AR Cheat Codes Working on Dolphin for Android
Figured out how to get AR Cheat Codes working for me. It isn’t difficult once you know how, but it was difficult making sense of all of the posts and videos and learning how. Unfortunately I could not get Gecko Codes to work for me no matter what I tried. So this is a step by step tutorial for AR Codes only.
Since it did take me a bit to figure out, and I am one of those people that needs a step by step to do anything. I wanted to share my way of making it work with the community and hopefully it can help someone else out there who is like me and needs a step by step. So lets get started.
We are basically going to use Dolphin on the PC to get the cheat codes nice and organized and then we are going to add the text from the game ini file from the PC into the ini file on your Android device.
Here is what you need to make this happen:
1. Capable phone and a PC or Mac
2 Download and install current development builds of Dolphin for both Android and PC. As of this post I was using 5.0-9331 for both Android and PC and cheats worked for me. I have no idea if older Dolphin builds will work or not.
3. And the game you want cheat codes for…obviously.
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DO THESE NEXT STEPS ON PC
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3. Run Dolphin on your PC and import the game you want cheat codes for. If its already there,…hooray!
4. Start the game you want cheat codes for in a small window so you can see both the Dolphin Program and the game running. For me I chose Luigi’s Mansion and I also did Ikaruga. Cause I am never going to beat Ikaruga without some cheat codes.
5. While the game is running. Go to tools, then click on cheat manager. A new window should open and you should see tabs that say AR Codes and Gecko Codes. For Ikaruga and Luigi’s there were AR codes there already. If the codes are there for your game, simply tick the box for the ones you want and hit apply, and close the cheat manager window.
6. Stop and restart the game now. Play a little bit on the PC to see if the Code works. If it works great. You are ready to transfer this over to the Android Device. If it doesn’t, choose another or trouble shoot further. Stop the game at this point no need to run it in the background anymore.
7. Back in the Dolphin games list on your PC, right click on the game, and select properties. Go to the AR Codes tab to make sure the selections stuck, if they did and the box is still checked, your good for now.
8. This next part is a bit tricky, and it is a bit different for each game. But basically in the AR Codes tab click on Edit Config and Show Defaults. The files that open will have the codes listed and it will have them in some of the format that Dolphin likes to see them in. You will have to move some things around and combine them to make them work for Android but don’t worry I’ll explain how and what.
For example, the game I was using was Luigi’s Mansion. And when I clicked on Edit Config the Edit Config file that opened for Luigi’s looked like this:
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[ActionReplay_Enabled]
$Infinite Health
$999 Cash
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Those are the two cheats I enabled. But this is only half of the info we need for it to work on Android. The other half is the actual codes themselves and these can be found by clicking on “Show Defaults”. The Luigi’s Show Defaults file looks like this:
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# GLME01 - Luigi's Mansion
[OnLoad]
# Add memory patches to be loaded once on boot here.
[OnFrame]
# Add memory patches to be applied every frame here.
[ActionReplay]
# Add action replay cheats here.
$Infinite Health
040B9524 60000000
$999 Cash
040AE4D0 3C00270F
040AE4E8 60000000
040AE500 60000000
$99 of some treasures
040AE518 63180063
040AE51C 3F000063
040AE520 3F000063
040AE524 3F000063
040AE528 3F000063
040AE52C 3F000063
040AE530 3F000063
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So what we need to do is combine these files into one ini file for Android, so they look like this:
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[ActionReplay]
# Add action replay cheats here.
$Infinite Health
040B9524 60000000
$999 Cash
040AE4D0 3C00270F
040AE4E8 60000000
040AE500 60000000
$99 of some treasures
040AE518 63180063
040AE51C 3F000063
040AE520 3F000063
040AE524 3F000063
040AE528 3F000063
040AE52C 3F000063
040AE530 3F000063
[ActionReplay_Enabled]
$Infinite Health
$999 Cash
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Now that you have this file sorted out. Save it with the exact name as the game name in the ini file, which for Luigi’s is GLME01.ini. You must name it this way. This file is good to go now, make sure you save it somewhere safe.
And just for the sake of the example, the Ikaruga file was different. The Ikaruga file when I clicked on Edit Config it looked like this:
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[ActionReplay_Enabled]
$Infinite Lives
$Infinite Homing Laser Energy
[ActionReplay]
$(m)
C40C95B4 0000FF00
081F1207 00000010
001F1207 00000001
$Infinite Lives
0018BC4C 00000063
$Infinite Homing Laser Energy
0018BC49 00000078
$Max Combo
0218BC84 000003E7
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And the Show Defaults file for Ikaruga didn’t have anything in it. So I don’t know if this was just my case. But Ikaruga’s file was ready to go from the edit config file.
11. Now we need to find two more files so that the Android app can run the cheat codes. The files we need are named codehandler.bin and totaldb.dsy these files live in the Sys folder in your Dolphin program folder on your PC or MAC. So go to the Dolphin program folder and find them. Copy and save somewhere or just keep that window open. We are gonna need these files.
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DO THESE NEXT STEPS ON YOUR ANDROID DEVICE
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12. Install latest Development Build of Dolphin if you haven’t already.
13. Launch Dolphin on your Android Device. If you already have game settings for this game and you don’t want to lose those settings, then you need to either write them down, or save the Android ini file before you do anything with the cheats file.
14. Connect your Android Device to your computer and make sure your computer and Android device are set to transfer files.
15. On Android Device, go to the folder named dolphin-emu and open this folder.
16. Copy over the “codehandler.bin” and “totaldb.sys” files into the dolphin-emu folder. Make sure they are both in the dolphin-emu folder.
17. Open the “Config” folder that is inside the “dolphin-emu” folder. Open the “Dolphin.ini” file. TextEdit or Notepad work just fine, you just need to edit some text so use whatever you want.
18. In the Dolphin.ini file search for and find “EnableCheats = False”. This should be under the [Core] section. And replace False with True. Save the file and close.
19. Now its time to get the cheats into the game. Get the ini file you created. Copy and paste this ini file into the “GameSettings” folder on your Android device. It must go into this GameSettings folder.
19. Start up your game. And your cheats should work.
If you need to make changes to the game settings from the App, don’t worry they will just be added to the games ini file and the cheat codes will still be there. If you already have an ini file on your android you don’t want to lose or replace, you can copy and paste the text directly into that file, just make sure everything that has to do with the cheat codes from the file you created is at the top of the Android ini file. And if you want to change cheat codes, you will have to do that anyway. Oh, yeah, if you change your mind on the cheats you added to the file, you can open the Android ini file and comment out the lines or delete them.
I know this was a long post, I wanted to include as many details as I could. This method has worked for me on both Ikaruga and Luigi’s Mansion so far. I could not get Gecko Codes to work for either game using this method, and when I had Gecko codes enabled on a game the Android app would crash overtime. So I am avoiding the Gecko Codes for now, I am ok with just the AR Codes.
Thank you to the Dolphin Devs for making an awesome app.