Un-Advanced hacking FAQ

If you're sneaky, you can do this in tsc.

I don't really see how, considering that there's no TSC command that involves the Inventory...

 

Well, you have to sacrifice only bringing up the inventory during a script (Which could be buggy enough as it is), but when you're told to show your evidence, you can then press the inventory key, choose your evidence, once selected, move some vertical triggers over where you should be standing (Since this is a courthouse, I'm guessing you'd have to be on the stand before you can show your evidence), then drive the story on based on what you chose.

 

Well, you have to sacrifice only bringing up the inventory during a script (Which could be buggy enough as it is), but when you're told to show your evidence, you can then press the inventory key, choose your evidence, once selected, move some vertical triggers over where you should be standing (Since this is a courthouse, I'm guessing you'd have to be on the stand before you can show your evidence), then drive the story on based on what you chose.

...But...pressing the inventory button does NOTHING during a script...or at lease a <KEY...

What would the vertical trigger do?

HOLD IT! (lolphoenixwright)

You're saying end the script, lock them in place, and when they've selected the evidence, create a vertical trigger to make an event happen? Well, that doesn't really help, because I can just put an <EVE...

But that wouldn't only let you bring up the inventory...

Are you saying if Lace does/shows me how to make the <INV command? Then the Vertical trigger is a great idea...

 

iknowhowtodoitbutiaintfreetilsaturdayokay?

 

iknowhowtodoitbutiaintfreetilstaurdayokay?

imnotevendonewiththestorylineyetsothereisnorushokay?

 

Ah, assembly code.

Such simple commands create such great confusion.

 

Ah, assembly code.

Such simple commands create such great confusion.

It's all way beyond me...

 

Such simple commands create such great confusion.

condescending much? plus, there are quite a few people here who arw pretty dang good at assembly.

comment noted power, I'll get it dun soonsh.

 

I don't think that was meant as a condescending comment, he was just accurately describing assembly.

 

Yeah he's just describing assembly's primitive nature as a language. And even though it's so simplistic it really takes a bit to understand and grasp fully.

 

*Facepalm*

Got that right >.>;
I spent the longest time reading these Assembly tutorials, only to find out I needed to learn a specific version to do any work with SMW. {Different commands}
Which meant I had a ton more reading to do....

 

Yeah he's just describing assembly's primitive nature as a language. And even though it's so simplistic it really takes a bit to understand and grasp fully.

Exactly what I meant.

I didn't mean assembly is simple to learn, I'm saying all the commands are very simple (no complex functions, etc.). It's very difficult to read and program anything using assembly languages.

 

It only takes like a month or two of actual hacking, but yeah, I get your point.

 

I am learning from these Assembly tutorials right now, thanks for making them. Since I more or less managed to learn TSC the last few months, mebbe Assembly is the next step. The only prob is that I am too lazy...

 

Well, that may not be the only problem. Assembly is about the least intuitive programming language there is. Though, to be honest, TSC isn't much better.

If you do decide to learn assembly, make sure you find a tutorial on x86 or i386 assembly (I think those are the same thing). There are other kinds of assembly (PPC, 68k, 6502, Z80, etc) that are all very different and totally useless for hacking Cave Story.

 

Z80 assembly language (and other random assembly languages) are not useless for assembly hacking. They teach you the basic concepts. All assembly languages are similar to some extent. If you can learn one, you'll learn how to do Cavestory assembly hacking a whole lot faster than if you had no programming experience.

If you're totally new, x86 may be the way to go. However, most guides on the internet are horribly lacking in useful comments for the non-assembly-savvy layman.

 

If you only want to learn for the sake of learning assembly, x86 is not the way to go. I've heard Z80 is pretty good for beginners though. If you want to hack cave story, you will need to know x86 of course.

For anyone interested, the reason x86 assembly is so hard to learn is because the good folk at Intel who designed the precessor needed to make every precessor backwards compatible with every other processor, otherwise anytime anyone made a program, they would need to recompile it every time a new processor was released.

So they had to do a bunch of terrible hacks to make it work the way they needed it to, otherwise they would run out of "room" for instructions. Example: when you are multiplying something, you assume that eax is your first operand. Another example: the precessor has different modes, where the same binary will do different things depending on the mode the processor is in, also, lots of registers were originally designed to only serve one purpose, eg eax was supposed to be really fast at math, and ecx was supposed to really fast at bitwise operations. This still applies, but to less of an extent, like ebp and esp pointing to the bottom and top of the stack, and eip pointing to the current instruction.

Just an interesting anecdote I thought I'd share. The x86 processor has been described to my by my professor as "held together with glue and bits of string"

 

Ouch. Never knew about the convoluted x86 history.

Z80 was used for the original gameboy and is still used for some calculators. Crafted for smaller handheld devices, 8-bit Z80 assembly is definitely easier to understand.

 

Hm. This must be why the assembly class at my school teaches 68k assembly rather than x86 assembly despite the latter's architecture being more prevalent.

 

Also, in practice almost nobody uses x86, because C compilers are better than most people at optimizing. The only people that do are professional reverse engineers, people who make antivirus software (which arguably could fall into the first category) people who make compilers, and people who make operating systems, and even they they are mostly C with a little bit of inline assembly.

If you have a job working with assembly, it is almost certainly a recently developed architecture for which no compiler exists, or extremely limited embedded devices. One person I know is working on a device that has 64 bytes of ram, and an 8 byte stack. It has a special jump instruction that can only jump to addresses in the first half of the program, but it means the program size is one byte smaller, and that one byte could come in handy.

Edit: people who make emulators use assembly too.