Leaderboard

If anyone remembers PGamers, surprise! https://pgamers.net/ And thanks InsaneNutter for remembering my site! What a long time ago that was

If a loose cart turned up in the wild today, would people be any less sceptical the legitimacy of it with the info not yet in the public eye? If something truly 'new' turned up at some point in the future i'd certainly be more inclined it was real, however it will always be a risk, just like it has been in the past. Thankfully a lot of good research has been done by people on PP.org, so it shouldn't be too much of a challenge to prove if something new legitimate or not as far as archiving the data goes. As you say damned if you do, damned if you don't in some respects.

A happy medium may exist though, for example a Dev cart could be rewritten with something like the rickroll video, or that Skyrim intro meme. It could garner enough attention to let people know it's possible and easy to rewrite these things without giving explicit instructions. @Purin raises a valid point I hadn't considered until recently, there is evidence that actual distribution devices were used with these loose cartridges; and if these were ever to emerge in the wild... well whose to say. It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of thing.

I was going to ignore this thread, however as its been mentioned myself and others have this distribution i'll provide some context for current happenings. The above video was filmed by me and recently leaked (with my blessing) by someone in our event presentation team. Without going in to detail at this moment in time, we decided it would be a benefit for the above video to be "out there" based on information we had. The plan has always been to continue with tradition and release on Christmas day for the Pokemon community to enjoy, or sooner if a devcart with the distribution on turned up on Ebay before then. At the moment more than anything what you should take away is it’s extremely easy to re-write a GBA devcart, I can assure you the Doel Deoxys distribution wasn’t on that devcart when it came in to my posetion. We've speculated the GBA distributions that have been sold on Ebay over the last couple of years were reproductions, however have never been able to prove this until recently thanks to information provided by @Deoxyz before he retired. Things have been happening behind the scenes, so lots will soon be ready to share which will hopefully put an end to any reproductions been passed off as the real thing.

Someone just sent me this link. I was wondering when/if people would find out this exists earlier than anticipated. I guess I'll clarify. We spent most of 2018 raising money to obtain this rom, which we finally did in September. It was a toss up between Doel and Strongest Pokemon Japanese NDS roms to release for the annual Christmas Pokemon rarity release. We opted on releasing Strongest Pokemon in 2018, and saving Doel for 2019, in hopes that it being more valuable may be handy for trade material if some sort of other ultra rare rom came to our attention during 2019. I did give the rom to all those who contributed, and told them not to share or talk about it publicly until it was released in December 2019. Naturally I'm trustworthy of anyone who is willing to help spend as much money as we needed for this thing. There's a lot of information on how this rom works, how it is unique, and how to use it. Just possessing the original rom, and you wouldn't know what the hell you're supposed to do. That's kind of the truth though. Its nature also prevents anyone from being able to sell this as physical reproductions and get away with it. I don't think I'll release any of my notes or private posts explaining the rom details as of yet, that'll probably come out near Christmas if @InsaneNutter and others still plan to hold out until Christmas. It's no longer any of my concern. Perhaps this spoiled you guys' Christmas, but that was the risk. When I retired from Pokemon and video games earlier this year, I had zero solid leads on obtaining anything else in 2019, and as far as I'm aware, there's still nothing on the horizon. Since I'm logged in and on the topic, if anything to look out for, I did also privately provide our event preservation team with bombshell information detailing how these developer carts are EASILY rewritten, as well as a plethora of info an anonymous source passed onto me detailing the history of the infamous scammer who has specialized in creating and reselling these for years. I told them to try to release both pieces of information sometime this summer, I don't know if it has or when it will be, but I'm sure it will be seen relatively soon. Certain aspects of the infodump made me not want to be the one to do it earlier. But rest assured, once it is all out, the dirty market on these reproduction distribution carts will start declining until it is destroyed, just like what happened when we made the Mystery Mew savefiles public in 2016. After years of killing myself to obtain these roms, killing the market was the least I could do when I decided to up and leave. Don't EVER buy GBA distribution carts if your goal is to have "a piece of history", buy an Everdrive and use the publicly available roms instead.

So I wanted to provide a general overview of how Nintendo/GF originally created the savefile that was used on these FireRed carts. It's been said in the past that they filled a completed FireRed savefile with 426 Mews, and then copied the save to hundreds of retail carts to send to Toys R Us stores across the country to use for the distribution. This is true, but what hasn't been said publicly is how the Mews themselves were generated. I decided to share this visual that I had made about a year ago, which helped me better visualize what we had learned from the data about the generation process. Basically what they had was a very similar version of the pokemon distribution software/rom that we all know from 10ANNIV, etc. This software however completely filled the party with Mews, rather than just generating one at a time. (This is likely similar to what we saw with the Shroomish/Barboach test distributions in the German Debug Ruby rom.) They started with only one pokemon remaining in the party (possibly the over-leveled Blastoise seen in the Hall of Fame), then ran the distribution software which generated their first group of 5 Mews. The "Blastoise" was then released, and the first 4 Mews were placed vertically, top to bottom on the bottom right side, in Box 14. The distribution software was ran again, then the next group of 5 Mews were moved to the PC in the same order, with the 5th Mew on top of the previous column. This process was repeated many times until every single PC box was full. working backwards from Box 14 to Box 1. When the final group of 5 were generated, the 3rd Mew from that group was move to Box Slot 1,1 to fill the last hole in the PC. The 5th Mew from the first group generated remained in the party the entire time. And while trivial, for whatever reason, the first two Mews from the third-to-last group were shifted upwards two slots in Box 1, with the 5th Mew from the second-to-last group placed in the middle of the column rather than at the top. The distribution software was ran one final time to generate a Mew to fill the last empty slot in the party. Since this last Mew was generated by itself, there's no relative data to reference, therefore impossible for us to recreate it. The other 5 party Mews were able to be recreated based off data from the Mews generated in their same group of 5. Though what wasn't possible until a few days ago was recreating them to also include their trashbytes. While trivial, trashbytes are important for legality and preservation purposes. That's why the 5 recreated party Mews weren't public until now. Thanks a bunch to @ajxpk for successfully cracking this case. Every time we think we've gotten as far as we ever will regarding Mystery Mew, somehow we get lucky and gain another step forward. Who knows if Mystery Mew #426 will ever surface... It's possible someone who attended the original distribution in 2006 still owns a cartridge with Mew #426, but it's unlikely they'll ever know they have the most important Mew from this event.

The first Pokemon fan site I remember browsing was Pokemon GameBoy Zone in the summer of 2000. I signed up on the forum which is what kept me going back, when you got to certain post count milestones you'd get a gym badge which appeared under your username on the forum. You would get the Boulder Badge after something like 10 posts, then end up with the Earth Badge if you got to something like 1000 posts. I loved that idea of that back then and used to post loads trying to work my way up the ranks and collect all the badges. Web Archive has preserved the site quite well: pgz.pgamers.com (December 2000) and the PGZ Forum (January 2001). Someone on that forum called MewGod had his own site which hosted roms / gameshark codes, I believe that's where I got a very rough translation of Pokemon Gold from a long time before it was released in English. This site is also somewhat preserved: https://web.archive.org/web/20010424065417/geocities.com/mew_king (no roms dont worry!)