Finding Moon Jump and Invinciblity...

[pasky13]

How is this done? I've always tried to find these values for games and never can, I know for invincibility you need to find that moment when your character can't be harmed, like when you die and are respawned but don't know exactly how to do this.

Delays? How is this found? For instance, the delay in metal slug's grenade throwing, how do you find addresses like these?

What about moon jump, what value are you looking for here? Whether the game thinks you have jumped? The button being depressed?

Sorry if this is mentioned in an FAQ, but I failed to find specifics, I know how to find relatively simple values, like lives, life bar, time, etc... But these have always eluded me. Thanks.

[Gaius_4]

For finding invincibility, either from a power-up or after you 'resurrect' and are temporarily invincible... You may need to utilize 'Pause' repeatedly. Usually, invincibility lasts a certain amount of time. So when you are first invincible - Pause, then Save the data, Unpause for a brief second, then Pause again. Do a search for anything Less. Repeat till the invincibility is done. Make it so that you are invincible again and Search again, but this time look for anything Greater. Then look for anything Less again the same way you did before - using the Pause, search, pause, search, pause, etc. etc.

That's the simplest way to go about finding it. Unless it is something that is dependant on the ROM areas...?

There was something having to do with a game with 4 characters going through a maze. I dare not utter the name of that game. But finding the invincibility for that game might not be a good idea. I don't know why. Just don't dare try it or you'll get a visit from uncle Vinny if you get my drift. Everybody in the cheating communities uncle Vinny will come looking for ya.

Nevermind ^that.

Delays? Good question. I'm afraid I don't understand. But again, it's probably a type of timer cheat.

Moon Jump? How to find it? I don't really know what to say here. Especially since I don't know what game you're wanting to find it for. You could look for what is active or activated before you perform a "moon jump". But I can only imagine that it would make for a buggy cheat.

I tried to look for -in Strider- where you could build up speed while running and jump farther than normal. It didn't work. Because the address's byte that would increase to a certain number couldn't be that number all the time. If it was - Strider would actually seem to run in slo-motion.

So if you'd need to have some byte in an address that makes the game think you are jumping or have jumped - it may not work if you actually aren't jumping or have NOT jumped. Since one address may need to be a higher number while another address may need to be lower. The bug would be caused -because both addresses would (for lack of a better term) not be in the correct balance. High and High.... It's hard to explain.

[Pugsy]

For finding invincibility, either from a power-up or after you 'resurrect' and are temporarily invincible... You may need to utilize 'Pause' repeatedly. Usually, invincibility lasts a certain amount of time. So when you are first invincible - Pause, then Save the data, Unpause for a brief second, then Pause again. Do a search for anything Less. Repeat till the invincibility is done. Make it so that you are invincible again and Search again, but this time look for anything Greater. Then look for anything Less again the same way you did before - using the Pause, search, pause, search, pause, etc. etc.

One of the tricks with the above method (works with most games) is to actually use shift P (to advance the game one frame) and then when you continue the search you are looking for -01 which narrows the results down a bit quicker.

Sometimes the timer location is used in conjunction with a status byte/bit that is enabled when invincibility is active if you search for this instead you can often have invincibility without any annoying flicker or fix the problem with some games where you actually need to lose a life to enable invincibility.

Invincibility ROM cheat making is really not an option for most people - it requires a lot of knowledge with tracing and breakpointing through assembler code to produce bug-free cheats. As for a moon jump cheat that would likely have to be a ROM cheat (a RAM cheat may work but it's more likely to be buggy)...as you would need to find the RAM current jump height location and then look through the code and find the compare/branch for the max value and change the compare to a higher/lower value to enable a higher jump. It's a lot easier than non-timer ROM invincibility but it requires experience of assembler and the MAME debugger.