The Day I Reverse Engineered a Gameboy Advance Game
summary
Reverse engineers a Klonoa: Empire of Dreams GBA ROM to find the tilemap, object (OAM) and camera logic in VRAM and the game’s larger level buffer, then extracts and decompresses level data, edits tiles, recompresses with the original Huffman/LZ77 routine compiled to WebAssembly via Emscripten to run the C compressor in-browser, and writes a patched ROM that runs in emulators like mGBA/emGBA. Uses No$GBA/IDA-style debugging and builds a web UI with React + WebGL level editor; performance improves from multi-second loads to roughly one second after optimizations.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Project inspiration
- 2:35Analyzing GBA internals
- 5:43Understanding DMA and VRAM
- 9:20Object attributes and physics
- 13:55Software interrupts and data
- 18:00Proof of concept
- 22:43Web application demonstration
- 26:46Web application architecture
- 31:18WebAssembly integration
- 34:52Performance optimizations
- 37:43Community impact and future
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