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Generation I Glitch Discussion

A newbie's guide to's? (with a spice of glitch item research) - Page 1

A newbie's guide to's? (with a spice of glitch item research)

Posted by: The G-Meister
Date: 2015-11-24 17:31:39
I was wondering how many questions we get about the basic glitches such as item underflow, arbitrary code execution, and some of the other early game, yet still complex glitches, and how often you get them. I was thinking about writing some "Newbie's guide to"'s (seen as I'm still pretty new something like this mighta been helpful), but wanted to know if it would be worth making them in the first place, or if they'd just get lost and forgotten about.

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: Krys3000
Date: 2015-11-25 04:34:57
I think it's always the ultimate goal of Pokémon glitch communities to create pages for everyone to understand and be able to use any glitch. That's what GCL's wiki is about, and that's also what I'm trying to do with PRAMA.

So far, GCL's article on ACE, for example, is a little short. It would be great to finally write a full, easy-to-understand article on this. I think the own I did for PRAMA is pretty cool and might be translated into English? Anyway this requires time, unfortunately I barely have the time to work on my own website.

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: The G-Meister
Date: 2015-11-25 13:15:56
That's a fair point. And even without translation of that PRAMA page, I can see you've put quite a bit of work into it. Good job :P

Now I'm definitely not as pressured for time as you might be, so I could give it a shot. The main things I was going to cover were how the glitches work, but also why they work, which is what a lot of beginners don't understand. Seen as I do all my glitching on console, I've bagged a few tricks up my sleeve to save myself some time here and there, which I'd mention as well. When I was thinking about doing YouTube this was gonna be my format for tutorials, but editing just got so dreary and boring that I dropped it. I'd rather make and be committed to making high quality videos, or not make them at all. Having said that, a comprehensive article written online is much more appealing.

First, I have to finish my guides to breaking the money cap, so, all in good time :D

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: Krys3000
Date: 2015-11-25 13:54:20
For having thought a lot about glitch "vulgarization", I think both video and written support are great. In every page we write for PRAMA, we separate the glitch itself to the technical explanations of it. That's necessary because you have readers that only are interested in doing the glitch, and really don't care about memory addresses, hex values, opcodes and stuff so you have to keep it simple for them.

Nonetheless, I'm thinking about starting a series of videos which purpose is to specifically explain glitches (in french). That might be interesting.

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: The G-Meister
Date: 2015-11-25 14:10:01
Have fun with that, I stopped from sheer boredom :P

The other thing I didn't know about until too late was the workings of items stacks over quantities of 99. It was a bit of a hit to realise that you can't deposit a x255 stack onto another x255 stack of the same item in the PC, as it just overflows and you end up with a x99 stack and whatevers left when you subtract 99 from 310. I'd like to mention those things so new people get the idea: "Do stuff exactly as stated, or these things will go wrong"

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: TheZZAZZGlitch
Date: 2015-11-27 03:16:02
Nonetheless, I'm thinking about starting a series of videos which purpose is to specifically explain glitches (in french). That might be interesting.


A few months ago I had the idea to do just that - post series of videos that explain some difficult to understand concepts about Pokemon glitches and glitches in general (arbitrary code execution, inventory underflow, buffer overflows, integer overflows, also how to find and exploit glitches in general, since I get that question a lot). Obviously in English. I never got around to doing it, since producing professional quality video content (including voiceovers) takes a lot of time, and I wasn't sure whether my viewers would be interested.

I might come back to the idea, but give up on the video part - just make comprehensive guides/articles in text form. Make them "noob-friendly" so everyone can understand what's going on, but have some additional technical sections to satisfy people who are a bit more curious.

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: Alaistar
Date: 2015-11-29 17:48:47
I was thinking about writing some "Newbie's guide to"'s

I might come back to the idea, but give up on the video part - just make comprehensive guides/articles in text form. Make them "noob-friendly" so everyone can understand what's going on, but have some additional technical sections to satisfy people who are a bit more curious.


Oh yes please, that would be great!
For a newbie (like me) that wants to start this magical journey into glitch exploration, every sort of explanations are more than welcome! Especially, as The G-Meister said, about the reason why glitches are like so and how the game works. I can imagine that making a guide is not easy and that requires a considerable amount of time but I think this would help newcomers a lot: the world of glitching is not so friendly at first. I found myself having some difficulties in understanding some passages (some of them remain obscure to me ::) ) and not everything on internet are clearly explained for a newbie.

Videos are sureley a great means of information beacause they are easy to understand and direct but don't understimate a good written support: one the best noob-friendly thing I found online "Inside the ROM: The deepest secrets of MissingNo. and Glitch Pokémon" was an article written by Crystal_ (all honor and glory) on Smogon. It really helped me in my first steps into the subject!

Finally imho you don't have to care that much about reception: if your work is well done and if it is easily accessible you don't have to worry, people will come and will enjoy it! Maybe not immediately, I think it's more a long term kind of reception..

(sorry for my very bad english, I hope you understood what I meant to say..)  :-[

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: camper
Date: 2015-11-29 23:42:03
Read this as well if you enjoyed that article.

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: The G-Meister
Date: 2015-11-30 15:11:55

(sorry for my very bad english, I hope you understood what I meant to say..)  :-[


Your English is pretty much spot on, if you hadn't have said otherwise I would have thought it was your first language!

Anyway, I've seen that in a lot of places, item underflow is brushed over kinda gently as if everyone already knows it in the finest detail (which a lot of us do). Seen as it's pretty core to a lot of glitching, I'll try get a nice coherent article together some time next week. Got a buncha school work to do and the glitchy richness first page to finish re-writing. I've found a few extremely useful applications for it as well (such as turning a stack of 1 item into a stack of 0 items, allowing the player to obtain x255 of said item), and I'll include a list of addresses from the DataCrystal RAM map and what happens when they're modified.

Sound good? Anything else worth including?

[Edit]: On the expanded item pack page, it says this:

Here is a list of interesting items to mess with : <help is needed there>


Is this referring to the Gen II section specifically?

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: Krys3000
Date: 2015-11-30 15:43:15
By google-translating the two tables in this page I wrote, you should be able to understand the result and rewrite it in good english. This would spare you the time to check which item affects which function, since I already did that.

However, the addresses are for the french version, +5 from english R/B. Also note "IDH" is a shortcut for hex ID.

Anyway good luck with that! I also think a good item underflow page should mention the GC RAM Manipulation method which doesn't require MissingNo.

EDIT: Google translates "Argent" to "Silver" which is not wrong but in this case it means money. Also "vault" is a lame translation of "Banque" which obviously means "Bank"…

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: The G-Meister
Date: 2015-11-30 16:31:38
From my extremely basic knowledge of French I get the gist… seems you've done all that work already! I'll gladly include those, link the webpage and I'll probably add a bit more detail. Thanks a bunch.

[Edit]: Seen as no-one answered my query about which items cause you to have to press A/B multiple times to be able to scroll past them, I'll be compiling a list of those items and their hex IDs, how they work (as they seem to differ dependant on map location), and multiple safe locations in which you can negate their effects. This will be important for underflow in terms of speedruns and they're just a general pain to keep around. It'll also give people a few ideas as what to set certain addresses to (such as options and rival's name) to avoid these items getting in the way of their underflowing.

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: Krys3000
Date: 2015-12-01 10:14:09
You're welcome!

About long name items I have some informations. PRAMA member Haxel did a full test of every item from hex:62 to hex:C3 for their ability to display Rival's name when the player is placed in the specific position. We were then able to set a list of those, and which letter of the Rival's name is displayed in the Cooltrainer/LOL tile according to the length of the name.

I'm guessing those are, at least partly, the items which cause the blocking thing in the expanded item pack. The list is a messy internal note, thus not published but I can make you a clean one.

The problem is glitch items have different names between english and other european games, so I really don't know if english items behave the same way.

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: The G-Meister
Date: 2015-12-01 12:02:34
I would have suspected that it would differ between versions. Regardless, I did a whole haul of testing today, and it seems there's a lot of them. The majority of them require different amounts of button presses dependant on where you are stood, yet every single one of those items requires the same amount of presses. These must be the ones which do not have any sort of end tile. However it seems some of them operate differently, where instead they always require a set amount of key presses no matter where you are stood, even in places where the other items would require no presses at all. One of them even combines the two, having one extra press added to the normal amount.

Before I make the article, here's the list. I've got a few I need to retest for the second or maybe third property, which I had no idea existed when I was going through for the first time. I also have yet to test for locations where said items are safe, and if it is the same from map to map. All testing so far has been done on English Red, and will be repeated on English Yellow when I get the time, although I believe the effects will be very similar, if not identical. I've tested 62h - C3h (98 - 195) and 00h, all others I've assumed to have properly terminated names.

Format: Dec ID, Hex ID, RBY text character that this correlates to (taken from the Big List). No text formatting is for ones which require different amounts of presses dependant on where you are in the map. Underline requires 1 press no matter where you are. Bold obeys both of these properties.

116, 74, Bold .
117, 75, …
125, 7D, Pokéball Border bottom left
126, 7E, Pokéball Border bottom right
127, 7F, (Space)
129, 81, B
130, 82, C
131, 83, D
133, 85, F
134, 86, G
135, 87, H
138, 8A, K
139, 8B, L
140, 8C, M
141, 8D, N
143, 8F, P
144, 90, Q
152, 98, Y
154, 9A, (
156, 9C, :
158, 9E, [
159, 9F, ]
160, A0, a
161, A1, b
165, A5, f
166, A6, g
167, A7, h
168, A8, i
169, A9, j
170, AA, k
171, AB, l (lowercase L)
182, B6, w
193, C1, (none, or unknown value, possibly a map tile)

What this means is, for none of these (or as little as possible) to get in the way of your scrolling to get to my favourite bytes (D362 & D363), letters 2, 4 and 6 in your Rival's name should not be any of these values above. The more of those you use, the worse of a time your going to have, because their effect is cumulative (if you have 3 on the screen at the same time, and it requires 28 presses (the most I've seen for a single map location) per item, you're looking at 84 button presses… per line). It also means, you should try not having any of the above hex values in the second set of digits (3 & 4) or your money. These will most likely be 74, 75, 81-87, 90 and 98, unless you've been getting glitchy-rich in which case all of the above values apply. Any options configuration will be fine, as that is used as a quantity rather than an item. Certain combinations of badges will trigger these effects, the players ID may trigger it (in which case, it's a lot of work to change, as you'll have to change the ID of your Pokémon too for them to be counted as yours) and finally, some audio tracks will activate this effect. That's a lot of stuff to take into account, especially seen as a lot of it is easiest to configure at the start of the game. However, this doesn't mean it's the end of the world, as you can swap these items around and dispose of them, although it will have the consequence of editing the bytes you change.

Everything else after that is dependant on maps. Go to the Data Crystal RAM map if you really want the specifics of those.

Re: A newbie's guide to's?

Posted by: The G-Meister
Date: 2015-12-02 16:55:48
Update: 132 was fine in the end, Trade Completed seems to have a properly terminated name.

I've been walking around trying to find spots where these items are safe, and there seems to be more safe spots than unsafe ones, although I'm still not too sure why. It seems the tile 50 (the "lower left corner of a bush" that everyone keeps going on about, because it pertains to a ret instruction) seems to have something to do with it, seen as I was stood on a specific spot, and it took me 8 presses to open the item menu. I moved right one to get 1 bush on screen and it went down to 6, again for 4, again for 2 and again for none. Having said that, when I had bushes on the right of the screen it didn't have the same effect. Might have something to do with the fact that they're replaced with the start menu when you open it up, meaning they can't properly terminate the names.

I've had an idea for another test involving where a bush is situated, seen as displaying one of these glitch items offsets the rest of the screen once it's done with its own name, maybe getting a bush in a certain position stops this effect. I'll update if I have any more news tomorrow.

Re: A newbie's guide to's? (with a spice of glitch item research)

Posted by: The G-Meister
Date: 2015-12-03 12:31:32
I most definitely have more news! It seems the main culprit of having to press B too often is brick tiles being on the screen after you've opened the start menu. For every one of those 8x8 tile blocks, you're gonna have to press B one more time! I found a couple other tiles that have the same effect, in Red at least: The bottom half of a railing, one of the 4 tiles in a cave entrance and one of the 4 tiles on the bottom half of those weird box things you can find in Pokémon mansion.

The way these items work is after they have finished displaying their name, they offset the whole of the background screen as if the start menu is open and the item menu isn't. This means that you can cover up any one of these tiles with the start menu to negate its effect. Furthermore, if the lower left corner of a bush, or the bottom half of a sign comes before it, it will terminate the name, meaning the brick tile (or whatever other tile it is) will not be displayed, so you won't have to press B.

I think I'm almost done now, all I need to do is find more tiles which increase your amount of B presses.