If you like this kind of thing, just go in and give it a shot! The NES is a great place to start, just three registers and simple instruction set. The display unit ABI is well documented and there's a couple of NES debuggers out there.
Starting with no experience, I wrote a program to dump level images straight from a ROM:
The early stuff he shows can be done on most emulators as a way to cheat. Done it ever so often when i get bored with a game. Sometimes locking the health value will freeze a game though as developers use a cheap refill animation on leveling up or beating a boss, and you end up with the animation getting stuck as the emulator keeps resetting the value.
I have never owned one, but i think gamesharks and others work similarly.
The NES/SNES era had a lot of games that use sprite animation state/OAM memory as the canonical place to hold the current state of something. Often even important, high-level pieces of game business-logic state, were just left as sprite attributes on particular sprites.
Two examples from Super Mario World (which loves this technique):
• You can avoid dying from running out of time in SMW, by simply getting a power-up right as the level timer reaches zero. The level timer just changes the Mario sprite's animation to STATE_DYING (once, when transitioning from 1 to 0); so if you can get the sprite to play a different animation, the game forget that the player was supposed to be dead.
• The "null sprite" glitch: Yoshi 'carries around' enemies in his mouth by just 1. marking the enemy sprite as invisible and intangible, and then 2. storing a pointer to said enemy sprite. If you can get that sprite to unload from OAM memory and get something else to take its place, then when Yoshi goes to spit the enemy out, he'll instead spit out whatever random garbage is now at the OAM location referenced by the pointer.
Yes! Gamesharks / Action Replays / similar gave you an "instruction set" of sorts that was interpreted as instructions of sorts - write value to address, do if value at address is X, and so on. When I was messing with one on the Nintendo DS a few years back, you were actually able to write ARM (and THUMB, I believe) ASM and compile it to the target system (NDS) that could be loaded through the Action Replay. I'll have to check if I can dig up my old notes on this stuff when I'm home...
I'd really like to read your notes if you find them. I'm assuming the Action Replay could be used for the first bypass/homebrew loading exploits, then?
I'm not sure; I never got that involved in it. Back when I was involved, there were some communities entirely centered around taking apart individual games and figuring out how to tinker with them. Things like loading up the unused tracks in Mario Kart and changing the colours etc. to make "custom" courses.
Here's one of the main pages I used as a reference at the time: http://doc.kodewerx.org/hacking_nds.html Even without ASM, you could still write to arbitrary memory addresses, jump around with conditionals, patch, copy memory, and all sorts of things. The linked page also touches on the basics of ARM/THUMB ASM tinkering. I seem to have lost my notes, so this is all I can get you :(
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I have been freelance for the past 8 years. But I'm willing consider full time and relocation for the right project.
C#, Asp.net MVC/WebApi, AngularJS, MS SQL Server. Large body of work in the public and private sector on projects of various scale. From helping a small publishing shop connect their CRM to their CMS, to writing the backend content management system for one of the largest publishers on the app store, to building the 911 dispatching system for the local county. I primarily build web applications, but have also developed projects related data scraping and cleaning, document manipulation, and batch processing systems.
I have been freelance for the past 8 years. But I'm willing consider full time and relocation for the right project.
C#, Asp.net MVC/WebApi, AngularJS, MS SQL Server. Large body of work in the public and private sector on projects of various scale. From helping a small publishing shop connect their CRM to their CMS, to writing the backend content management system for one of the largest publishers on the app store, to building the 911 dispatching system for the local county. I primarily build web applications, but have also developed projects related data scraping and cleaning, document manipulation, and batch processing systems.
Things here are broader than the physical. Not for all people who are depressed, but a general absence of desire is common. It includes desire for physical things that you may have once liked or collected. Lack of desire for social things like friends or lovers or perhaps any contact with other people. Even the desire to be alive, which for most people is just a given, can be absent. I, for example, was not actually suicidal, I just had no desire to exist, but also no desire to put forth the effort to end my existence.
I think this is meant in the context of having goals for oneself, some drive about something(s) to make you want to get out of bed ... not simply consuming products you don't need
Which is pretty ironic, considering that the people who completely lack desires tend to be those suferring major depression much more than those who have achieved an enlightened serenity.
As someone who has grappled with fairly severe depression, it's not that you have no desires. Your body does a decent job of making sure you maintain your body by giving you plenty.
I would merely say you have no rational desires. As a human your are functional, but as a rational human you've hit a wall.
I can't definitively say I've been depressed, but is it fair to say that you still have desires and want things, but it feels like there are insurmountable barriers between you and desires/things?
Yea, I think that's fair. I think it's also pretty subjective, so it wouldn't surprise me for people to experience it differently. But whatever is wrong or blocking one or one's desires (or whatever) is in one's brain, if not one's control.
I don't think it's gratuitous negativity. I think the response is gratuitous sensitivity. My comment communicated that (1) it doesn't work on Firefox, (2) this is an increasingly common problem, and (3) it frustrates me.
Review the rules. I don't think my comment violated them and I think the response to my comment is an indicator that people have thinner skins every day.
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I primarly work with Angular.js, Bootstrap, & jQuery on the front end and C# on the backend - Asp.net (Web Forms, MVC, & Web API), LINQ, Entity Framework, & MS Sql Server. I've done iOS development using Monotouch/Xamarin for an interal customer & order mangement system used by a salesforce of 500 people. I get up to speed on new tech very quickly and have been known to dabble in python, cobol, perl, and node.js.
I can code your brand new project on my own as a full stack developer or agument your existing team. If you are a small business who lacks a full time development staff, I can add new features or do maintenance on your existing applications.
