hope cheat code support is added to the ED64, it would make the already great ED64 even better!

 

I didn't work on the 64Drive, I did my GS code on the N64 NeoMyth. I'm currently working on some updates to libdragon, then I plan to make a stand alone cheat app for the ED64.

 

hi ChillyWilly, first of all thanks for hosting your menu at google-code. i really feel your technical enthusiasm for old consoles and the comnunity
but how are you going to deal with codes that uses the gameshark button, without function hooking?
is it possible to add that to the gs-exception handler?

cheers, saturnu

 

Sorry, my mistake (I don't know the difference between the 64Drive and the N64 NeoMyth, so they seem to have merged in my memory :confused-new. Anyway, I am *really* looking forward to the stand alone cheat program, it will make us (few, but loyal) N64 fans very happy to be able to use Gameshark codes with our favourite games.

By the way, will it be one text file with game's cheats listed in it, or a different text file per game? I don't suppose it makes too much difference, as long as we can manually add codes to the text file(s) ourselves. For example, say you have two files called

Perfect Dark (e) [!].z64
Perfect Dark - sims can use mines.z64

then since these two games are mostly the same (the second one is basically the first one, but I've added a patch from http://www.goldeneyevault.com/ to patch the rom to allow the sims (bots) to use mines in the multi-player) most cheats codes that work with the first will work with the second, but since the second file is not officially recognised (plus, I chose the name) then it won't have any cheats listed for it, so I'd like to be able to 'create' my own cheats, by copying the file "Perfect Dark (e) [!].txt" (or whatever it's cheat file is called) and renaming the copy to "Perfect Dark - sims can use mines.txt", or, if it's one big file for the cheats (called, say, cheats.txt) then copying the block of cheats for "Perfect Dark (e) [!].z64" in the text file, and pasting it to the end of the text file, under the heading "Perfect Dark - sims can use mines.z64".

It is possible (I assume) to emulate the Gameshark button, by assigning an unused-in-any-game combination of joypad buttons, such as [Left Shoulder Button] + [Right Shoulder Button] + [Z], so that pressing these three buttons together presses the 'emulated' Gameshark's button.

The only combination that the N64 already expects is [Left Shoulder Button] + [Right Shoulder Button] + [START], which resets the analogues stick settings to zero (centre), based on where the physical stick is when you press this combination. This [Left Shoulder Button] + [Right Shoulder Button] + [START] combination is hard coded into the N64, so can only be used for that, but any other combination of [Left Shoulder Button] + [Right Shoulder Button] + [Something else] + [maybe a fourth button?] should be fine, as as far as I know, no game requires the player to use a combination like that in the game. Most games don't use the [Left Shoulder Button] at all, so adding that to the mix is a safe option.

 

My current cheat engine doesn't handle the GS-button commands, but I can do that like Conker2012 says - make it look for a pad button instead. You'll get the choice of button(s) and a pad (in case a game uses all buttons on a pad, it would be handy to use a button on another pad since the N64 can have four pads). I'm looking into a number of improvements to my current code in any case, so the ED64 will benefit from the improvements.

My current code checks for a text cheat file the same name as the rom, but my update will check a global file as well. So you can have per rom cheats as well as global ones.

 

This is going to be *fantastic*! Especially since, via the Everdrive, people like me (who could previously only use PAL games) can now use the NTSC versions of games, since some of the best Gameshark codes were only made for the NTSC versions of games.

There were ways published to convert NTSC to PAL codes (and vice versa), but they didn't always work, as the games code was sometimes seriously modified when porting the game to PAL.

Thanks for answering, Chilly Willy, and for all the work you've put into the Gameshark emulation (and will be putting into the ED64 version). And for planning to make the joypad combinations and text files so flexable and user controlled, which is always a major plus but is sadly so ignored by so many programmers (I hate the way modern first person shooter console games are removing the definable control options, for example :mad-new. I'm really REALLY looking forward to using Gameshark codes on the ED64!



Edit: You probably already know this, but Zoinkity and others on the http://www.shootersforever.com/forums_message_boards/ forum seem very knowledgeable about the Gameshark, and are always ready to help anyone asking for information or help.

 

Yes, that's where I got a lot of info on the GameShark. But thanks for the link... you never know when someone doesn't know such things.

 

OMG,

Chilly Willy You the MAN, any ETA on this or will it be done when it's done.

 

I'm working on some changes to libdragon. Once those are done, I'll work on the cheat app. I work on these in my spare time, so it doesn't go terribly fast... unless I feel like spending a weekend on it or something. So I can't say for sure when, but it is next on my todo list, which is much better than a number of other things I'm also working on.