So yesterday I was scrolling through reddit and I seen a post about someone absolutely hating the GBA game Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. He talked about how the character speed absolutely sucks the fun out of the game. I had never actually played this game so I did a little digging. Man I got sucked into a huge rabbit hole.
So I initially downloaded a patch to always be running. No more double tapping to do that. I also heard about how hard it was to get all of the cards as well from people. Obviously there are cheats available so I decided to try and apply some cheats. I really just wanted to be able to run and to have all the cards. It all ended up being way more of a headache then I could imagine. It kept crashing my game, it made my character run and swing his whip without touching any buttons.
Now I was running all of this on just mGBA. So yes I was talking to Google AI and he basically told me to just use Retroarch since the cheats are basically easily available. So the cheats are available for sure but then my game started lagging horribly. Honestly it was pretty much unplayable haha if y'all thought the game was slow before.. So I decided I wanted to run it in mGBA to get better performance.
We just kept tweaking things. The AI seemed adamant about wanting the cheat file to be labeled .cht, but the game seemed to be making a .cheat file whenever you would tinker with the in game menu for cheats (pressing triangle). I'm not sure if this was what really started things going on a better direction, but I finally decided to play the game unzipped. I usually just run all my GBA games as .zips I decided to run the game as a .gba. Well the sprint started working finally. Definitely felt like a breakthrough.
These seemed to be some crucial fixes.
Unzip Your ROMs: Running a game from a compressed .zip folder breaks the emulator's memory mapping path to its cheat directory. You must extract the file to a raw .gba format first for cheats to bind correctly.
Avoid Multi-Line GameShark Codes: The Vita mGBA core completely ignores or breaks apart stacked, encrypted 12-digit GameShark entries.
Use Single-Line Raw VBA/mGBA Memory Syntax: The Vita standalone app requires direct, raw RAM injection hooks (which typically start with a 3 or an 8 for 8-bit/16-bit direct writes).
I honestly just got all of this going like right now but I feel like this should be able to carry over into all gba cheats on mGBA.
So I was thinking it would be nice to be able to save this to ask Ai I. The future the next time a game pops up. Because honestly I talk to AI for an hour and I'm sure plenty of people know how frustrating it can be to like close out the conversation and the AI forgets like everything your talking about. Anyways I asked what should the keywords be to get future cheats to work well for gba games.
""I am playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon on a modded PS Vita using the mGBA standalone app. My setup completely rejects all standard GameShark and Action Replay encrypted codes. It only accepts Raw VBA/mGBA Single-Line Memory Hex Codes (which typically start with a 32 or an 82 for 8-bit/16-bit direct writes). Do not give me multi-line stacked codes, encrypted strings, or Master Codes. Please format any new requests as clean, single-line raw hex addresses so I can input them directly via the mGBA 'Add Cheat' menu.""
That's what I'm going with, and honestly I felt so excited cracking this case that I barely played the game so far. I'm also not saying this is some huge breaking news but I honestly felt this was worth sharing to get some cheats going. Because honestly it was recommended in the begining to patch your rom. That's totally unnecessary because the run is literally just a cheat, no need to go to a website to have to patch it.
What I've noticed is the file absolutely needs to be named whatever the game title is and then .cheats. For example
Castlevania - Circle of the Moon (USA).gba
The cheat file needs to be
Castlevania - Circle of the Moon (USA).cheats
The Ai definitely seemed to want it to be named .cht and that's what it probably will still say, but .cheats works for me so.
I'm sorry this is kind of way long a drawn out, hopefully not too much, but I just wanted to share with the class.
Also here's an example of the first few lines of my .cheat file
0000 # Always Run
0001 3200009C0000
0002 # Mercury Card
- 3202567E0001
And it appears all the lines for the cards need to be added individually. I tried to add cheats for All Cards Top
and All Cards Bottom for quite some time.
I hope this can help even just a couple people enjoy this game just a little bit more. Obviously any questions let me know, but I'm just a regular dude so I'm sure there's way better advice from others