Prototype of a system to whitelist known game patches that are allowed to be used while RetroAchievements Hardcore mode is active. ApprovedInis.txt contains known hashes for the ini files as they appear in the repo, and can be compared to the local versions of these files to ensure they have not been edited locally by the player. ApprovedInis.txt is hashed and verified similarly first, with its hash residing as a const string within AchievementManager.h, ensuring ApprovedInis and the hashes within cannot be modified without editing Dolphin's source code and recompiling completely.
These games are erroneously zeroing buffers before they can be fully copied to ARAM by DMA. The responsible memset() calls are followed by a call to DVDRead() which issues dcbi instructions that effectively cancel the memset() on real hardware. Because Dolphin lacks dcache emulation, the effects of the memset() calls are observed, which causes missing audio.
In a comment on the original bug, phire noted that the issue can be corrected by simply nop'ing out the offending memset() calls. Because the games dynamically load different .rel executables based on the character and/or language, the addresses of these calls can vary.
To deal generally with the problem of code being dynamically loaded to fixed, known addresses, the patch engine is extended to support conditional patches which require a match against a known value. This sort of thing is already achievable with Action Replay/Gecko codes, but their use depends on enabling cheats globally in Dolphin, which is not a prerequisite shared by patches.
Patches are included for every region, character, and language combination. They are enabled by default.
The end result is an approximation of the games' behavior on real hardware without the associated complexity of proper dcache emulation.
https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/9840
