Monday, October 30, 2017

Panic! GameInfo reading out of buffer!

Pretty weird error message. I don't know what triggers that. It doesn't interrupt the emulated program but kills the emulator itself, even when we're running in gdb-debugging mode. It happens while parsing some line of text in my "wave.cmd" script unless I invoke GobAnim::setWindowed() on an animation earlier on. The object parsed when the crash occurs has no relationship with the GobAnim that gets windowing-enabled.
  • Panic! GameInfo reading 302251 out of ROM (302254)
  • halting emu: ARM9 PC=020406A0/02000F0B, LR=0204069C 
  • ARM9 halted 
  • halting emu: ARM7 PC=037F9B84/037F9B7C 
  • ARM7 halte
The crashing address happens to be within memcpy.

  break *0x20406a0 if $r3 + $r0 > 0x300000 && $r0 < 0xb000000

could be working, except that GameInfo doesn't start at offset 0, but apparently rather at offset 0x08000000.

A bit more digging (setting the right breakpoint, using one more desmume patch to reveal registers R0 through R3) finally allowed me to get a stack trace....
And the offending memcpy was part of a buffer refill for waves.cmd file. For some reason, by incrementing the size, I hit a threshold where one more copy is needed, but then the very last bytes can't be read because the emulator believe they should always pick a 4 bytes from the current position (instead of an aligned 32-bit word holding the byte). Simply adding a zz.zz file that will come past the waves.cmd file make the code work again.


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