Pointers confusion
So, im editing the text of Wario ware inc. for the gba, and I need to use pointers, but theres one thing, i dont know what pointers generally look like. So the question is simple, just tell me what pointers generally look like.
The GBA ROM is visible in the GBA's memory from 08000000 through to 09FFFFFF and a few other very rarely used mirrors.
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbamemorymap
This means anything referencing the ROM (which is most things -- Nintendo picked very fast memory for it so only what absolutely has to copies things to memory) will likely reference that range. As most ROMs are less than 16 megabytes then this means 08?????? where the ?? is the location within the ROM itself (give or take a bit of flipping because endianess), and as most things don't have just one pointer then if you search for 08 and find a whole bunch with 6 bytes between them* on average you likely have found some pointers.
*08 is still a valid thing to have inside a pointer, indeed perhaps more so than some other numbers so don't be too focused on it always being that fixed. There are also occasions where for something like text you might see [pointer] [formatting] [next pointer] [formatting] or some length values to save it having to calculate it rather than back to back pointers.
I do have some examples in https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ as well.
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbamemorymap
This means anything referencing the ROM (which is most things -- Nintendo picked very fast memory for it so only what absolutely has to copies things to memory) will likely reference that range. As most ROMs are less than 16 megabytes then this means 08?????? where the ?? is the location within the ROM itself (give or take a bit of flipping because endianess), and as most things don't have just one pointer then if you search for 08 and find a whole bunch with 6 bytes between them* on average you likely have found some pointers.
*08 is still a valid thing to have inside a pointer, indeed perhaps more so than some other numbers so don't be too focused on it always being that fixed. There are also occasions where for something like text you might see [pointer] [formatting] [next pointer] [formatting] or some length values to save it having to calculate it rather than back to back pointers.
I do have some examples in https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ as well.
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