Pokemon Ranger Protoype and Azure Flute

[theSLAYER]

3 minutes ago, Deoxyz said:

FTR, it turns out you don't even need to change decchi.bin to decchi.gba to use it, at least with VBA and DeSmuME.

I guess the emulator just tries to load it.
 

36 minutes ago, Ammako said:

I made three custom distro roms to give myself Wondercards "legitimately" through Mystery Gift.

I just did it too.

It's way too easy to swap out the wonder cards.

[Deoxyz]

Quote

Opening the sav ( or the decchi ?) with pokesav for jap D/P it showed that there was an infernape there. But when I got the gift from delivery guy it would just give azure flute

^This is the Infernape thing I was told about. It may have something to do with PokeSav, though I haven't tried it yet. I haven't had PokeSav on my computer since 2010.

Though, I guess none of these oddities can really be explained unless we figure out how the Manaphy Egg wondercard is showing up in the first place.

[Guest]

I'm pretty sure the Manaphy card is a red herring.

My best guess: they previously had that card in their list, and tossed it in-game, then either 1: save editor error reactivated it or 2: they didn't know it wasn't active and thought it came from the distro.

The only information we have about it is "I can't download EGB in my Japanese Pearl but I have instead a Manaphy Egg with a Pichu, Cacturne and the 4th gen cat. Why?"

Which isn't very much to say the least and doesn't really prove it would have come from the distro.

[theSLAYER]

17 minutes ago, Ammako said:

I'm pretty sure the Manaphy card is a red herring.

My best guess: they previously had that card in their list, and tossed it in-game, then either 1: save editor error reactivated it or 2: they didn't know it wasn't active and thought it came from the distro.

The only information we have about it is "I can't download EGB in my Japanese Pearl but I have instead a Manaphy Egg with a Pichu, Cacturne and the 4th gen cat. Why?"

Which isn't very much to say the least and doesn't really prove it would have come from the distro.

Yeah I feel the manaphy card is a red herring too.

Heck, there really is only one wonder card, and changing it changes what you receive:
 

Gah, should have used a screen recorder.
stupid 240p resolution.

[Guest]

Do we know if the slot-2 distribution method exists -at all- in the non-Japanese versions, anyway?

(240p is fine for this :p) I find it deliciously ironic that you picked the GAMESTP Celebi Wondercard for this.

[theSLAYER]

18 minutes ago, Ammako said:

Do we know if the slot-2 distribution method exists -at all- in the non-Japanese versions, anyway?

(240p is fine for this :p) I find it deliciously ironic that you picked the GAMESTP Celebi Wondercard for this.

That was the very purpose for it

I was thinking the restriction is either implemented by:
The Japanese Gen4 games searching for friend function also checks GBA slot for a particular game ID to work with or
there's a flag that represents language lock.
 

edit:
I'll say tearing apart a NDS rom and see how the NDS rom recognizes the GBA cart will help bigly.

[Guest]

At least I couldn't find the Japanese game IDs within dechhi.bin (unlikely they'd have used that method anyway, since it distributes to all Japanese games indiscriminately.)

It doesn't seem to use the same language GGIDs that the slot-1 distros used either, so we don't get to do this easily, heh. (Japanese GGID: 45 03 00 00, in the slot-1 distros.)

[BlackShark]

The Mystery Gift checks for game serial. In the Japanese Pearl you can find a list at 0x30F7D8 and only those serials will be accepted.

B5BJ
B5CJ
B5CJ
B5EJ
B5FJ
B5GJ
B5HJ
B5IJ
B5JJ
B5KJ
B5LJ
B5MJ
B5PJ
B5QJ
B5RJ
B5SJ
B5TJ
B5UJ
B5VJ
B5WJ

Even though the non-Japanese versions have such a list as well the cart won't be accepted even if the serial matches. There must be more than just that.

[theSLAYER]

6 minutes ago, BlackShark said:

The Mystery Gift checks for game serial. In the Japanese Pearl you can find a list at 0x30F7D8 and only those serials will be accepted.

B5BJ
B5CJ
B5CJ
B5EJ
B5FJ
B5GJ
B5HJ
B5IJ
B5JJ
B5KJ
B5LJ
B5MJ
B5PJ
B5QJ
B5RJ
B5SJ
B5TJ
B5UJ
B5VJ
B5WJ

Even though the non-Japanese versions have such a list as well the cart won't be accepted even if the serial matches. There must be more than just that.

Were there any Events for Gen IV done via slot-2, internationally?

So far a quick search shows this, but it's japanese:
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:Distribution_cartridge_Slot_2.jpg

 

edit:
Everything here seems japanese:

 

[BlackShark]

1 minute ago, theSLAYER said:

Were there any Events for Gen IV done via slot-2, internationally?

So far a quick search shows this, but it's japanese:
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:Distribution_cartridge_Slot_2.jpg

As far as I know that methode was only used in Japan and Korea, but I'm not sure.

[Guest]

Offset may change depending on version, for example for my Pearl v1.6 the list is at 30F9D8. But it likely won't really be too far off from that regardless (not that it matters all that much for us right now, anyway.)

0x2FF6DC in English Diamond v1.5, if anyone feels like messing with that.

There is a possibility that slot-2 distribution was completely left out of the non-JP/KR versions, but the way I see it, it would have been dumb to disable it, because even if they didn't have plans for it, they'd have been SOL if they later changed their minds and wanted to make slot-2 events for the West, lol. But eh this doesn't really prove anything, just means I think that GF wasn't the smartest if they disabled it.

[theSLAYER]

@BlackShark @Ammako

There was some preview on google that seems to mention that a Crobat was distributed via slot-2,
but it looks like I belonged to Pokemon Secure and I'm unable to access the link.

If so, the event in question is likely this: 068 Worlds 2010 Crobat ENG [PPorg].pcd

 

Given the Crobat can be received via Slot 2, that would mean that Slot 2 receiving isn't disabled internationally.

Perhaps the decchi is language locked, or there's a different list for game id (one actual, one leftover)

[Guest]

I was under the impression that the VGC events would have been slot-2, that was only my assumption of how the event worked though so it wasn't really based on anything.

Changing the game code to B5BE in a hex editor was one of the things I had tried actually, but yeah as we know that didn't work.

[theSLAYER]

Maybe it's a double layercheck.

The game checks for the serial code, and make sure it's of the correct language?

[Guest]

How would it be able to tell the language aside from the serial code, though?

[theSLAYER]

1 minute ago, Ammako said:

How would it be able to tell the language aside from the serial code, though?

The games code may be able to check:
If Gba serial code is in reference list then

If value at offset = my language then
'call gba event
else
  'do wireless friend searching
end if

Else
'call wireless friend searching
end if

[Guest]

I'd like to bring up pokepatch though. This is something that was used back in the days to make GBA connection work with the 3in1.

It might provide some insight on how it works. Its author seems to still visit GBAtemp so it might be worth asking about it, if they still remember after all this time haha (cause I wasn't able to find source code for it and information about it is pretty scarce nowadays, I just get Pokémon GO results.)

Also found this in case this might be of help:

If the game reads slot-2 for events in a similar way than it does for Gen. III carts then this could potentially have some missing pieces of a puzzle. However if this ends up requiring rom edits to the Gen. IV games themselves it's probably not worth it anymore imo.

[theSLAYER]

24 minutes ago, Ammako said:

I'd like to bring up pokepatch though. This is something that was used back in the days to make GBA connection work with the 3in1.

It might provide some insight on how it works. Its author seems to still visit GBAtemp so it might be worth asking about it, if they still remember after all this time haha (cause I wasn't able to find source code for it and information about it is pretty scarce nowadays, I just get Pokémon GO results.)

now that you brought pokepatch up,

it's plausible it's using the same language locking as Pal Park.
Was that ever understood?

Is it possible to break open the game and find which offset it's reading, it'll likely make things easier.

[BlackShark]

I found that the whole part from 0xC0 - 0xFFFFF is just unneeded, probably the image which is shown when booted from the GBA and/or junk. If you zero this area the distribution still works.

So there are only 336 Bytes that could have something to do with the region locking, 0x100000 - 0x10014F.

Edited January 14, 2017 by BlackShark
missed a zero in offset, sorry

[Guest]

my bad, delete this

Edited January 14, 2017 by Guest

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, BlackShark said:

I found that the whole part from 0xC0 - 0xFFFFF is just unneeded, probably the image which is shown when booted from the GBA and/or junk. If you zero this area the distribution still works.

So there are only 336 Bytes that could have something to do with the region locking, 0x10000 - 0x1014F.

That is, if the remaining piece of the puzzle is within decchi.bin, and not within the Gen. IV games themselves.

[theSLAYER]

17 minutes ago, Ammako said:

That is, if the remaining piece of the puzzle is within decchi.bin, and not within the Gen. IV games themselves.

Well its a two prong type of thing
1. gen 4 games look for language byte
2. Decchi.bin has language byte

So solving either side may fix the situation.

Also, given it may have the same location as gba games, we could find offsets from existing documentation, if it exists.

25 minutes ago, BlackShark said:

I found that the whole part from 0xC0 - 0xFFFFF is just unneeded, probably the image which is shown when booted from the GBA and/or junk. If you zero this area the distribution still works.

So there are only 336 Bytes that could have something to do with the region locking, 0x10000 - 0x1014F.

are you missing a 0? the only thing there are 0xE0.
lots of them.

It's also not 0x100000 - 0x10014F range,
as those values are mirrored in the Azure Sea Chart PCD.
(I think it was 0x104 - 0x153 on the PCD)

[Guest]

Well see, I don't think it's all about the game codes, and I don't know how else they could check for language.

The Gen. IV rom already has a list of game codes similar to the one that was in the Japanese versions, however editing the game code on decchi.bin doesn't work (and editing the game code list on the Gen. IV rom doesn't work either.)

There is a list of game codes for the Gen. III games in rom, it contains game codes for every language of the games. Not sure what they use the other game codes for, maybe they just put all the game codes in to make it easier for them and simply reference to a different one for different languages.

[theSLAYER]

5 minutes ago, Ammako said:

There is a list of game codes for the Gen. III games in rom, it contains game codes for every language of the games. Not sure what they use the other game codes for, maybe they just put all the game codes in to make it easier for them and simply reference to a different one for different languages.

While I don't think it's game code, I think it does check against a byte or offset.

It'll make sense to have all game codes; I remember dongle method not being language locked (only Pal park was language locked)

[Halfshadow]

Really? Mine don't work too...