Gen 4/5 nickname trash bytes

[James1999]

So I’ve been playing several older games and accumulated quite a lot of legitimate shiny/high IV stuff by rng abuse, all now stored on a platinum rom. I want to move everything to black 2 version via PKHex without actually modifying anything to keep everything as legit as possible. My issue is that having Pokemon in gen v with all caps names really irritates me, so using PKHex I transferred them and then checked, unchecked and checked the nickname box for each one to so they’re all registered as having nicknames and in the correct case (the idea was that they would look as though I’d used the gen 4 name rater although at this point it wouldn’t be practical since they had come from many different save files and so obviously I couldn’t rename them all in the same game). Afterwards I was told that altering the nicknames as I did can alter your trashbytes, thus making your Pokemon illegal. To rectify this I used PKHex to wipe all the trash bytes as I heard the name rater is able to do this anyway by renaming each one to a 10 character name and then back to the desired name.

My question is are my Pokemon now completely legal down to the last byte of data?

Also how does the name rater remove trash bytes? Can he be used to remove every single one in all Pokemon or is it just the trash bytes that are associated with the nickname?

 

Any advice appreciated. Thanks in advance. Apologies for the wall of text.

Edited September 8, 2020 by James1999

[Sabresite]

How can you nickname a transferred pokemon from Gen 4 to 5? The likelihood of tid/sid/name/otg to match indicates hax..

As for the name rater, most likely 10 bytes are always copied since I think names are fixed width. The code up through Gen 5 wasn't standardized. Some parts copied the bytes up to the terminator, some were copied as fixed width... It depended.

[James1999]

Sorry, maybe my explanation wasn’t brilliant. Essentially what I’ve done is RNG the Pokemon mostly in platinum, then drag and drop them into a black 2 save file. At that point I checked, unchecked and checked again the ‘nickname’ box in PKHex to effectively erase the capitalised name and replace it with a normal looking name although the game registers it as a nickname (because nicknaming before poketransfer is the only way to achieve this so it had to be checked). To compensate for the fact that in order to do this legitimately you would have had to use the gen 4 name rater which apparently erases all trash bytes (this is the part I’m not sure is true, but is what I’ve been told), I used PKHex (ctrl + right click on the nickname) to view and then erase to trash bytes on all my transferred Pokemon.

My goal is to have gen 5 pkm files with normal looking names and trash bytes that look legitimate. All these Pokemon files are otherwise completely legitimate. The problem is I can’t nickname all of them in game and then just drag and drop them into black 2 partly because this would take ages and partly because some of them are RNGd events or are from other save files that no longer exist and so I can’t nickname them in game.

What I’m asking is assuming the files are otherwise completely legal, will checking the nickname box in PKHex and then deleting all trash bytes make them illegal?

Again, apologies for the wall of text. I realise I’m being extremely OCD about this but any help is appreciated