Glitch City Laboratories Archives

Glitch City Laboratories closed on 1 September 2020 (announcement). This is an archived copy of a thread from Glitch City Laboratories Forums.

You can join Glitch City Research Institute to ask questions or discuss current developments.

You may also download the archive of this forum in .tar.gz, .sql.gz, or .sqlite.gz formats.

Pokémon Discussion

Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen - Page 1

Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: IceFlame
Date: 2016-06-27 17:36:35
In English RBY, Swift ignores accuracy/evade modifiers. However, I noticed it missing in Japanese Green and Yellow when modified accuracy/evade were in effect. I searched for information about this for a long time, found nothing on the usual English sites, and remarkably little when searching in Japanese (results below). Is this difference true in general? Does anyone here have a real Japanese cartridge to test with? And if it's true, how did it happen that hardly anyone noticed?


Basic info websites just say it always hits, the same as the English sites:


http://pokemon.g-takumi.com/skill63.html

赤

: に

Red-Green-Blue-Pikachu guide
Speed Star
Comment: attack always hits the enemy



http://games.gaym.jp/GB/pokemon_rgbp/wiki/?

赤 wiki

説:

Pokemon Red-Green-Blue-Pikachu guide wiki
Speed Star
Explanation: attack always hits



http://wiki..com/wiki/

説

第代:っに な ほの に はっ
…

Explanatory Note
Battle Skill
Second Generation: Shoots a completely unavoidable beam of stars
…


This page just quotes the descriptive text from the games, and there wasn't any in 1st Gen. So it doesn't specifically say that the effect applies to 1st Gen, but doesn't say otherwise either, and it would make sense to mention something like that.


https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/の覧_(-の)

I can't entirely read this, but maybe it does explain the situation.


のの中の避になく中に
第代では中では中と説ののは中100のでのにっては避となのはのみで海では中になほで中にってそとぶで空中にびってに
では避と

Speed Star
Normal type unique skill. Always hits regardless of own accuracy and opponent's evade. It always affects the opponent (???).
In the 1st Gen games it was explained as "hitting the target", in practice it was a 100% accuracy skill that could be evaded depending on the opponent's status. This was possible only in the Japanese version (???), in overseas versions in addition to hitting the target, it would hit opponents while underground for Dig or in the air for Fly.
In America, it could hit the target without evasion (???).



Then we get to obscure posts on Q&A sites:


http://pokemon.g-takumi.com/bbs_detail.php?bbs_id=3762

:
でで
Speed Star missed but is this possible?

:
ま
Yes it's possible.

:
絶対のではなので！
It doesn't always hit!?

の:
代では中とべはま
だの中100%のになのでね
そてな中100%とてで0.4%の確でになってま
In 1st gen it wasn't called the "hitting the target" skill.
It just had a 100% accuracy rate.
And somehow, even 100% accuracy skills had a 0.4% chance of missing.

:
そなで
でははぶでの影で
Is that so…
So Double Team will have an effect after all?

0:
ぶなetc て影はで
Double Team, Sand Attack, Flash etc should all have an effect.

:
そで念で
Is that so… too bad.



http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q10145018325

And finally a complete explanation, if it's correct…

sensui2231:
の赤ってま
って絶対まね
どとで
ちなみにちはで33はで33小くな使って
I was playing Pokemon Red and Speed Star missed.
Doesn't Speed Star always hit?
What's going on?
By the way, this was a L33 Starmie, and the opponent was a L33 Clefairy which had used Minimize once.

gigafa_1007:
中になのはで
海と2以の代ではので
Hitting the target was from Gold and Silver onwards.
Except the overseas editions and Pokemon Stadium 2, in 1st Gen it was an ordinary skill.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: Spoink
Date: 2016-06-28 10:41:12
All moves have at least a 0.4% chance of missing, because the formula is x/256, while the highest possible value is 255, which gives 99.6%.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: IceFlame
Date: 2016-06-28 11:32:03

All moves have at least a 0.4% chance of missing, because the formula is x/256, while the highest possible value is 255, which gives 99.6%.

I know that, though from what I was reading recently, there is still some doubt about it for Swift.
http://forums.glitchcity.info/index.php/topic,6649.0.html

What I'm talking about here is Swift being affected by accuracy/evade modifiers in the Japanese games.

(Attached video) In Yellow Rev B, my Electrode is battling a Grimer that had already used Minimize 3 times. No way is this 1/256.
It misses 6 times out of 10. If the chance of missing is 1/256, the chance of missing 6 times out of 10 is less than 1 in a million.

I know that VBA is not the most accurate. Tested in BGB as well. But testing on the real thing would be a good idea.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2016-06-29 16:16:56
Neat. ^_^ Seems like another obscure Japanese version glitch. Other than Select button glitches we have other obscure glitches such as the Saffron Gym glitch and Broken Hidden Items glitch (unlisted on that page). This makes me wonder if there are any more.

I have physical Japanese Pokémon cartridges, albeit with dead save batteries. I should be able to conveniently test Swift/ with reduced accuracy out on a physical cartridge for you once I get a new Xploder GB cheat cartridge (I can order one with expected delivery between July 5th, July 6th), as the current one I have may be broken.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: Stackout
Date: 2016-06-29 17:59:47

I should be able to conveniently test Swift/ with reduced accuracy out on a physical cartridge for you once I get a new Xploder GB cheat cartridge (I can order one with expected delivery between July 5th, July 6th), as the current one I have may be broken.


Interesting. What makes you think your Xploder GB is broken? I think the same with mine, but only because it takes several hours of resetting just to get to the enter cheat screen. (the majority of the time it freezes on a white screen or glitched screen that turns to a white screen). It could be because it can't fit properly in a GBA SP though.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: IceFlame
Date: 2016-06-30 06:31:25
I look forward to hearing the results.

I wonder if it's not a glitch, and they thought up the "always hit" effect later once they noticed Double Team was broken.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2016-06-30 06:54:55


I should be able to conveniently test Swift/ with reduced accuracy out on a physical cartridge for you once I get a new Xploder GB cheat cartridge (I can order one with expected delivery between July 5th, July 6th), as the current one I have may be broken.


Interesting. What makes you think your Xploder GB is broken? I think the same with mine, but only because it takes several hours of resetting just to get to the enter cheat screen. (the majority of the time it freezes on a white screen or glitched screen that turns to a white screen). It could be because it can't fit properly in a GBA SP though.


On my Game Boy Advance SP, the Xploder GB freezes on a black screen, or a white screen/glitched screen, so it sounds like we've been experiencing a similar issue. There have been different results depending on the game I insert into the cartridge. The device worked in the past so it makes me wonder whether something inside of the cartridge was damaged. I think possibly at one time; twice(?) a long time ago and relatively recently the cheat list became corrupted, but the first time I managed to fix the problem (although I don't know if this is a false memory). I haven't tried repeatedly trying to load it yet, so I'll give it a go for a good two hours :).

On my Game Boy Color (which had a low remaining battery life), the screen won't get past the Game Boy Color bootup (it appeared blank without the Game Boy Color logo).


I look forward to hearing the results.

I wonder if it's not a glitch, and they thought up the "always hit" effect later once they noticed Double Team was broken.


Interesting. Hmm.

In Red/Blue/Yellow and Stadium we have the text:


TM39 is a move
called SWIFT.

It's very accurate,
so use it during
battles you can't
afford to lose.


;and the Stadium description is

"A Normal-type attack. It is highly accurate, so it can be counted on to inflict damage.")


These state that Swift is very accurate but don't state that it always hits. I will look up the Japanese texts too, one moment.

Edit 1:


はとのはちつくのまなぶのときくにつは


Translation attempt:

TM39 is called the Speed Star move. This move's accuracy rate is very high and nothing else beats it. It should help you. (??)

負 ま - To be defeated.
まな - Means it is undefeated.

Note that I'm not very experienced with Japanese so my translations may be wrong.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: IceFlame
Date: 2016-06-30 07:57:34
Hmm, your quote is missing the line breaks - I think that's the sentence-ending explanatory の in the 4th line, so the meaning is the same as the English.
は
と
のはちつ
くの
まなぶのとき
くにつは

TM39 is
a move called Speed Star.
This move's accuracy rate
is very high.
During a battle you can't lose
it should be useful.

I'll have a look at the English disassembly later. But we don't have an annotated Japanese disassembly, right? So finding out anything from the Japanese code would depend on similarity to the English, and might take a very long time.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2016-06-30 08:16:15
Oh, OK. :) Thanks.


I'll have a look at the English disassembly later. But we don't have an annotated Japanese disassembly, right? So finding out anything from the Japanese code would depend on similarity to the English, and might take a very long time.


OK, good luck analyzing the code. Not that I'm aware of, no(?). Yes, we could use a hex editor to find similar byte code. If the Speed Star code is significantly different, I guess a different approach is to look for a higher move routine and set a breakpoint. We have some great reversers here like Wack0, TheZZAZZGlitch, Sanqui so they may be able to help.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: Stackout
Date: 2016-06-30 11:22:04

On my Game Boy Advance SP, the Xploder GB freezes on a black screen, or a white screen/glitched screen, so it sounds like we've been experiencing a similar issue. There have been different results depending on the game I insert into the cartridge. The device worked in the past so it makes me wonder whether something inside of the cartridge was damaged. I think possibly at one time; twice(?) a long time ago and relatively recently the cheat list became corrupted, but the first time I managed to fix the problem (although I don't know if this is a false memory). I haven't tried repeatedly trying to load it yet, so I'll give it a go for a good two hours :).


I seem to remember the last time my Xploder GB properly worked was around ~2006-2007. It froze when saving the cheats list, and the cheats list was corrupted with a reset. But at a later time, when I got it to work, the cheats list showed perfectly normally, including the cheat I added when it froze (it was an encounter modifier to get Gengar, for the capture flag to prevent a bad freezing Pokédex entry, as I intended to then use it to encounter h Poké (RB:C3). This was on my friend's Blue cart, as I didn't have any Gen 1 carts of my own at that time.

These days, I have no patience to keep trying, resetting, trying again, reseating the carts, etc, for hours. Another friend of mine has a GB GameShark, so…

I guess this Xploder GB issue is another reason why I want to get a GB ROM dumper; however I have no clean ROM to compare against, and have no idea if the Xploder GB ROM is even dumped. (A quick Google search only shows me ROMs for the GBA Xploder, which I got at the same time as my Xploder GB (around 2003-2004 or so; the two were bundled together) and still works to this day. Not that I use it often.)

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: IceFlame
Date: 2016-07-01 11:22:09
In the English PokeRed disassembly, looks like Swift always hits, and moves always hit when X Accuracy is in effect. There's a comment on the Swift check saying "Swift never misses (interestingly, Azure Heights lists this is a myth, but it appears to be true)".

There is a case where an attack does zero damage and the game says it missed. I remember a streamer getting caught out by this when trying to fight Brock's Onix with a Weedle. But it can only happen with 1/4 type effectiveness, so that can't explain people thinking they've seen Swift miss.

User 80C doesn't actually say it was an English cartridge, though on an English forum, I'd think that was the case unless otherwise specified.

Comparing the move table is a lot easier than comparing the code. It uses 990 bytes, in 165 groups of 6 (move id, effect, power, type, accuracy, pp). And it starts with Pound (01 00 28 00 FF 23). The only difference is that in the Japanese games, Blizzard's effect is 0x23 (shared with no other moves), while in the English games, it's 0x05 (the same as Ice Punch and Ice Beam). Swift's effect is 0x11 in all the games (shared with no other moves). So it appears that Swift was supposed to do something.

—-

Getting distracted onto Blizzard, the following Effect IDs are used by the listed moves:

0x04 Fire Punch, Ember, Flamethrower
0x05 Ice Punch, Ice Beam, Blizzard (E)
0x06 Thunderpunch, Thundershock, Thunderbolt, Thunder
0x22 Fire Blast
0x23 Blizzard (J)
0x24 Body Slam, Lick

In PokeRed, the FreezeBurnParalyzeEffect routine gets called for all 6 of those. It picks the 10% or 30% probability based on the size of the Effect ID, then for the 30% ones it subtracts 0x1E to convert to the 10% version before applying it.

In English Yellow, I hacked the move table entry for Scratch to have Effect 0x23, and it does indeed freeze a lot.

As a side note, FreezeBurnParalyzeEffect seemed to be comparing the type of the attack with the types of the target to determine effect immunity, so I tested that. My hacked Scratch can freeze Ice Pokemon but seemingly not Normal Pokemon.

https://www.math.miami.edu/~jam/azure/compendium/myths.htm
Myth: Blizzard freezes 30% of the time in link battles.
Many guides report this, and if you poke into the ROM you will see that Blizzard does indeed freeze 30% of the time, if a certain condition is true. We just don't know what that condition is, or even if that condition can be met within the realm of normal game play.

I don't think so… English Red is not doing anything to distinguish between Blizzard and Ice Beam. It seems rather that Effect 0x23 freezes 30% of the time, but no attack has this effect.

This myth was further propagated by the Pokémon Yellow instruction booklets, which claim that Blizzard freezes less frequently in Colosseum2 link battles. In reality, however, Blizzard freezes 10% of the time in all link battles.

I'll guess it's true in Japanese Yellow, and got changed in the game but not in the manual.

It seems so…
https://tcrf.net/Pok%C3%A9mon_Red_and_Blue/Version_Differences#Original_Blizzard_Freezing_Chance_Value
In the original Japanese releases, Blizzard has a 30.1% chance of freezing. The localizations, Pokémon Stadium, and the Japanese Yellow, when played in Colosseum 2 mode reduce this to 10.2%. The English Yellow instruction booklet mistakenly claims that Blizzard freezes less frequently in Colosseum 2 mode, which is only true in the Japanese releases since the value was reduced to 10.2% everywhere already in Red and Blue.


—-

Also, we were talking about in-game move descriptions earlier. According to Bulbapedia, the Stadium description for Mega Punch says it's "highly accurate". This doesn't really inspire confidence in the descriptions (unless Mega Punch actually does have a different accuracy in Stadium?)
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mega_Punch

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: IceFlame
Date: 2016-07-01 19:41:14
I had a good attempt at comparing the code, and I reckon it's a bug:
http://pastebin.com/nJzRK337

Predictions:
In the Japanese games, the Swift Effect works only against Substitutes.
HP draining attacks work against Substitutes in the English games, but miss in the Japanese games.

Sadly, I won't be able to test it today.

(Please excuse the double post in this case. If anyone else is working on this at the same time, I wanted to make sure they notice the update.)

—-

I roughly confirmed this for English Yellow and Japanese Yellow (Rev B). Used codes to give my Pokemon Substitute and Double Team, and give a wild Pokemon 4 copies of either Absorb, Pound or Swift.

For the first test, the wild Pokemon had Absorb, and my Pokemon damaged it and then made a sub. (I didn't use Double Team in this test.)
In English, Absorb worked on the sub. The drain effect worked, except on the turn the sub broke. In Japanese, Absorb missed the sub all of the 5 times the wild Pokemon tried it.

For the second test, the wild Pokemon had Pound, my Pokemon used Double Team 6 times, then let itself get hit for a while, and made a sub and let that get broken twice.
In both games, the wild Pokemon missed a good proportion of the time, whether my Pokemon had a sub or not.

For the third test, the wild Pokemon had Swift, my Pokemon used Double Team 6 times, then let itself get hit for a while, and made a sub and let that get broken twice.
In English, Swift hit every time, whether my Pokemon had a sub or not. In Japanese, the wild Pokemon hit every time when there was a sub, and missed a good proportion of the time when there wasn't one.

I guess this is resolved! Though I still wonder, "how did it happen that hardly anyone noticed?"

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2016-07-19 11:25:54
Great research IceFlame! I've finished testing this on my physical Japanese Pokémon Yellow cartridge and made a video of the results.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6Hkos4vdsU[/youtube]


User 80C doesn't actually say it was an English cartridge, though on an English forum, I'd think that was the case unless otherwise specified.


I think 80C possibly likes to play the Japanese games, as they found an Articuno binoculars glitch on Japanese Green and shared it with me, although I don't know if they were playing a Japanese game at the time.


(Blizzard effect information)


That's right. I was also the person who added the information about Blizzard on to TCRF, but I haven't looked around the code in a disassembler to confirm it.


Also, we were talking about in-game move descriptions earlier. According to Bulbapedia, the Stadium description for Mega Punch says it's "highly accurate". This doesn't really inspire confidence in the descriptions (unless Mega Punch actually does have a different accuracy in Stadium?)
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mega_Punch


That seems unusual given the accuracy is 85% in the core games. I tried it in Stadium and the move missed the second time, although I don't know if the accuracy was changed. IIMarckus may be able to help because he has done work on analyzing Pokémon Stadium.

For reference, according to this guide, there are other descriptions for moves that claim them to be highly accurate. These had 255/256 accuracy in the core games and include:

Dizzy Punch
A Normal-type attack. The punch is relatively strong and highly accurate.


Night Shade
A Ghost-type attack.
Highly accurate, it inflicts damage regardless of the target's type.


Spike Cannon
A physical attack consisting of two to five consecutive hits.
Highly accurate.


Surf
A Water-type attack. The power of this technique is strong and highly accurate.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: froggy25
Date: 2016-07-19 13:06:42
That seems unusual given the accuracy is 85% in the core games. I tried it in Stadium and the move missed the second time, although I don't know if the accuracy was changed. IIMarckus may be able to help because he has done work on analyzing Pokémon Stadium.

The moves accuracy were not changed, aside from the 1/256 fix which made nearly every move slightly more accurate than on cartridge as a side effect of the fix.

Swift effect skips every Accuracy check in international Pokémon Stadium.

I know that VBA is not the most accurate.

Yup, it has a lot of issues (most of these are explained on the GB test ROMs page on gbdev), it's best to not use that emulator.

Re: Swift (Speed Star) in Japanese 1st Gen

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2016-07-19 13:15:53
Thanks for the information froggy25! Do you know if there are any differences battle mechanics-wise between the original Japanese Pokémon Stadium and/or Pocket Monsters Stadium 2 and the international release?