FRLG RSE - Toysrus Mew Distribution GBA Cart

[Invader TAK]

Or, all the carts for sale are the clones of the same cart.

It is way too easy to dump and clone retail carts' saves.

They could have easily gotten their hands on an actual distribution cart, clone the save and sale it...

Honestly, I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case.

[Guest]

Considering Sabresite already uploaded the Mews (the things of value), I personally don't see the problem with uploading the save. I mean, the ROMs of the Gen 4 and 5 distributions getting dumped and spread around certainly didn't devalue the legit carts floating around so why would this be any different?

Because having a rom of a distribution cartridge doesn't allow you to flawlessly replicate legitimate distribution cartridges.

Dumping the rom of a distro cart doesn't copy the cartridge itself. It doesn't matter how many people have the rom, you'll always be one of the few with the actual cartridge.

While Toys'R'Us Mew distribution cartridge, there's literally nothing differentiating a "real" one from a cloned one. It's literally a case of Legal vs. Legit

@Ammako

We can't prove for a fact that a good majority of Mew carts for sale are "scams".

Also, the fact that some people are making huge profit from doing basically nothing has been something at the front of my mind on the subject of making the save public. I also figured a public save would hopefully devalue the save their scam method. Though, the thing is we can't guarantee how many people, buyers and sellers, will be aware or able to find the save file if it is posted here. It may not help much to devalue in that case. It's hard to say. Worst case scenario, it doesn't devalue, and some people see it here and decide to go make hundreds of bucks themselves with it. At the same time, what about the people that paid hundreds of dollars for a legit cartridge? Is a devaluation from a public save fair to them? I'm sure some wouldn't be pleased by the idea.

There's all risky potentials involved if we were to do this, but of course I'd just love to be done with it and help preserve history by making it public. I would've done so months ago if I thought it wouldn't potentially cause a big negativity.

See, here's how I see it.

Yeah, there'd be a chance that people would take the public save file and copy that to retail cartridges to sell back at a profit.

But

If save files become public, and it causes more people to make 'fakes' to sell on ebay

That will make supply go up, and sellers just looking to make a quick buck will price theirs lower than what other people are selling theirs at, causing a general drop in price, possibly to the point where people don't profit nearly as much from it.

And if not enough people start doing it for it to cause such a huge price drop, then it's safe to assume that not very many people would have started doing this.

On the other hand, it's pretty much a guarantee that the people currently selling Mew cartridges are copying the save file to new cartridges every so often to sell more of them. Why? Because they have access to the cartridge, they have access to the save file. They'd be crazy to just sell it and lose it forever, and not backup the save file for their own personal use/for later copying back to a new cartridge for selling it again. If you literally can legally profit off selling a copy of something you own, without losing the original, you'd be crazy not to do it.

Besides, if people can't profit off selling supposed Mew distribution cartridges, they'll just profit off selling the same cartridges just with different things in them

Anyone? They literally have like at least 5 listings for it, and you can see that plenty of them sell well enough, and they don't even have to hide it, literally says in the listings that they just use PokEdit to make save files, which is something that is publicly available.

[Invader TAK]

Because having a rom of a distribution cartridge doesn't allow you to flawlessly replicate legitimate distribution cartridges.

Dumping the rom of a distro cart doesn't copy the cartridge itself. It doesn't matter how many people have the rom, you'll always be one of the few with the actual cartridge.

While Toys'R'Us Mew distribution cartridge, there's literally nothing differentiating a "real" one from a cloned one. It's literally a case of Legal vs. Legit

See, here's how I see it.

Yeah, there'd be a chance that people would take the public save file and copy that to retail cartridges to sell back at a profit.

But

If save files become public, and it causes more people to make 'fakes' to sell on ebay

That will make supply go up, and sellers just looking to make a quick buck will price theirs lower than what other people are selling theirs at, causing a general drop in price, possibly to the point where people don't profit nearly as much from it.

And if not enough people start doing it for it to cause such a huge price drop, then it's safe to assume that not very many people would have started doing this.

On the other hand, it's pretty much a guarantee that the people currently selling Mew cartridges are copying the save file to new cartridges every so often to sell more of them. Why? Because they have access to the cartridge, they have access to the save file. They'd be crazy to just sell it and lose it forever, and not backup the save file for their own personal use/for later copying back to a new cartridge for selling it again. If you literally can legally profit off selling a copy of something you own, without losing the original, you'd be crazy not to do it.

Besides, if people can't profit off selling supposed Mew distribution cartridges, they'll just profit off selling the same cartridges just with different things in them

Anyone? They literally have like at least 5 listings for it, and you can see that plenty of them sell well enough, and they don't even have to hide it, literally says in the listings that they just use PokEdit to make save files, which is something that is publicly available.

Fair point on the "unable to spot a faked Mew cart" thing. I also agree with everything you said after that. Plus if an original save isn't uploaded, we still have the Mews, just in Gen 4 PKM format instead of Gen 3.

Also, the seller of that White 2 runs PokEdit. That guy's been doing this stuff since the days of Platinum. Remember UltraSaves? Same guy.

[Guest]

I know, and people have been doing this with Gen. 3 games too (just I gave White 2 as an example because that's what I came across first, lol.)

Anyway, one can claim that all Mew cartridges that pop up on ebay are all genuine just because save files aren't publicly available yet, but... all things considered, no one can really tell, and it's far more likely that the vast majority of them are all copies, and how would you tell anyway?

Besides, ebay sellers dont need it to be publicly available; for all we know there's a couple people sharing the save privately to each other.

Oh yeah, another thing. Nothing prevents someone from buying one of those that pop up on ebay every so often just so they can get the save file and then start copying it over and over to make profit. Save files aren't exactly kept secret by whoever has them, they just aren't widely available to the public, yet

Guess if no-one makes to want saves public, we could always make a group effort to raise money to buy one of thr Mew cartridges that show up on ebay so that we can dump the save file and make it public. A couple people over in the Gen. III wondercard research trade did that to buy a bunch of Gen. III games in various languages so we could get Auroraticket in all languages, maybe some people would be willing to do that if there's no other option.

[Invader TAK]

I know, and people have been doing this with Gen. 3 games too (just I gave White 2 as an example because that's what I came across first, lol.)

Anyway, one can claim that all Mew cartridges that pop up on ebay are all genuine just because save files aren't publicly available yet, but... all things considered, no one can really tell, and it's far more likely that the vast majority of them are all copies, and how would you tell anyway?

Besides, ebay sellers dont need it to be publicly available; for all we know there's a couple people sharing the save privately to each other.

Oh yeah, another thing. Nothing prevents someone from buying one of those that pop up on ebay every so often just so they can get the save file and then start copying it over and over to make profit. Save files aren't exactly kept secret by whoever has them, they just aren't widely available to the public, yet

Guess if no-one makes to want saves public, we could always make a group effort to raise money to buy one of thr Mew cartridges that show up on ebay so that we can dump the save file and make it public. A couple people over in the Gen. III wondercard research trade did that to buy a bunch of Gen. III games in various languages so we could get Auroraticket in all languages, maybe some people would be willing to do that if there's no other option.

You're not gonna stop people selling these carts, so why withhold the save that could help us detect any possible fakes? But at the same time, not only did Sabresite provide the Mews in Gen 4 PKM format, he also provided the seeds to generate them. If no one's willing to provide an original save, we have options for making a different save.

[Sabresite]

The only saving grace is that the original mystery mews had 1 unique trash byte.  With enough time and luck I could probably figure out the pattern for the extrapolated mews also.  I don't think it is worth it, and it won't stop people from selling clones or faked mystry mew carts.

I know the original download is gone, so I'll find my copy and upload if needed again.

[Invader TAK]

3 hours ago, Sabresite said:

The only saving grace is that the original mystery mews had 1 unique trash byte.  With enough time and luck I could probably figure out the pattern for the extrapolated mews also.  I don't think it is worth it, and it won't stop people from selling clones or faked mystry mew carts.

I know the original download is gone, so I'll find my copy and upload if needed again.

I still have the Gen 4 .pkm set if anyone wants them.

Edited December 8, 2016 by Invader TAK

[Invader TAK]

1 hour ago, ajxpk said:

It would be great if you could look into it. 
I actually think it's worth it. And I do agree with what you said that it won't stop scammers being scammers.
But I think it's not so much about them. It's more about the people who're getting scammed.
And it possibly would make people think twice and make them consider to get the Mews from us before they getting scammed.
Which is why I think it's DEFINITELY worth a shot.

That's a very good point. Plus I've always been about preserving and sharing these events, no matter how "rare" they may be.

That said, here are the Mews Sabresite previously uploaded. Gen 4 PKM format, untouched from the original download.

MYSTERY Mews (Gen 4 PKM).zip

[TheRealSlimShady]

I've had these 3 save files for a while. Not sure if legit, but I think they are. Maybe you can find out something interesting from them?

 

I put them all in a .rar archive. Feel free to add them to your downloads page in case they are legit

Mystry Mew.rar

[Invader TAK]

20 hours ago, TheRealSlimShady said:

I've had these 3 save files for a while. Not sure if legit, but I think they are. Maybe you can find out something interesting from them?

 

I put them all in a .rar archive. Feel free to add them to your downloads page in case they are legit

Mystry Mew.rar

*checks them out in Trigger's PC* If these are legit saves...

Edited December 14, 2016 by Invader TAK

[TheRealSlimShady]

32 minutes ago, Invader TAK said:

*checks them out in Trigger's PC* If these are legit saves...

 

haha I'm pretty sure they are legit, or at least one of them is!

I got them in a trade a long time ago. I traded some of my personally dumped GEN V Distribution ROMs for these files. Always wondered if they were legit and I'm pretty positive that at least one of them is. I remember the guy who traded them to me mentioned a "pokemon project" site and I think this is it. I emailed him a few months ago but I've never received an answer back.

I'm a huge pokemon fan and have all kinds of distribution stuff. I've collected several files and carts that I may want to share to the public to get analyzed at in the near future.

I think these are Twig's saves. I traded them to other collectors in these past few years, and I'm pretty sure some of them injected the savs into retail carts and sold them on eBay. I totally hated that and I want it to stop.

 

I don't know how to check if they are legit, hence why I posted them here. Please let me know! 

[Invader TAK]

18 minutes ago, TheRealSlimShady said:

 

haha I'm pretty sure they are legit, or at least one of them is!

I got them in a trade a long time ago. I traded some of my personally dumped GEN V Distribution ROMs for these files. Always wondered if they were legit and I'm pretty positive that at least one of them is. I remember the guy who traded them to me mentioned a "pokemon project" site and I think this is it. I emailed him a few months ago but I've never received an answer back.

I'm a huge pokemon fan and have all kinds of distribution stuff. I've collected several files and carts that I may want to share to the public to get analyzed at in the near future.

I think these are Twig's saves. I traded them to other collectors in these past few years, and I'm pretty sure some of them injected the savs into retail carts and sold them on eBay. I totally hated that and I want it to stop.

 

I don't know how to check if they are legit, hence why I posted them here. Please let me know! 

Hopefully it won't be long before Sabresite pops in. I believe he still has Twig's saves so he could compare if he does (and maybe fill in the gaps while he's at it). Also, you won't be able to stop people from injecting the savs into retail carts and selling them. On the bright side, it seems like everyone gave up on selling Mew carts through eBay. I just did a quick search and didn't find any listings.

Also, if you have any Gen 3 Egg Wonder Card saves, shoot 'em over to ajxpk. He's been researching Gen 3 Wonder Cards for over a year now (if not longer, last year was just when he made his thread). With help from various people here (and Nintendo Italy, funny enough), all of the Ticket events have been collected. He's just looking for Wonder Cards for the US Wish Eggs and the Japanese PokePark Eggs.

Edited December 14, 2016 by Invader TAK

[HaxAras]

On 12/14/2016 at 1:12 PM, ajxpk said:

Thanks a lot. I extracted them and already sorted them.
Excluding the hacks these are 373 individual Mews. 
Also I already was taking a look at the Trash Bytes and there's one thing I noticed...
And this is very interesting...
 

I've been wondering. I'm assuming you have a program to sort through them all. Would you happen to be able to separate them from the rest and put them on their own save? I was interested in trying to find all of the unique mews and separating them but with hundreds of Mew, that would take forever without a program or help. 

[theSLAYER]

Relevant posts regarding 10anniv moved to here:
https://projectpokemon.org/forums/forums/topic/39517-10anniv-discussion/

 

[Sabresite]

I haven't had time to look at those saves to see if they match what I was given.  Ajxpk is right about the trash bytes.  The original trash bytes are generated from the actual event process.  I wonder if that process was modified (Like a program that has a generate 1, 5, 10, 100 option) to account for the other 4 mews in the 5-mew block.  As for the trash bytes, I haven't had time to put together a pattern search algorithm.  Although since it is just one byte, and there are several variables that could account for trash bytes, it is hard to start.

if I had more information about how trash bytes are normally generated in 3rd gen, including (or not) event process, then that would help tremendously.  Unfortunately it could be something as simple as, what was in memory at that time, before the generation.  Also if 3rd gen has dynamic memory offsets (Emerald had that too, did FR?), that could account for the trash bytes being different too.

[suloku]

FRLG has dynamic.memory too, but is that relevant?

I've been told the 10th annyversary cart actually transfered a program over link cable that modified the save, so would they really implement it to a distribution rom no one is supposed to have? Or am I missing something?

[BlackShark]

@ajxpk you are missing some Mews in your archive. I found 399 unique Mews while your archive only contains 373 files.

From what I've seen only the following 21 PIDs are not present in any of those three Gen 3 save files.

412404F8
4549B8A6
49977527
50A34854
5B8CFFC5
5CDF3657
626C9D1A
7F2B652D
9D658E75
A67053D3
AAF5ECA7
AD7014B0
B2F13D46
B72AB134
BC39CB62
BCB41D1F
C02E0F07
C6B58F2D
C82DB8DD
C87451BB
DE4F39DB

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Deoxyz]

Ah, well I'm glad someone had the guts to finally make it public. I know I really really wanted to release my Mew save many months back for historical preservation, but even after we discussed it a bit in this thread, I still wasn't sure what the right thing to do was. I guess I was just being overly cautious, considering every side of the situation, but now that the save out there's no reason to hold back I suppose. My main concern was that a public save wouldn't get enough public awareness, and the hopeful result of devaluation against scammers wouldn't happen. Though it already seems that the value has been vastly lowered by alleged eBay scammers in the recent months, so the time seems much better now than it was months ago to do this.

I know all the save files appear to be identical so this may be pointless, but in the case some of you researchers want to examine multiple Mystery Mew savefiles, I'll upload mine.

Mystery Mew Savefiles

Edited November 1, 2017 by Deoxyz

[Deoxyz]

Considering the Mystery Mew distribution only lasted for three hours from 12 - 3 on September 30 of 2006, it's probably safe to assume there exists a cartridge out there that had barely any traded away. The problem is that we don't know if any of those never made it back to Nintendo, or if any Nintendo employees happened to hold onto one of those. Perhaps a Nintendo employee may even have a cartridge that was never actually sent out to a ToysRUs store. It's possible.

Besides, I thought the original seed was found and we were able to regenerate the original supposed 420 Mews and had uploaded the data to PokeCheck years back. So I don't think it'd be hard to reconstruct the "original" savefile. Of course, a non-tampered savefile would always be the most ideal to have, but I'd say it's wishful thinking that we'd ever obtain one.

Edited December 17, 2016 by Deoxyz

[Sabresite]

@ajxpk How are you able to reconstruct 7 of them without the original trash bytes?

Also there is still one remaining question.  What was in the player's party before any trades were done.  1, 5, 6 mews? Another pokemon?

[suloku]

5 hours ago, Sabresite said:

@ajxpk How are you able to reconstruct 7 of them without the original trash bytes?

Also there is still one remaining question.  What was in the player's party before any trades were done.  1, 5, 6 mews? Another pokemon?

He noticed the first mews generated from each batch of 5 share the same trash bytes, hence assing that will be the case for the missing ones.

Also yes, I wonder what was in the paety too... I doubt any employee that held the distribution remembers that detail tough.

[HaxAras]

4 minutes ago, ajxpk said:

I have some bad news regarding those Trash Bytes.
I was talking with Sabresite and he was talking with Bond697 in turn.
I don't want to go too much into detail and would like to leave it to them if they want to make a public statement...

It looks like we might not be able to reconstruct the missing trash bytes data for the 14 missing Mystry Mews.
I want to apologize for raising hopes at this point regarding this, I wanted to try my best to make this happen.

However I have a solution which I would like to suggest, how we still might be able to complete this.
Earlier in the Trash Bytes research we figured out that transferring back and forth between Colosseum&XD erases the Trash Bytes of 3rd Gen Event Pokémon.
This means in other words that an 3rd Gen Event Pokémon isn't necessarily illegal if it doesn't has any Trash Bytes.
This could be a solution in case if we are not able to find the missing Mews.

I'm not too sad about this, honestly. It's only 14 out of a few hundred. I'm grateful for what we have and who knows, maybe somebody will donate the missing Mews someday. I'm also grateful you guys are able to even look into this stuff. We're infinitely better off than we would be without people like you guys. You can't really say never with the miracles like  we had with wonder cards.

This might also be un-related. You've seen Insane Nutters gen 3 events save. Well, anything listed on there as being given to me by my friend Big Mike has been sent to Colosseum. So for example: The "Mitsuruni/Jungle Tour" Celebi would no longer have trash bytes. Also, does this mean Agate/Ageto Celebi wouldn't have trash bytes? I know some of them are sent directly to Colosseum. 

[Invader TAK]

45 minutes ago, ajxpk said:

I have some bad news regarding those Trash Bytes.
I was talking with Sabresite and he was talking with Bond697 in turn.
I don't want to go too much into detail and would like to leave it to them if they want to make a public statement...

It looks like we might not be able to reconstruct the missing trash bytes data for the 14 missing Mystry Mews.
I want to apologize for raising hopes at this point regarding this, I wanted to try my best to make this happen.

However I have a solution which I would like to suggest, how we still might be able to complete this.
Earlier in the Trash Bytes research we figured out that transferring back and forth between Colosseum&XD erases the Trash Bytes of 3rd Gen Event Pokémon.
This means in other words that an 3rd Gen Event Pokémon isn't necessarily illegal if it doesn't has any Trash Bytes.
This could be a solution in case if we are not able to find the missing Mews.

Considering the Mew Tutor in XD, I don't see the lack of trash bytes being an issue in the long run. Plus casual event collectors won't even care to begin with.

Edited December 24, 2016 by Invader TAK

[Sabresite]

I looked at the trash bytes for Mew, and I am fairly convinced after speaking with @Bond697 that mystry mew was generated using a distribution ROM.  Most likely the team modified the existing multiboot rom code to generate them in batches of 5.  We know it was a distribution ROM because the trash bytes of the first mew is consistent with other events (like 10 aniv) that came from multiboot roms.  Bond researched the trash bytes which ended up being from lazily copying the pokemon's name with no regard for the data that came after the terminator.  Upon inspecting what that data is, Bond found that some of the distribution code was copied to the stack for an unknown reason.

Our theory is that they made a button that adds 5 mews to the save and hit that button a million times.  IIRC, in that save file the town was blocked by a tree, trapping the character in town.  This leads us to believe that the original cart used to make the save file was most likely a dev cart that had manipulation capabilities.  Also makes sense since they would have to extract the save for manufacturing.

For what it is worth, we have a range of trash bytes by observing the other mews. And of course when you xfer to XD/Colo or Pal Park, PokeTransfer, Bank, etc, trash bytes don't matter anymore anyways.

[Invader TAK]

3 hours ago, Sabresite said:

I looked at the trash bytes for Mew, and I am fairly convinced after speaking with @Bond697 that mystry mew was generated using a distribution ROM.  Most likely the team modified the existing multiboot rom code to generate them in batches of 5.  We know it was a distribution ROM because the trash bytes of the first mew is consistent with other events (like 10 aniv) that came from multiboot roms.  Bond researched the trash bytes which ended up being from lazily copying the pokemon's name with no regard for the data that came after the terminator.  Upon inspecting what that data is, Bond found that some of the distribution code was copied to the stack for an unknown reason.

Our theory is that they made a button that adds 5 mews to the save and hit that button a million times.  IIRC, in that save file the town was blocked by a tree, trapping the character in town.  This leads us to believe that the original cart used to make the save file was most likely a dev cart that had manipulation capabilities.  Also makes sense since they would have to extract the save for manufacturing.

For what it is worth, we have a range of trash bytes by observing the other mews. And of course when you xfer to XD/Colo or Pal Park, PokeTransfer, Bank, etc, trash bytes don't matter anymore anyways.

So basically, we can just reconstruct the missing Mews using the Gen 4 PKMs as a reference then call it a day.