Originally posted by Yoronosuku

---

No one is going to search for data for you, do you not get that part? =\

---

• N64 games are all made with the same devkit, and all run in a simple multithreaded OS. They are almost entirely coded in C.
  
• Pretty much every N64 game compresses most of its data, as rivalling the Playstation it was very important to fit as much content onto as small a chip as possible to keep costs down while delivering comparable results.
  
• N64's CPU is much more powerful, and it has much more RAM.
  
• N64 games frequently employed various anti-piracy methods, such as ROM checksums, and in many cases anti-cheating methods as well.
  
• N64 cartridges are not memory-mapped; data has to be slowly transferred from them into RAM before it can be used. (The N64 automatically transfers some data from the beginning of ROM, and performs a checksum on it, at power-on.)
  
• Obviously, the N64 does true 3D, and has a floating-point processor. It also has two coprocessors and an MMU.

Originally posted by Alice

---

sliafdnacinoS has the right idea but I don't think his post needed to be so negative. It's understandable that a newbie might think Shockwave is required for N64 hacking since the only N64 editor he knew about required it, but this isn't true. You do NOT have to know ASM to hack even N64; it is a HUGE help but it isn't mandatory. (Plus, the instructions you posted were for a 6502, which has nothing to do with N64. )

If you want to hack N64 you should know a fair bit about it and how it differs from the SNES (and NES, which I won't bother to mention since it's so similar to SNES). You can look up these differences on Wikipedia and various homebrew coding sites.

It's important to note some differences from the SNES:

• N64 games are all made with the same devkit, and all run in a simple multithreaded OS. They are almost entirely coded in C.
  
• Pretty much every N64 game compresses most of its data, as rivalling the Playstation it was very important to fit as much content onto as small a chip as possible to keep costs down while delivering comparable results.
  
• N64's CPU is much more powerful, and it has much more RAM.
  
• N64 games frequently employed various anti-piracy methods, such as ROM checksums, and in many cases anti-cheating methods as well.
  
• N64 cartridges are not memory-mapped; data has to be slowly transferred from them into RAM before it can be used. (The N64 automatically transfers some data from the beginning of ROM, and performs a checksum on it, at power-on.)
  
• Obviously, the N64 does true 3D, and has a floating-point processor. It also has two coprocessors and an MMU.

These differences pose interesting changes when it comes to hacking. Compression, checksums, multithreading, and MMU make ROM corruption pretty much worthless - it will almost certainly result in the game crashing; trying to decompress garbage data and getting stuck in a loop, failing a checksum, or writing past the end of the buffer being used for decompression and triggering an access violation. Since SNES games didn't often use compression or checksums, this was less an issue, and since a very small portion of their memory map was actually RAM (most of it is ROM) and there was no MMU to say "hey WTF you shouldn't be writing there" and stop the program, corruption generally only produced strange results, and even if it did cause some routine to write to memory it shouldn't be writing to, this was much less likely to crash the game - on N64, the MMU would detect this and just stop the thread, crashing the game.

Fortunately, since all N64 games use the same devkit, they generally all use the same or similar data formats. For example, many games use the MIO0 compression format, which I've already released a [de]compressor for. One way to find data in N64 games is to simply find and decompress these files, and see what's in them, or try corrupting them (I like just changing the size in the header) and seeing what breaks. And since N64 games don't use banks, you can usually find a pointer to something in ROM by simply looking for its 3-byte address in the file. If you know how to code, all the better; you can do what I did for Mario Kart 64. Suppose you want to find level data, then make one save state in each level, then write a program that will scan each state for the contents of each decompressed file, and make a list of which files are found in memory in which levels. (Reset the game after making each state to ensure no data is left over in memory.) Look for files that are only loaded in one level or not in any (some games, including Mario Kart, discard of the decompressed data once they've processed it, so it may not be in memory any more once the level actually loads.)

N64 hacking isn't easy, and knowing ASM would be a big help, but it's not impossible either.

---