


Why? Probably to increase proprietary-ness since at the time Datel had some other competition with other similar products coming out such as GameShark and Code Breaker. Another thing to mention is that Action Replay codes are encrypted. D8BAE4D9 4864DCE5Īction Replay codes take the form of having two 32-bit integers being one complete code in the form of xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx which is why usually when you saw formatted Action Replay codes they took that neat two-column form. Let’s dissect one of these Must Be On codes. The AR has its own instruction set of sorts that it uses for cheats that makes the AR itself seem like a RISC processor of its own. Every game that you wish to run cheats for on the AR has what’s called a Master code(M) or Must Be On that has to be enabled for any other following cheats to be ran. So now we have a successful way to run our own code in the middle of a game! How do we know when to start running custom code though and how do we get to the cheat part of this? First lets find out how the AR gets its own code running. It can look out for certain memory addresses being read and swap in its own code entirely for a moment before providing the console with actual data from the ROM. The action replay would sit right between this protocol and spoof the data that the console is getting whenever it wants. When the CPU is executing the game’s code it’s really just reading them right off the game pack and that’s where the action replay comes in. This area is read-only (ROM) so if the CPU tries to write to these regions they pretty much do nothing while reading between these addresses interface with memory on the game cartridge. The reason why I mention this is that when a GBA game gets plugged in it gets mapped to the entire memory range from 0x8000000 to 0x9000000. What this means is that the memory bus of the gba gets linked up in such a way that reading and writing to certain addresses is how the CPU can find out about things like the current state of buttons being pressed or feed data to the sound hardware and such like that. So what it does is map certain ranges of addresses of ram to interface with peripheral devices.
Avalon code action replay codes full#
The GBA uses Memory Mapped IO meaning that while this processor( which is an ARM7TDMI by the way) has a full 32 bits of addressable memory( about 4 gb) it clearly isn’t going to use that much space. Now lemme explain something about how the GBA works before I show how this little gadget manages to work. It was a device that would sit right between your GBA game cartridge and your GBA console. I’ll talk about the GBA one specifically since the newer ones for the NDS or Gamecube or w/e are more complex. I still have sketchbooks full of little discoveries of me editing the “teleport to _” code in the old Pokemon games and notes when I taught myself hexadecimal.

Ok I’m gonna answer the hell out of this because Action Replay is legit one of the things that started my whole comp-sci career all those years ago. Ask Submit About Frequently asked questionsĪnonymous asked: How do things like Gameshark and ActionReplay codes work?
