What happened to the PCNY distribution software?

[theblokeman]

so if you don't already know, back in 2020 retroali and hard4games discovered the PCNY "gotta catch em all" distribution machine. not the actual machine, but the necessary internals. I was waiting patiently for the software and memory card data to drop so I could start experimenting with it, but I started to get impatient and completely forgot about the topic. it's now 2023, 3 years after the discovery and I'm starting to look into the GameCube spinoff distributions. I suddenly remembered that the PCNY machine existed and thought "it's 2023! surely by now someone has uploaded dumps of the software right?" yeah I think you can see where this is going. no one, even 3 years later, have dumped the software... I know the Pokémon from the discovered distributions have been transferred to actual save files and backed up, but in most cases, no one is gonna have the ability to get these Pokémon onto their own cartridge. so I bring this back up in the hopes that someone actually cares to look into this machine and back it up. both the disks for gen 2 and 3 and the memory card files (aka the distributions and the access key) and if somehow we can make that a reality, we can see what makes the software tick when the card reader is inserted. anyway, just wanted to rant about something I'm kind of surprised and upset about (like a lot of people online) but tbh I don't think many people would care anyway so it's kind of just a long winded suggestion. also here's the video I'm talking about

[theSLAYER]

As far as I know, they’ve not yet been able to make it compatible with any kind of emulator. The issue disc requiring the NR reader I think. They’ve already tried redeem several redemptions and shared the mons online:

 

 

[theblokeman]

1 hour ago, theSLAYER said:

As far as I know, they’ve not yet been able to make it compatible with any kind of emulator. The issue disc requiring the NR reader I think. They’ve already tried redeem several redemptions and shared the mons online:

 

so in theory, if they homebrewed an NR reader they could possibly extract the files off the disk using a sd card memory card adaptor?

[theSLAYER]

1 hour ago, theblokeman said:

so in theory, if they homebrewed an NR reader they could possibly extract the files off the disk using a sd card memory card adaptor?

Extraction is one matter, getting it to run is another.

[theblokeman]

2 minutes ago, theSLAYER said:

Extraction is one matter, getting it to run is another.

oh... well that makes more sense

[InsaneNutter]

Both the Pokemon Distribution Machine Gen II / Gen III discs are dumped, along with the memory cards. So from a data preservation point of view that data is safe and backed up which I'm pleased about.

The original hardware went on to someone at Project Pokemon interested in getting this working for all to enjoy, so it's great that ended up in the best possible place for the Pokemon community to hopefully one day be able to use these distributions in some way.

The data not been out there for anyone to freely tinker with years later is not an ideal situation I agree, hopefully that is something which can be changed.

Deoxys explained the situation on emulation and what works / doesn't in far more detail here: https://digiex.net/threads/pokemon-gen-2-3-pcny-distribution-machine-save-downloads.15872/#post-82340 - worth reading if you haven't already.

Edited February 16, 2023 by InsaneNutter