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Generation III Glitch Discussion

Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald) - Page 1

Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: VaeporSage
Date: 2012-03-10 11:53:51
Reading through glitch threads on Serebii.net yesterday, I came across this odd discovery: after a certain point in the game (this point is unknown specifically, though some claim that the pause after saving at the Battle Tower is a potential trigger) the windows in Rustboro City Trainer's School develop strange black glitch curtains. I just uploaded a video of it in my game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj3ErvCdOXs

Has anyone here heard of it, and/or understand why the curtains appear?

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: Tsukuu
Date: 2012-03-10 12:47:07
I was searching through my savefiles, and found it in one of them, which was in VBA-Link, where I used to battle my brothers. But we abused GS Pokémon generators a lot, and as some of them weren't completed (missing either Master Code, Anti-DMA, or both), so this game had several Bad EGGs, a specific spot in Box 1 which turned any Pokémon input there into Bad EGGs, sometimes after a battle was done, some of my Pokémon were severely corrupted, and in the end, the box became inaccessible at all, BSoDing every time I open it. So it's probably related to savefile corruption. I'll try to take a better look into my less-corrupted savefiles from VBA-Link, maybe one of them is less corrupted so I can take a better look at it.

EDIT: found a less/almost no damaged savefile, but it still has a few Bad EGGs and several GS generated Pokémon and some illegal movesets (they themselves probably don't matter though). But I doubt the Cloning glitch has to do with it since I have a game with several cloned Pokémon and there's no curtains there. This one, however, has been massively cheated, and got some slight corruptions, like the Bad EGGs, and the symbols being messed (I got Gold symbols I didn't have, and one of my Silver symbol simply vanished).

Anyways, here's a more accurate taken from VBA: [img]http://i1090.photobucket.com/albums/i363/Thunderasen/blackcurtains.png[/img]

And here's my savefile if anyone wanna investigate: http://www.mediafire.com/?96hsg6mez9zcpkw

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: OwnageMuch
Date: 2012-03-10 15:14:07
Wow great job uncovering these Vae, there always seems to be more to learn :o

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: VaeporSage
Date: 2012-03-10 16:43:09
@Pawny: My savefile is uncorrupted; the only thing out of the ordinary to have happened to my Emerald cartridge was the one time I found a shiny Tentacool - I found an exactly identical shiny Tentacool (same nature, stats, level, gender, even IVs) a week later. I have cloned countless times on my game - I'd say I've cloned at least 500 Pokemon and 3,000 items at this stage.

@blahpy: Another thing I found but couldn't record footage of is that hatching an Egg in a n area with no background music causes the Egg-hatching music to linger until you exit. Maybe someone else could upload a video of that or get back to me on whether or not it's true - these came from Serebii.net, after all, a haven of glitching illiteracy.

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: Tsukuu
Date: 2012-03-10 18:33:35
Oh wow, that's a lot. Maybe that cloning glitch has a very small chance of corrupting a small part of the save file, idk. You never cheated, right?

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: VaeporSage
Date: 2012-03-11 05:55:03
@Pawny: No, I've never used Action Replay/GameShark etc. Evidently, the cloning glitch isn't to blame; a couple of commenters on the Serebii thread also said that they'd never cloned but still had the curtains, just like in on of your games.

The glitch is exclusive to Emerald, so perhaps it's due to some other aspect of the game that only exists in Emerald. I'm beginning to think that the curtains were a beta decoration, but were taken out for some reason and left in the coding.

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: OwnageMuch
Date: 2012-03-11 23:43:53

@Pawny: My savefile is uncorrupted; the only thing out of the ordinary to have happened to my Emerald cartridge was the one time I found a shiny Tentacool - I found an exactly identical shiny Tentacool (same nature, stats, level, gender, even IVs) a week later. I have cloned countless times on my game - I'd say I've cloned at least 500 Pokemon and 3,000 items at this stage.


Actually, this occurence is rather common in all Emerald games (including real copies).

It happens due to a thing in the RNG algorithm, and it can also cause some players to have extreme luck at finding shiny Pokémon (although they will always have the same values, as you stated). I don't really know the in-depth technicalities of it, however.

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: Tsukuu
Date: 2012-03-12 06:51:19
Oh, that'd explain why I had two shiny Wingulls among my small list of random shinies. But I can't confirm it since I was too noob and didn't catch the first one LOL.

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: VaeporSage
Date: 2012-03-12 16:32:27
Well, that's a relief. When it happened to me, I was worried that my game could have been damaged in some way.

About the curtains: could it have anything to do with Scott? Scott appears in the Trainer's School when you first enter it, and Scott leads you to the Battle Frontier - people who have acquired the curtains seem to have reached that point in the game.

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: Tsukuu
Date: 2012-03-12 17:12:20
Idk, but it could have something to do with the Frontier Symbols, since it apparently was the only visible effect of the corruption other than the Bad EGGs and the curtain itself.

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2015-06-03 08:52:47
Metarkai solved part of the mystery guys! The curtains are influenced by the data of Pokémon at slots 4-6 of box 8 of the PC! Earlier slots represent pixels higher up, later ones represent pixels lower down.

Removing Pokémon 4-6 removed the curtains, or if I just had slot 6; then only a lower part of the window was corrupted.

[img]http://i3.minus.com/iIVQ20GSZ7iZF.png[/img]

If you use the anti-DMA code B2809E31 3CEF5320 1C7B3231 B494738C; then memory addresses 0202DAE4-0202DB43 always represent curtain pixel data. Each byte will control the layout of up to four pixels on the screen.

I think it may be the case that whatever value for each byte, you always have pixels opposite each other (it would make sense for programming a curtain, I suppose). Metarkai didn't know if it's possible to change the colours.

I think that potentially you may be able to create nice art.

It still seems to be a mystery why these curtains exist and why box Pokémon matter though. In Pokémon Ruby, none of the box slots affect the windows but perhaps some range of addresses memory or ROM still does.

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: SatoMew
Date: 2015-06-03 14:36:10

Actually, this occurence is rather common in all Emerald games (including real copies).

It happens due to a thing in the RNG algorithm, and it can also cause some players to have extreme luck at finding shiny Pokémon (although they will always have the same values, as you stated). I don't really know the in-depth technicalities of it, however.


Smogon has various articles about Emerald's PRNG: http://www.smogon.com/ingame/rng/


It still seems to be a mystery why these curtains exist


Are they part of any standard tileset?

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: Torchickens
Date: 2015-06-03 17:13:21
I don't know much about GBA graphics, but I couldn't spot any curtain related tiles in the tile viewer. The curtains do not appear in map viewer either even when they are on the screen.

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: TheZZAZZGlitch
Date: 2015-06-04 03:42:47
The glitch seems to cause empty tiles with IDs higher than 790 to be overwritten with Pokemon box data:

[img]http://i.imgur.com/JJOFDYy.png[/img]

Normally these tiles are unused, but for some reason window sides in Trainer School have tiles 791-793 laid on top of them. Maybe they were intended to have curtains at some point:

[img]http://i.imgur.com/t656OIL.png[/img]

Which causes the garbled graphics to become visible.

This happens with all tilesets with empty tiles in that range. Makes me wonder if there are more locations with noticeable effects of this corruption.

Re: Black Curtains of Rustboro (Emerald)

Posted by: Krys3000
Date: 2015-06-04 09:25:52
Yeah ! This glitch was rediscussed lately on PRAMA (where it was posted originally by VaePomeg), and it seemed to have motivated Metarkrai who asked on PRAMA's chat for save files to investigate it… When he came back on it and announced this, we were all like "wtf where is the logic in this"  ;D

It's cool it's finally solved, at least partly !