I'm helping investigate the SA2 world rankings. I found the blue spinner "Dialing" menu the other day. The guy who maintains that wiki found the rest after it I'm trying to load the 1ST_READ.BIN into IDA. But it will not disassemble, WCE EXEs work fine, and I was able to disassemble the WCE 0WINCEOS.BIN kernel binary, but IDA won't load this one Anyone have any info on this? There's none I could find on the net I just need that info, and won't turn this thread into another progress/project log again Thanks
What do you mean by "won't load"? IDA will usually try to guess at what type of binary it is. You may need to manually set the processor type and endianess when you start a new project. How big is the .bin?
It tells me it can't find the entry point then the whole thing is mostly .res.b 1 I tried defining the actual RAM start address and size, same thing for ROM, default binary execution offset. So I come to the boards for guidence
@TerdFerguson short answer: in the same way as any other generic binary file for void system. if you never did it previously: - you have to select target CPU, Renesas SH-4 little endian - create memory section for RAM: RAM start address - 0x8c000000 (*) RAM size - 0x1000000 - uncheck "create ROM section" - change Input file - Loading address to 0x8c010000 (*) after loading start disassembling binary from this address however I'll recommend to work with whole RAM dump instead, in this case you will have both game "exe" and initialized working data. you can dump RAM using some hexeditor from game running on Demul for example, address of Dreamcast RAM is 2C000000h in emulator process address space. (*) some games instead of 8Cxxxxxx works in 0Cxxxxxx addresses, you have to know correct one before creating IDA base.
PS: as easier alternative you can try to use special loader for DC https://github.com/lab313ru/sdc_loader not sure if it works OK, as I see its quite preliminary
I'm familiar with demul debugging, but could you elaborate on how you export a ram dump from an emulator? Edit: I see now that's what sdc loader is
>>> ie run WinHEX - Open memory - select demul in process list, select start and end block addresses (2C000000 - 2CFFFFFF), save it
Also if your 1st_read.bin is scrambled, I imagine you would need to unscramble it before IDA could make sense of it.
That was probably my issue hidden in plain view, I forgot about scrambling. If not I'll try the ram dump. Thanks
scrambling is Mil-CD only security thing, you'll never see scrambled 1ST_READ.BIN on regular GD-ROM, GD-R or GD-M (.HCD) images.
