Cheat Engine

[Banjo Patterson]

Hello everyone,

Looking to get some different angles/opinions on some CE disassembled code. The game is LoZ LttP (U) running through the ZSNES emulator. I tracked down the instruction that is called when the player takes damage, and can successfully modify this to prevent damage etc. However, it appears this one instruction is responsible for others as well, such as mana, ammunition, and other game loops (tile drawing perhaps). I'll post that one below.

What I'm curious about, is whether the CE disassembler is able to accurately represent what I assume to be 65816 assembly. Or is it possible that a whole bunch of routines have been lumped into one instruction in the process of disassembly? I guess what I was expecting was to see separate instructions for HP loss, mana loss, etc.

For example:
The instruction at zsnesw.exe+3D4F9 seems to be responsible for updating the player variables when taking damage etc, and when NOP'd will make you invincible. Also, if you move zone, the tile graphics for e.g. floors, carpets and wall torches go all out of whack, until eventually nothing makes sense visually and you are invisible.

The instruction is: mov [ecx+zsnesw.exe+32B468],al

With this instruction, I was hoping to trace where the amount of damage Link takes from an enemy is loaded from. However, seeing as this instruction is in some way tied to other game loops, setting a breakpoint leads it to constantly catch (with ECX changing frequently).

EDIT: What I should also mention, is that following this instruction is a return, with the instruction immediately after the return being:
sub dword ptr [zsnesw.exe+2E404C],37 at address zsnesw.exe+71C1B
Checking the address at zsnesw.exe+2E404C in memory, seems to be memory of the emulator itself, not game memory. I think this because the values change even when the emulation is paused, and just a little further down in memory are strings related to ZSNES itself e.g. STALL DETECTED, "This is info for the last game you ran" etc etc.

I'm just looking for some insight from all of you, who are a lot smarter than I am, on this one. Do you think the game was originally written with all of these functions (hp change, mana change, tile graphics pointers(I think?)) written into one instruction? Or could this simply be the difference between emulated SNES instructions and CE disassembled instructions? Or is it hopeless trying to disassemble SNES via CE?

Thanks everyone, let me know if I've made no sense whatsoever.

[TheyCallMeTim13]

[Banjo Patterson]

Awesome, thanks for that. I'll brush up on the tutorial there and make sure I understand all of it.