Nintendo GBA and DS ROM hacking guide (2016) (opens in new tab)

The 3DS hacking scene is still pretty active. Great form factor devices, fully jailbroken. Guide is pretty easy to follow at 3ds.hacks.guide :)

I've got mine as the best form-factor emulation station (for older games) you could imagine :).

Very comprehensive resource for someone trying to get into rom hacking in general.

The GBATEK specification [0] mentioned several times in the guide (not limited to the GBA, it also covers Nintendo DS, DSi and 3DS) feels like a real treasure trove of technical data.

[0] https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm

This appears to be a phenomenal document containing a lot of fascinating info on ROM hacking in general - while the document does explicitly appear to cover GBA and DS most specifically (at 300+ pages, I could only skim through it, here) - it covers surprisingly fundamental basics about game development, emulation and core programming concepts.

This will be a document I'll keep around for the foreseeable future. Amazing work.

Back in the '80s there was a lot of save game file hacking going on. My buddy and I would look at save game files for all the hot fun games in the hex editor and try to figure out what values we could change. Bard's Tale had a fairly simple layout, which we painstakingly figured out by, for example, using one item and seeing which values decremented. BTII or III, can't remember, went to some length to prevent this easy hacking of the save state. By the 1990s it was common for save game files to be obfuscated in various ways, making the process much more of a pain in the ass.

This is a surprisingly well written /book/. Thanks for the link.

I used to do game save file hacking on palmOS as a teen. Was a hoot. Eventually turned to full blown “cracking” of software. That was a fun hobby.

I'm working on a project to use 3DS devices as a Terminal and IoT device with RTMES as the OS. Still in pretty early stage (aka nothing to see here) but used 3DS's are cheaper then RPI's have wireless, a Screen a keyboard (touchscreen), infrared, microphone and speaker and even a UPS (battery) plus two different Cores, so it is a pretty powerfull Device for stuff like that.

Is there any URL we can switch the top link to, that contains some of this information but doesn't do an automatic file download as https://gbatemp.net/download/gba-and-ds-rom-hacking-guide.33... does? (Those make annoying links for frontpage submissions, even when the content is good.)