Is it just me or do old 16-bit fighting games....

[dragonboy]

Who is this Rai? What website is he on?

EDIT: Is it this guy? http://www.proprofs.com/forums/index...howtopic=13910 I can see why you might think it is me, but it's not me. He's just someone who has a lot in common with me.

[tomaitheous]

Dragonboy:

No, not him. Someone else in a hacking forum. I mean in the fact that you said you knew 68k assembly because you read some documents and memorized some instructions. He did the same thing for 65x and R3000, but didn't *really* understand it. He couldn't hack existing code because he couldn't understand it. He understood what the instructions were and could follow them, but he had no idea what was going on and couldn't figure out what the overall code was doing.

He kept asking for assistance on how to hack a certain/specific part of the game. He wanted someone to write a routine for him so he could insert it back in to the rom. Everyone kept telling him he needed to learn 65x ASM. He kept insisting that he knew 65x ASM since he had the instruction lists, documents, and knew what the instructions did. If he in fact did know ASM, he would have known right away that someone couldn't just give him a replacement routine. A replacement routine is custom to almost every situation (in hacking) and the coder needs to be intimately familiar with the existing code to even write one. Figuring out the original code requires ASM knowledge, not to mention a certain level.

So the parallels were that you both thought that having the instruction list and/or memorizing it meant you already knew ASM. The same goes for hardware. If and when you've coded for many similar console systems, can you look at documents and get a decent feel what it's capable of. But that can still bite you in the ass. Ones level of experience in ASM for a specific system is what really separates coders. Imagination also helps out a lot. It allows you to think of new/clever tricks, optimizations, exploits. There is some really clever code written out there.