Pikmin 2: Debug Heap/Process Bars
11Turns out Pikmin 2 has these colorful Heap and Process bars that the developers likely used for debugging the game. You might recognize these from Zelda: The Wind Waker and Mario Kart Double Dash which also had (pretty much) the same bars that could be enabled using cheats. See below for the gecko codes I created to make the debug bars visible.
The heap bar is the top one. The colors are as follows: The purple-ish bar on the left states the code size and it should never change during the game. The blue bar is the entire ram that the game uses or can use. The bright pink and purple on the right seem to belong to the current heap, with the bright pink showing the free space and the purple being the used space. Sometimes the current heap isn't drawn and the space it'd occupy remains blue. Changes in the current heap length can indicate major scene changes. What is interesting (but not surprising) is how in the cave area the amount of free space in the current heap is significantly bigger than in the overworld area.
The thick bottom bar is the process bar and it seems to represent cpu usage of various processes. I haven't been able to figure out what the bars mean though because the process bar rendering code is significantly more complex than the code for the heap bar rendering. Interestingly there seems to be some sort of scaling going on sometimes.
Cheat codes for enabling the debug bars in Pikmin 2:
$ Enable Heap and Process bar [USA] [Yoshi2]
04030a98 60000000
0402f28c 60000000
* Heap bar represents memory usage (in the order code,user ram (blue),current heap free,current heap) and process bar represents cpu usage.
$ Enable Heap and Process bar [PAL] [Yoshi2]
04030b58 60000000
0402f34c 60000000
* Heap bar represents memory usage (in the order code,user ram (blue),current heap free,current heap) and process bar represents cpu usage.
For comparison:
Debug bars in Wind Waker: https://tcrf.net/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_The_Wind_Waker/Debug_Content#Colored_Bars
Debug bars in MKDD: https://tcrf.net/Mario_Kart:_Double_Dash!!#Draw_Debug_Process_Bar
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