I've been trying to look for a method to do this for a long time, but no dice.
I've been trying to use cheat searching to find out the character modifier codes of games where none are posted. However, the game seems to list the characters of a specific game.
What I mean is, the order that is given to us, either in the video game, or listed in a magazine or in some other order, is much different than the game's actual order. Let me give an example by using Mortal Kombat 2.
The typical "order" of the playable characters tends to be this:
Liu Kang
Kung Lao
Johnny Cage
Reptile
Sub-Zero
Shang Tsung
Kitana
Jax
Mileena
Baraka
Scorpion
Raiden
However, in the game's listing in the ROM is as follows:
00: Kung Lao
01: Liu Kang
02: Cage
03: Baraka
04: Kitana
05: Mileena
06: Shang Tsung
07: Rayden
08: Sub-Zero
09: Reptile
0A: Scorpion
0B: Jax
As you can tell, there's a few similarities here and there, but other than that, the game's listing of characters is much different than the order, and if you were to try looking into things in terms of their perceived order, than you would more than likely not find the code.
My question is this, what is a reliable method for trying to find such a thing? I have been trying to use "Equal To" and "Not Equal To" searches, but then it just doesn't find anything. Greater than/less than searches are not reliable either because how do you know whether the game lists the characters in the same order as shown or perceived?
Equal to/not equal to searches should work, with enough patience. However, perhaps it would be better to simply search through the rom after the names you expect to be there. They will probably appear in a table somewhere, which will be in the same order as what you want. Most roms are so small that such a search would be pretty quick, though figuring out the character set might be a bit of work. You would probably have to write such a program yourself, but it wouldn't be more than 20-30 lines, I'm sure.
Equal to/not equal to searches should work, with enough patience. However, perhaps it would be better to simply search through the rom after the names you expect to be there. They will probably appear in a table somewhere, which will be in the same order as what you want. Most roms are so small that such a search would be pretty quick, though figuring out the character set might be a bit of work. You would probably have to write such a program yourself, but it wouldn't be more than 20-30 lines, I'm sure.
Scan relative is a godsend in most hexeditors. Transhexlton has it (misspelled name)
Anyway, equal/notequal does work. Whatever emulator you're using must be either broken or not functioning properly; just be sure that when you do the searches a very obvious value has changed (e.g. active player character), not on a select screen:
A game could simply store the X and Y position of the selector, and only when an actual selection has been made will it actually look up the value to see what character it belongs to. Equal/notequal would fail in this instance as you would only sometimes change X and Y values when moving the selection.
Not that many games do, but yeah.
