Looking for guidance - dissecting ROMs to find secrets

[nullity]

I'm not a total noob to programming, but I have 0 experience in the realm of rom hacking.  I've been curious about a "secret" in Silent Debuggers ever since first playing it 20 years ago, but no info exists online.

How would you experts recommend one get their feet wet when it comes to examining ROM file contents? If it involves knowledge of assembly, then name your price for doing it for me! I'm not smart enough to make sense of assembly, but will pay many many cheeseburgers to anyone who is if said knowledge is required.

[Bonknuts]

What is this secret in the game?

[Sadler]

I think he's talking about this. I know nothing about ROM hacking either, but if you open it up with a hex editor can you search for "secret" or something to get started?

[Bonknuts]

You have to be careful with hacking US TG16 games. The dumbass who's responsible for most of the US rom dumps, left the format in inverted byte format (all because the bus lines are switched on the US models). If you have one of these roms, you won't be able to edit in a hex editor until you reverse all the bytes (bits in the byte).

 That said, most text in roms of that era - aren't in ascii format. Especially of the game didn't originate from the west.

[Bonknuts]

I think he's talking about this. I know nothing about ROM hacking either, but if you open it up with a hex editor can you search for "secret" or something to get started?

 Ohh. Well that's not so easy to find. You'd have to figure out some of the game structure (data), to understand what's in the rom to begin with.


 I assume you're looking for validation of this secret, by way of text? That's a decent idea. But that won't tell you how to activate it - just that probably is there. If the text isn't in ascii format, you'll have to figure out what format it's in. Once you figure this out, there are hex editors that allow you to load custom Letter tables, to display the text correctly.

[megatron-uk]

Yeah, checkout my 'Cyber Knight' thread to see  an example of this in action - you need to search for common sequences, try and map them to fonts used in the game and then you can see what it says; you rarely get whole ASCII in there, and it sounds like the US games could potentially be even weirder to view