[Announcement:] Several New Gen 3 Jirachi Events Found by me!!

[Sabresite]

If I had to guess, all generation 3 Pokemon Center before GCEA were probably GCN distro, especially considering the number of Pikachus obtained. It also correlates with the low/clumped seeds.

[YoshiMoshi]

So I dumped my physical copy of the US bonus disc, and using "GC-Tool" this was the only files I could find. I found the "pokedownloader.tgc" file, as you mention, so I extracted that. I then used "tgctogcm" program. Placed "tgctogcm.exe" into "C:/Users/[my terminal user name]. I placed the "pokedownloader.tgc" file into that same path. I then opened up command prompt and typed in "tgctogcm.exe pokedownloader.tgc [what ever i wanted].gcm". And using the tool it converted "pokedownloader.tgc" to "[what ever i wanted].gcm" within the path. I then opened "[whatever i watned].gcm" file using the "GC-Tool", and I see some of the files that you have mentioned. I see two files which you are calling the multi boot (MB) files titled "client.2003_1112.bin" and "sample0519.bin" and "client.bin". How did you open these in an emulator? I just get a white screen .

On 4/4/2017 at 11:10 AM, suloku said:

I'm not sure what is each file, are the 3 files mb roms? where the 3 inside coloseum bonus disc? I'm a little confused, but anyways I compiled one of FIX94's program for each of those bin files for anyone who'd like to test them out. If they work, maybe they can be swapped with the one in the 10ANNIV rom as a way to use them on emu/gba-gba
@InsaneNutter

jirachi_mb_test.zip

ps: backup saves before testing, also, we don't know which rom these multiboot expect, but I would asume R/S either USA or JAP (if they are leftover prototypes maybe they are still for JAP).

EDIT: It should be possible to put two of those bin files in the 10ANNIV rom, but the "sample0519.bin" is too big. In any case vba won't work with multiboot files on gba-gba apparently (but seems to work on dolphin-vbaM joybus emulation), so if they serve any purpose we could edit US colosseum bonus disk so it sends these multiboot roms instead of the one it is supposed to).

Also, in client.bin there's text for R/S, and in sample0519.bin there's the gamecode for japanese Ruby.

"Also, in client.bin there's text for R/S, and in sample0519.bin there's the gamecode for japanese Ruby." How are you viewing these files exactly to see this code?

Edited January 13, 2018 by YoshiMoshi

[theSLAYER]

41 minutes ago, YoshiMoshi said:

So I dumped my physical copy of the US bonus disc, and using "GC-Tool" this was the only files I could find. I found the "pokedownloader.tgc" file, as you mention, so I extracted that. I then used "tgctogcm" program. Placed "tgctogcm.exe" into "C:/Users/[my terminal user name]. I placed the "pokedownloader.tgc" file into that same path. I then opened up command prompt and typed in "tgctogcm.exe pokedownloader.tgc [what ever i wanted].gcm". And using the tool it converted "pokedownloader.tgc" to "[what ever i wanted].gcm" within the path. I then opened "[whatever i watned].gcm" file using the "GC-Tool", and I see some of the files that you have mentioned. I see two files which you are calling the multi boot (MB) files titled "client.2003_1112.bin" and "sample0519.bin" and "client.bin". How did you open these in an emulator? I just get a white screen .

"Also, in client.bin there's text for R/S, and in sample0519.bin there's the gamecode for japanese Ruby." How are you viewing these files exactly to see this code?

the .tgc won't run in the emulators, without any kind of multiboot editing, apparently.

[YoshiMoshi]

well in case anyone was wondering

i dumped my physical copy of Pokemon channel PAL and tried to open it in GC-Tool and this is what i got, despite it running in dolphin fine

can anyone recommend a similar tool

[InsaneNutter]

5 hours ago, YoshiMoshi said:

well in case anyone was wondering

i dumped my physical copy of Pokemon channel PAL and tried to open it in GC-Tool and this is what i got, despite it running in dolphin fine

can anyone recommend a similar tool

I can open my PAL copy of Pokemon Channel fine in GC-Tool.

It could be a bad dump, check the SHA1 of your dump is: 64dc845f39e971b1c15c0e20622bfc09050b1d75 (I use HashCalc on Windows to do this)

That's what I get dumping my own copy on a Wii with CleanRip, it also matches the SHA1 on Redump.

You can also right click on a game in the Dolphin Emulator > Properties > File System then browse / extract the files you want.

Failing that GC Rebuilder might also be something to try.

Edited January 13, 2018 by InsaneNutter

[Invader TAK]

Have any other distro multiboots been obtained? Still holding out hope for 10 ANIV Celebi and SPACE C Deoxys.

Edited January 14, 2018 by Invader TAK

[Deoxyz]

18 minutes ago, Invader TAK said:

Have any other distro multiboots been obtained? Still holding out hope for 10 ANIV Celebi and SPACE C Deoxys.

Not that I'm aware of, but that figures. Besides, I doubt any collector has the rom for Celebi/Deoxys.

-----

For the record, I did separate the Aura Mew multiboot from the distro rom and rebuilt it with the AGBJ master like done with the Jirachis, and that DID work on real hardware. So if it was questionable, we know for sure the problem has something to do with these multiboots coming from a GameCube. Though, theoretically it can be done since Nintendo did it officially for the European BGFZ cart. I also took the BGFZ multiboot from the US Demo disc(it's identical in both disc 14 and 16), but the differences to the GBA multiboot are too much to solve by trail-and-error. At this point I think we're mostly going to need to rely on the skill of @ajxpk, so hopefully everyone can give him the time and patience. Whatever it is, it's something VBA is "luckily" ignoring.

Edited January 14, 2018 by Deoxyz

[Invader TAK]

1 minute ago, Deoxyz said:

Not that I'm aware of, but that figures. Besides, I doubt any collector has the rom for Celebi/Deoxys.

I remember Sabresite saying he was able to get the Celebi multiboot years ago for his legality checker. But we don't know if he still has it (and if he's able to give it to ajxpk if he still does).

[Sabresite]

2 minutes ago, Invader TAK said:

I remember Sabresite saying he was able to get the Celebi multiboot years ago for his legality checker. But we don't know if he still has it (and if he's able to give it to ajxpk if he still does).

I do not have it unfortunately. I got the Top 10 WAY before it was made public, which we already had known was made from the 10 ANIV.  And I had already known the Celebi/SPACE C was made from that as well.

[Invader TAK]

Just now, Sabresite said:

I do not have it unfortunately. I got the Top 10 WAY before it was made public, which we already had known was made from the 10 ANIV.  And I had already known the Celebi/SPACE C was made from that as well.

Thanks for the clarification.

[YoshiMoshi]

@Bond697 You decompiled the .bin file for meteor jirachi using IDA? So we are able to convert it into C. Does it decompile accurately? We can decompile the european shiny zigzagoon and USA shiny zigzagoon?

Does anyone know of other gamecube games that have been converted into game boy advance, like the shiny zigzagoon?

[Sabresite]

36 minutes ago, YoshiMoshi said:

@Bond697 You decompiled the .bin file for meteor jirachi using IDA? So we are able to convert it into C. Does it decompile accurately? We can decompile the european shiny zigzagoon and USA shiny zigzagoon?

Does anyone know of other gamecube games that have been converted into game boy advance, like the shiny zigzagoon?

It is not about gamecube games.  The slave ROM's are downloaded to the GBA and ran on the GBA.  They are essentially payload data files with respect to the master ROM (whether GBA or GCN).

Also since (most of the time) the files are optimized, decompression to C is very ugly and making useful code would require manual reconstruction (like they do on github with the main pokemon games).  To that the end, the meteor jirachi is almost exactly like wshmkr except for a few of the pokes details.

[Kaphotics]

On 1/10/2018 at 4:17 PM, Deoxyz said:

Japanese Colosseum Bonus disc doesn't have any multiboots, iirc, it just enables an in-game event for Celebi to join your party, iirc.

Here are the .bin files from pokecolo_ex.tgc, in case nobody has the colo jp bonus disc file handy. Not exactly sure how to verify if a multiboot is in the data.

full file contents

There's another tgc (thpPlayer.tgc) which just has thp videos. They take up the majority of the bonus disc contents and play on VLC 

dg = donkey konga

dk = super donkey kong

fz = f-zero

mk = mario kart

ml = mario & luigi rpg

mp = mario party

pb = pokemon box

[Deoxyz]

@Kaphotics I just search the first few lines of a GBA header to see if one turns up. "colbtl.bin" and "pkjb_test.bin" both turn up GBA headers. I merged them with the AGBJ master, but neither sends a Celebi/Pikachu multiboot. The first bin didn't send anything, but the second one gave this:

Whatever that translates too.

At least that confirms what ajxpk said about everything is generated on the GCN, regardless whether it then directly gets transferred to the GBA. Same case for Channel Jirachi.

Edited January 18, 2018 by Deoxyz

[ad2099]

I already did all those tests including the fragments "test" but none works, something curious is that the games of fr / LG and E have the file of the berry Fix very similar to the gc disk and in turn you can add any of the 2 Jirachi compatible with the American and European versions and distributed without problems in physical or emulatorI already did all those tests including the fragments "test" but none works, something curious is that the games of fr / LG and E have the file of the berry Fix very similar to the gc disk and in turn you can add any of the 2 Jirachi compatible with the American and European versions and distributed without problems in physical or emulator

[InsaneNutter]

6 hours ago, Deoxyz said:

Whatever that translates too.

Roughly based on Google it says:

"To download (unknown word, the pokemon name maybe?)

Please press the A button to start"

[theSLAYER]

36 minutes ago, InsaneNutter said:

Roughly based on Google it says:

"To download (unknown word, the pokemon name maybe?)

Please press the A button to start"

"ダウンロードに 成功 しょました"
Download Successful

"A ボタンを押してリセットて下さい"
Press down the A button to reset.

[YoshiMoshi]

paint_help.bin in the European Jirachi does appear to be a multiboot, I just can't figure out what it does, this is all that I got indefinitely

the pinball_E.bin, i scanned the code and saw "programmed by bubby", I googled that and saw that it was part of pkemon pinball mini. I got similar results to the picture above. So it appears pokemon channel PAL has pokemon mini ROMs on it. And I got similar results with nurie.bin, mtv.bin. pokechan.bin, I actually got the "Nintendo" logo to come up in English characters, but that was it.

 

[Invader TAK]

1 hour ago, YoshiMoshi said:

So it appears pokemon channel PAL has pokemon mini ROMs on it

I'm not surprised. The other versions should have them as well.

[Guest]

Yes, Pokémon Channel has a Pokémon mini emulator and you can actually play some of the games inside the game.

[InsaneNutter]

So i've managed to replace the battery in my JPN Ruby cartridge and can now confirm if you patch the JPN Interactive Multi-Game Demo Disc from January 2004 to access the JPN Berry Glitch Shiny Zigzagoon distribution it does work on real hardware:

(This is a very quick video, so excuse the quality and my pronouncing of Zigzagoon)

After replacing the battery in the cartridge I did have to start a new game for the distribution to work, the older save game is one which was on the cartridge when I purchased it. I'm not sure why the distribution didn't work with that, however i've distributed myself four Zigzagoon on a new save without issue.

[Sabresite]

4 hours ago, InsaneNutter said:

So i've managed to replace the battery in my JPN Ruby cartridge and can now confirm if you patch the JPN Interactive Multi-Game Demo Disc from January 2004 to access the JPN Berry Glitch Shiny Zigzagoon distribution it does work on real hardware:

(This is a very quick video, so excuse the quality and my pronouncing of Zigzagoon)

After replacing the battery in the cartridge I did have to start a new game for the distribution to work, the older save game is one which was on the cartridge when I purchased it. I'm not sure why the distribution didn't work with that, however i've distributed myself four Zigzagoon on a new save without issue.

I didn't realize that was a thing. I thought you turn it on, it communicates, "downloads" a game and executes.  I didn't realize the pokemon game itself could download/execute code.

[InsaneNutter]

I've been messing about with the demo disc a bit more.

The menu system for the disc is a webpage, looking at the index.html we can see it has code for another button at the bottom for the Pokemon distribution, this is disabled by removing the hyperlink and pointing the image to a blank png file called spc.png

index.html

<tr> 
<td><img name="pokemonrs2" src="images/spc.png" width="238" height="61" border="0"></td>
<td><img src="images/spc.png" width="1" height="61" border="0"></td>
</tr>

So as the images for what would be the Pokemon distribution menu item exist on disc, we can just edit them back in, along with the hyperlink to the page which launches the distribution which still also exists on the disc:

<tr> 
<td><a href="pokemonrs/pokemonrs_p.html" onMouseOut="MM_swapImgRestore();"  onMouseOver="MM_swapImage('pokemonrs2','','images/pokemonrs2_f2.png',1);" ><img name="pokemonrs2" src="images/pokemonrs2.png" width="238" height="61" border="0"></a></td>
<td><img src="images/spc.png" width="1" height="61" border="0"></td>
</tr>

End result, the main menu with the hidden distribution unlocked.

A menu with the distribution option unlocked also exists on the disc as index2.html

This looks exactly the same as my edited menu above, however it does also have some additional meta tags.

For example it shows we can define keys on the GameCube controller to open a specific html file:

<!-- button settings -->
	<meta name="keyY" content="index2.html">

If this had been present on the main index.html I would have speculated it could be a hidden way of unlocking the distribution, however its not. So i'm unsure why it's present in the unused index2.html, as all it does is re-load the menu you are already on.

It would be pretty easy to translate the disc menu system too if we wanted to, although pointless given all the video content and demos are Japanese.

Below is a simple image edit:

However if we could one day build custom TGC's that distribute other Pokemon, it would be easy to create a nice menu system to launch each distribution from one GameCube disc.

The main problem with that is when editing GameCube ISO's you can only replace files with other files which are the same size or smaller. That could be worked around by totally extracting the ISO then rebuilding it with GameCube Rebuilder. However i've not been able to re-build a working ISO.

This is also the reason i've not been able to modify the TGC which distributes the Zigzagoon, as the TGC has to be converted to an ISO before we can extract the contents or modify it. (Unless anyone knows of any tools that can work with TGC's directly?) The problem then is something like the Jirachi distribution ajxpk got working on an emulator is too large to inject in to our ISO, so again we need to re build the ISO which breaks it.

You can now see how easy it is to modify the demo disc, all you need is GC-Tool and your favorite text and image editor.

If nothing else you can now patch the demo disc to enable the distribution, using all assets from Nintendo so the patched disc is a legit as possible.

[Sabresite]

2 hours ago, InsaneNutter said:

I've been messing about with the demo disc a bit more.

The menu system for the disc is a webpage, looking at the index.html we can see it has code for another button at the bottom for the Pokemon distribution, this is disabled by removing the hyperlink and pointing the image to a blank png file called spc.png

index.html

<tr> 
<td><img name="pokemonrs2" src="images/spc.png" width="238" height="61" border="0"></td>
<td><img src="images/spc.png" width="1" height="61" border="0"></td>
</tr>

So as the images for what would be the Pokemon distribution menu item exist on disc, we can just edit them back in, along with the hyperlink to the page which launches the distribution which still also exists on the disc:

<tr> 
<td><a href="pokemonrs/pokemonrs_p.html" onMouseOut="MM_swapImgRestore();"  onMouseOver="MM_swapImage('pokemonrs2','','images/pokemonrs2_f2.png',1);" ><img name="pokemonrs2" src="images/pokemonrs2.png" width="238" height="61" border="0"></a></td>
<td><img src="images/spc.png" width="1" height="61" border="0"></td>
</tr>

End result, the main menu with the hidden distribution unlocked.

A menu with the distribution option unlocked also exists on the disc as index2.html

This looks exactly the same as my edited menu above, however it does also have some additional meta tags.

For example it shows we can define keys on the GameCube controller to open a specific html file:

<!-- button settings -->
	<meta name="keyY" content="index2.html">

If this had been present on the main index.html I would have speculated it could be a hidden way of unlocking the distribution, however its not. So i'm unsure why it's present in the unused index2.html, as all it does is re-load the menu you are already on.

It would be pretty easy to translate the disc menu system too if we wanted to, although pointless given all the video content and demos are Japanese.

Below is a simple image edit:

However if we could one day build custom TGC's that distribute other Pokemon, it would be easy to create a nice menu system to launch each distribution from one GameCube disc.

The main problem with that is when editing GameCube ISO's you can only replace files with other files which are the same size or smaller. That could be worked around by totally extracting the ISO then rebuilding it with GameCube Rebuilder. However i've not been able to re-build a working ISO.

This is also the reason i've not been able to modify the TGC which distributes the Zigzagoon, as the TGC has to be converted to an ISO before we can extract the contents or modify it. (Unless anyone knows of any tools that can work with TGC's directly?) The problem then is something like the Jirachi distribution ajxpk got working on an emulator is too large to inject in to our ISO, so again we need to re build the ISO which breaks it.

You can now see how easy it is to modify the demo disc, all you need is GC-Tool and your favorite text and image editor.

If nothing else you can now patch the demo disc to enable the distribution, using all assets from Nintendo so the patched disc is a legit as possible.

Index2 was the dev copy and the controller key was used to test render changes (picture changes, HTML edits, etc) without having to reboot the unit.

[YoshiMoshi]

Are there other instances of ROMs working perfectly fine on an emulator but not working on real hardware? Maybe instead of trying to compare the ROMs to the European shiny zigzagoon ROM to determine how the gamecube file was converted to a GBA ROM, we should do research on the differences between the emulator and the actual hardware.

In what little research I've done, I could not find other instances of ROMs not working on real hardware but working on an emulator. Also is there a way to decompile the GBA ROMs to the raw code used to create the ROM?

Also can you guys enlighten me, what program are you guys using to view the individual files on the DS distribution ROMs?

Edited February 18, 2018 by YoshiMoshi