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Total Disaster, Please Help!


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I'm freaking out right and I don't know what to do. Let me explain, I've been replaying the entire Tellius saga on the Dolphin emulator for a while now. I started with Path of Radiance and finished it. Now I'm 20 hours into Radiant Dawn, at the beginning of Part 3 Chapter 13 where Pelleas asks Michiah to kill him. The problem is I'm not seeing the "Refuse his command" option that's supposd to allow me to acquire him as a playable character.

I played this game years ago on my Wii, but never got around to doing a second playthrough to get all the secret characters and scenes. So before I started my current playthrough, I imported a save file to Dolphin that already had clear data on it. I thought that was all I needed to do, but I guess not? After playing around with the menu for a while, it seemed like in order for me to initiate a second playthrough, I needed to select the epilouge data at the top of the save menu. I just selected "Start New Game" when I began playing.

What am I supposed to do!? I already played through PoR twice because I finished the first time with Ike at lvl 19 with 98 exp. (I didn't realize that defeating Ashnard wouldn't give him any exp.) It was tedius, but I had to do it because I wanted all the character stats boosts and supports for Radiant Dawn.

The difference is that PoR is easier and a bit shorter, I can't play through RD after investing 20 hours in it, and that's not counting all the times I restarted the game because someone died, and that happened a lot!

I tried using this Geko Cheat code but I can't get it to work. Does anyone have advice? Please!

Number of times Game had been CLEARED [g6flavor]
003CAB57 000000xx

xx = 2 = Cleared once, xx = 3 = Cleared twice
You can use this to enable Pelleas and Sephiran on a first play through
Edited by MichiahxSothe
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Is it really a total disaster? Pelleas and Sephiran aren't exactly the best units in the game.

Don't be glib! This is serious to me. It's not just about the characters, it's also about the changes the story will take if Pelleas lives. I've just got to see how things unfold.

So no one has any iideas? Am I really going to have to startover?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Did you start the game on a "clear data" file?

This is the post you should be responding to, OP. Pelleas and Sephiran can (normally) only be recruited on a clear file. That means that you beat the game once and then start a new game using that save slot (the game will begin counting how many runs you have completed on that file). From the way your opening paragraph is phrased, it seems like you're still on your first playthrough, so the option to recruit pelleas isn't supposed to be available..

If you don't want to play through the game more than once, I guess you better get that cheat code working...you could also try finding some youtube videos of the chapters with Pelleas in them. You can also look through scripts on SF and maybe gamefaqs. There are probably some other versions out there as well.

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  • 4 years later...

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but this came up when I was searching for exactly the same thing. Except for OP, all of you are incredibly boring for saying that it's not a big deal. I literally couldn't move on with my game until I figured this one out. OP, it is a total disaster, and I'm sorry you had to go through this!

I didn't find the Dolphin-correct Gecko code for the clear count, but I found a way to (temporarily) cheat this using the Dolphin debugger. I should note that this requires some know-how, but I have a feeling that I'll be playing this game again in 5 years and that I'll search for the same thing and find this thread again, so I might as well dump what I know to the public.

First, if you have not started a game yet, consider just downloading a Radiant Dawn save that has already been cleared. You can get some over at GameFAQs. This is much easier. You can import Wii saves into Dolphin by right-clicking the game in your library and choosing Import Wii Save. (As a side note, the save file is encrypted and cannot be inspected with a hex editor before you import it.)

This method changes the clear count value on your save, but for some reason it reverts to 0 once you save again (including battle saves), so you need to do it right before you would benefit from a non-zero clear count. That aside, it doesn't matter to the program that you're playing Pelleas on a game with a clear count of 0, so once you've cheated to refuse his command, the game continues to play normally and he joins the battle as a playable character in 4-2 even as your clear count has long reverted to 0. You need to do this again right before you kill Sephiran/Lehran in 4-F4, as well: the best thing to do here is to play the fight normally and do a battle save right before the finishing blow, then reset the game.

Useful tools:

  • Enabling the debugger: for all of these things to work, you need to start Dolphin with the debugger enabled. On macOS and Linux, you do this by passing the -d argument to it; on Windows it's /d.
  • Breakpoints: when the debugger is enabled, you open the breakpoint tab by using the View -> Breakpoints menu item.
  • Memory view: when the debugger is enabled, you open the memory view by using the View -> Memory menu item. From this view, you can inspect and modify memory, as well as dump the game's memory to a file. That file is stored in the directory at Dump Path that you can set in Dolphin's main configuration, under the Paths tab. There seems to be a bug in the current version where the memory view doesn't refresh when the game pauses because of a breakpoint: you can force it to refresh by changing the sought address.

To do it:

  1. While you're on the title screen (before the menu screen), pause emulation and add a memory breakpoint when reading from address 0x90768874. This is the address of the byte that stores the clear count in your save file. Here's how I found it, in case this is useful to someone later (but feel free to move to step 2 already, you don't really need to know this):
    1. I first looked at a Radiant Dawn save file. You can access them by right-clicking the game in the Dolphin library and choosing "Open the Wii save directory" or whatever looks similar to that in English. The format is opaque, but comparing with a save that already has a cleared game and knowing from the Gecko code that the byte of interest is 1 when the game hasn't been cleared yet and 2 when it's been cleared one, it's pretty easy to spot which byte in the save header is the one that we want to change (it's 0x34 bytes into the save block).
    2. However, you can't just change it, because the save's integrity is protected by a checksum. The game will delete save files that have an incorrect checksum.
    3. The start of the save file (on my American copy) is marked with "FE10ASYS", and then 4096 bytes into the file, you have your first save, marked with "FE10ADAT". These two strings are easy to scan for in a memory dump. However, confusingly, the area of memory that 0x90768874 belongs to is not saved in the memory dump, and it is not searched by the regular memory search. The reason isn't clear to me. (Dolphin bug?)
    4. The game, however, is copying the save data to other locations in memory before acting on it, so you will find other matches in the memory dump. I was not successful in getting the game to believe that my clear count was 1 by altering any of these copies.
    5. I found the "original", the one at 0x90768874, by attaching an actual debugger (lldb) to Dolphin and scanning its entire memory for "FE10ADAT" while the game was paused. I don't exactly remember what I did to correlate the host process memory address to the Wii's address space.
    6. Note that for some reason, memory breakpoints don't trigger in Dolphin on that memory region when the save is being loaded.
  2. As I understand it, the memory breakpoint will trigger twice per save file that you have. The first time is during the calculation of the checksum and the second time is when the data is being copied. The trick is that you hit Continue the first time so that it calculates the checksum on the correct data, and the second time around you change the value of the byte at 0x90768874 to be 2.
  3. This will happen multiple times (going from the title screen to the main menu, then going into load menus, then going into games).
  4. If you do it right, on the save file picker, you'll see that the clear count of your save is 1. You still need to repeat the process all the way through to the actual game because you're not actually altering the save.

That's it. I imagine that someone could create a Dolphin-correct Gecko code for the clear count by loading a game that's been modified in this way, dumping the memory, and comparing the dump with one that hasn't been modified to try to find where the clear count went.

Edited by fay59
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