Nesviz

Nesviz is a tool for semi-automatically reverse-engineering NES games

Currently an early version. Work in progress

Current

• Some automatic code discovery on the most common mappers (covering hundreds of games)
  • Automatic handling of bankswitching
• Automatic data discovery, to a lesser extent
• Load CDL files from Mesen for extra code/data coverage
• Trace Streamer
  • Connect to an emulator (BWMesen) for live analysis
  • (WIP. Basic version implemented)
• Memory map
  • Show discovered code and data ranges
  • Show some annotations about what memory is used for
• Control-flow Graph
  • To be reimplemented

Planned

• Automatic discovery of level-loading routines, etc
• Enhanced live analysis
  • Needs significant expansion
• Botting
  • To assist live analysis
• Disassembly export
  • Will be able to write:
    • ASM file(s)
    • Formatted exports (Markdown, HTML)
    • "Info-only", bring-your-own-ROM data file with web viewer

Changes in 0.6

• Overhauled analysis engine
  • Enables progressive reporting of analysis progress
  • Generally making the analysis more theoretically correct according to accepted abstract interpretation methods
  • Analysis phases and phase groups
  • Analysis log with detailed breakdown while running
  • New in analysis:
    • Detect the "RTS trick"
    • "Excavate" common procedure shapes to jump-start code discovery
• Detect and display banked code
  • Code blocks now show a bank selector when multiple versions are detected across banks
• Removed:
  • Probable code discovery
• Temporarily broken:
  • Control-flow graph (to be re-implemented using neighborhoods)