Pokemon Ranch - Event and Club Look See

[jojo12100]

Hi,

I'm opening this thread in order to see if we know how to reproduce the event in-game that allowed you to get the Metagross/Flygon/Meowth/Octillery/Slacking trades?

 

Plus, I was looking at the Club Look-and-See and I was asking myself if their ranches contain only sprites of their Pokemon or if there are datas inside?

As I know Dolphin emulation for that game is not possible because of the lack of compatibility with the DS so it can be complicated to check.

But who knows with a real save imported into Dolphin and RAM opened in Hxd ???

 

[jojo12100]

Speaking about the Japanese Event Trade

I'm quoting @Blackshark :

"There are multiple .app files inside. But only 00000004.app is interesting, that's where the game code is located. Unfortunately the files are compressed (.ash) and packed into archives (.arc) and the only tool I found to decompress these files doesn't work for all files.
If you are looking for Metagross and the others I fear those where distributed like Mystery Gifts and probably lost for ever if nobody made a backup back then. "

 

Well I have 2 theories:

-First the Japanese Platinum update allows you to return to previous Look-See Ranchs, does it work too with Event Ranches?

-Second we should check at the ROM which contains the initial trades, maybe the event ones are just unlocked during the Japanese Platinum update?

 

So hurry, before the Wii shutdown, if someone can export a ROM and a save with the Japanese update (and if possible with one of the event ranches) it can help us a lot.

Of course if there is anyone with a good Wii hacking knoweldge it'll help us too.

[BlackShark]

The most interesting file is probably mii.arc.ash, that's where I think all the NPC data (Miis) is stored. So if the trades are really inside the game, there should be evidence in this file. It is actually bigger in the Japanese version than in the European version. Though this could be just because the Platinum update added 3 additional Miis to the game. Another interesting file is rodata.arc.ash, which is only in the Japanese version. But just like the other file this one could just be part of the Platinum update.
Those ash files are compressed and should be extractable with ASH Extractor (which seems to be the only tool available to handle ash files), but while it works well for some ash files it fails to decompress these two files. So the content remains a mystery.

[PMArkive]

On 1/3/2019 at 9:54 PM, BlackShark said:

The most interesting file is probably mii.arc.ash, that's where I think all the NPC data (Miis) is stored. So if the trades are really inside the game, there should be evidence in this file. It is actually bigger in the Japanese version than in the European version. Though this could be just because the Platinum update added 3 additional Miis to the game. Another interesting file is rodata.arc.ash, which is only in the Japanese version. But just like the other file this one could just be part of the Platinum update.
Those ash files are compressed and should be extractable with ASH Extractor (which seems to be the only tool available to handle ash files), but while it works well for some ash files it fails to decompress these two files. So the content remains a mystery.

ASH Extractor will usually crash when attempting to extract mii.arc.ash, but can sometimes extract it successfully. I haven't tested rodata.arc.ash yet but I imagine it will be the same thing.

edit: Possibly a heap corruption in ASH Extractor, but we could try requesting the source code from crediar so we can fix it. Looks like someone has asked before ( https://wiibrew.org/wiki/User_talk:Crediar ) so might ask that person too

the file extracted from mii.arc.ash appears to be a Wii U8 file, but attempting to use ARCTool.py or whatever misc tools fail to extract it due to large file sizes being detected. Maybe because of the endianness needing to be swapped.

edit2: I sent an email to the person that asked crediar before for the source of ASH Extractor and they said they weren't able to reach crediar when they asked. I haven't tried too much to get ahold of crediar tbh. Anyway, the crash for ASH Extractor seems to be caused by an out-of-bounds read. I think the only reason I was able to extract a file from mii.arc.ash is because Wine on Linux had placed memory some valid memory right before the buffer and so it read some random data. That would also explain why extracting files from it (a U8 file) failed... because its contents were random data. I tossed ASH.exe into IDA and decompiled the main function and changed a little bit so it can compile and to find out where it crashes but I don't have a fix for it... yet... You can find it here.

edit3: Was able to get the source from crediar and it crashes here. I also found that wiiqt, wii-system-menu-player, and quickbms had code apparently based off of crediar's disassembly too and hoped their changes/versions could decompress mii.arc.ash but they crash nonetheless.

Edited February 12, 2019 by PMArkive
update 3...

[Brittany]

Not sure if this helps or not, but I do have a hacked wii. I can import saves, and get around the region lock.

I also have Japanese cartridges of Diamond and Soul Silver. If you can find any saves with the mystery events in it, I can see if it will communicate with the game. (Not sure if it'll get pissy that the wii isn't Japanese though.) I'll have to test it when I have free time.

[YoshiMoshi]

What Wii shutdown?

[Brittany]

2 hours ago, YoshiMoshi said:

What Wii shutdown?

The eShop will be forever shut down on January 30, 2019. You had until March 26, 2018 to add more wii points if you wanted to buy games. So unless you have points on the wii right now, you can't buy any games.

[jojo12100]

My expectations were real, you can get the other Pokemon according to @BlackShark:

"Every Pokemon on the Ranch, even those that you can't transfer over, has almost full pk4 data in the save file. Those that will never see any Gen 4 game have a blank OT and other missing data while those that you could obtain from Hayley have their full valid data stored.

You can find them starting at offset 0x26C8."

 

Don't know if it applies to Club Look-See or if they are in the ROM instead but that's a first good news.

Now all we have to find is a Japanese save with the event trades ^^

 

[BlackShark]

Maybe I should have searched before, haha, @suloku did great research on Ranch save files! Nothing about the event trades but still interesting.