Game Timer still undetected after lots of tries!

[Bully@Wiiplaza]

Hey,
I tried to find the timer on mario and sonic and I couldn´t find it.
I searched in mem80 (unknown value, less than, less than, etc.) then poked the results. Even froze these values with a GCT Code.
Nothing. I moved to mem90 and searched through mem90 until mem938 since about all the codes are in Mem90.
Did the same poking and freezing of values, timer is still completely unchanged.
Afterwards I tried the same stuff with 16bit instead of 32bit. Nothing :mad:
Wtf, I couldn´t find a single timer on any of the sports from that game. I normally find timers, but this is too weird.
Is there another method that´s odd and could work? If the timer is counting down, I searched for "less than", obviously.

---

Another example:
On Pokemon Battle Rev. there´s a timer on battles (OFFLINE!) that keeps running even if the game is paused with a breakpoint.
The timer ran out during the pausing of that breakpoint. I did searches in Mem80 and 90, but nothing.

Weirdness, these are the only games where I couldn´t ever find the timers!
Any help?

[Anarion]

I never bothered to find timers on most of the games that I've hacked but I do it this way even if it takes a long time.

Mem80 or 90, whichever you wanna start with.
*When timer starts changing, pause with wiird/gdn, search unknown equal
run game, pause with wiird/gdn, search not equal
run game, pause through the game. the timer should stop. search not equal.
while paused through the game, search equal. and do as many equal searches as you want.
unpause game, the timer should continue changing. search not equal.
continue from *


you can always try a greater than, less than, instead of going with the "not equal"

[Skiller]

There are some games that will Count up even though whats on screen is counting down as well .. iv seen it were the Timer is counting up and its just compared to the max value of the timer .. so on screen u would see it counting down ..

[Bully@Wiiplaza]

thx guys.
I tried searching the "normal" way.
The game is known for it´s weirdness, since it has very untypical RAM and value expressions.

What I tried...
Our timer counts up from 0:00 until I reach the finish line (greater than searches) -> fail...
I also tried to do (less than searches) before -> thousands of results left, but I didn´t detect the timer by poking (maybe I should still take a more deep look there)

And if...
our timer runs down from 3mins to 0mins (less than searches) -> fail

I´d go for Skillers tip (searching the other way round) and if that doesn´t help I´ll use Anarions "long time" solution.

Is it possible that a poke on the RIGHT timer addresses does not do anything? (It is instantly "overwritten" by some Assembly)
I heard about that on MSC...

I won´t surrender yet :P

[Skiller]

There is  a chance that the Value u do fine is just a Fake .. and is Over written by another value even when u set it ..

some games do store more then 1 Address that will do the time ..

Example if u change 1 it just changes back ..
but if u change both then the timer changes ..  (I Call them Double CHecks) what it does is writes the value to one spot .. and if it dont match the other it will write it back before updating the time ..

some are set as master and slave .> Where u will find one value that is always changing .. u will mod it but nothing happens .. if u watch it then u can see that the value u put did not even stay it jump to its orignal .. this means this address is not the master value its just the Slave .. brakepointing on this address could endup taking u to the Orignal .. its how i found some of the monster hunter stuff like the missions junk..

[Bully@Wiiplaza]

It would be a good strategy to set breakpoint writes on any suspected address and nop them one by one, wouldn´t it?