GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[PaRaDoX]

Is there any way for us to be able to look at the programming code of games?I would like to know since I find the codes fascinating for some reason

[zoinkity]

Yep, a few different ways.
Easiest by far are emulators with debuggers in them. Of those, the one with least fuss to set up is Nemu64. When the game is running you simply open the "commands" window to view the opcdoes at given addresses. You can change the address in the window, and set breakpoints etc.
Mupen also has a debugger, though that blasted thing is a nightmare to set up. You can also use external debuggers like renegade64.

If you just want to dump opcodes without running the game there are those as well. Lemmy made one, I wrote my own and probably never posted it anywhere, and really any R4xxx series debugger will likely do.

One thing to note if you debug at runtime is that games using the table lookaside buffer (TLB) will only be able to view code at virtual addresses when the code has been loaded. By convention most virtual addresses start with a 7.

Opcode descriptions can be found all over the place, but most are self-explainatory names. Note that most debuggers only handle the normal processor and not the COP2 RSP psuedo-opcodes which are based on the same general format.
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[TimEh]

IDA Pro has native support the dissasembly of n64 roms. But im just tryin it for the first time after readin this post. By far a must have tool for win32 binaries, but not sure about n64 ones. Seems the C code generator doesnt work(for obvious reasons) which is mainly why/how i use IDA. Not sure if the debugger works. but for exploring the rom from the point of view "asm is scary and hurts my brain" id say try IDA

[PaRaDoX]

^ welcome back Timeh.
But what I meant by code was kinda like javascript or C++ . The actual programming lines. I don't know if that is what you guys meant, if it is, thanks

[zoinkity]

There's a difference between compiled code and source.

Languages like C, C++, etc or virtual languages like java are all "high-level" code. What that means is it doesn't stand on its own. In order for a machine to operate, it needs low-level assembly code. When you compile a script, you process the high-level code into a series of low-level asm.

In order to even concider a high-level interpretattion of the code, you'd have to either detect a known library and link against it or interpret the ASM as is and muddle out its usage. Games that use the N64 libraries (and don't alter them like GE did) you can work out maybe 0.5 - 1MB of code depending automatically. Everything beyond that is game-specific-ish.
So, for a precompiled piece of code like a ROM image ASM is your only option.
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