How did you start "hacking" pokémon?

[Hide]

Hey there!

This forum is full of awesome people that have contributed to a world of fairness around Pokémon: You have unfolded the secrets of game mechanics, brought events from abroad to our systems and taught us to distinguish between real and fake. It is not a simple task to keep something like this going after so many years, it is admirable. Kudos to all.

So, I have always wondered this: How did you started hacking Pokémon? Did you decide to study informatics after you decided to take this path? How did you become an enthusiast? Why are you doing this nowadays?

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[psy_commando]

Well, since no one else said anything..

I'm still kind of a newbie at reverse engineering, but I had a good 8+ years of experience writing C++ applications when I began reversing PMD2 and messing with the memory of Pokemon:.

I did have to work with external peripheral during my formation, mainly via serial port, and with an intel 8255 control card, which really made figuring some low-level stuff easier.

I began doing some RAM editing with PXD because I was doing some RNG-ing at the time, and I read a couple of articles about messing with the RAM to get the desired seed to happen. Then I just began modifying random things like move effects, evolutions, and etc, in-memory, just for fun. (creating an infinitely duplicating pokemon using nincada's evolution method was pretty hilarious )

Afterwards, I began working on reversing PMD2 literally because one day I felt like it. And it went on, as I began having fun doing it. Its also, in part because I was really annoyed that there were no romhack of PMD2, and it totally deserves a bunch of them.. Also because, playing through the game with my favorite causes a few glitches that I wanted to fix, because its not one of the original "starters" and its missing animations and etc.

There's really nothing very special about my story

[Alpha]

I started out as a dataminer. I wanted info straight from the source, I figured out how to get it on my own. Then I just started poking around and tweaking with stuff to get to where I am today. [abridged version]

[BattleLegend]

i just did somewhat/And a little bit of know how. HeX editing. And tried to find out C++. And that's pretty much all I did. So far in the past

[evandixon]

I started with an Action Replay (which is actually what got me into Pokesav.org, which is what this site used to be). Later, I got a trainer toolkit that let me create codes. Unfortunately, it broke before I could make anything big with it. However, it was a starting point, getting me familiar with hex and hex editing.

Then I got Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time, and since no one made a save editor for it, I took an interest in it. Years later after my programming skills developed more, I tried to make a pkm editor, when I got an epiphany about the checksum for Mystery Dungeon (it's similar to what's used by pkm files, except doubling the size of the checksum, and the words used to calculate it).