InsaneNutter

8 hours ago, jojo12100 said:

This is what they begin to do with Friend Safari in XY but I can't tell if it was a success or not. I mean I found it cool but frustrating in the same time. And Pokemon Ranger 3 coop mission disguted me to buy it, especially because only one player can receive the Deoxys.

I wasn't really thinking like the friend safari, although now you mention it I did really enjoy the friend safari feature. I added loads of random people from Reddit to get various Pokemon I wanted in there. Even leaving my 3DS online for hours in game just so someone in a different time zone could get my 3rd Pokemon. That was a great help when creating my living Pokedex.

For this I was thinking more like Pokemon Go, a massive open world which could be randomly generated or based on real world locations with map data, I guess kinda like an MMORPG. So everything is randomly generated, you might get common Pokemon, however you might also get some rare Pokemon which would be difficult to obtain otherwise, however it would never be the same for more than a couple of hours. I wouldn't want the whole game to be like this, however I just think it would be a nice additional "multiplayer" feature taking what makes Pokemon Go unique and applying it to the traditional games.

8 hours ago, jojo12100 said:

That is a storage and conversion problem unfortunately.

It doesn't have to be though is what i'm saying. In Gen 6 and 7 the data is there, however moving from Gen 6 to Gen 7 for example no longer shows the date this Pokemon was captured, just what region it came from. I dont see why it can't retain the route and date for something caught in Gen 7, when eventually transferring it to Gen 8 for example.

New features:

1. An open world section of the game, where you can explore randomly generated areas with other players and have the chance to catch rare Pokemon, or maybe Pokemon with unique moves, such as a Pikachu with Surf or Fly for example. Maybe in this you can team up with other players to capture a legendary. I'm thinking take the social aspects from Pokemon Go and make that work with a traditional Pokemon game. This doesn't even have to be in the main story section of the game, however could be an unlocked safari multiplayer type feature post game.
2. Improving the communication within the game would be nice, this seems to have regressed in Gen 7 to the point where you can't even type your own message when putting a Pokemon on the GTS. We should be able to voice chat in game at this point, that would be essential for the above open world idea.
3. Retaining more of the information for Pokemon imported from previous generations, for example the date / route it was caught, not just replacing it with something generic based on the game it came from.

Some returning features i'd like:

1. National Pokedex - as someone who enjoys the collecting aspect of the game the most I really don't like how it's absent from all Gen 7 games.
2. PSS - I did enjoy having this up as i'm randomly playing the game, it gave the feeling that your playing with other people as you progress though the story.
3. DexNav - I liked this, from a collecting point of view this was extremely useful.

Wishes:

1. Don't milk the franchise, by that I mean don't release Gen 8, then release the same game again a year later, slightly changed... (looking at you Ultra Sun and Moon). The Switch is a modern console, an expansion pack released at a later date with new regions to explore might actually work well for a Pokemon game if done right.
2. Don't go overboard with all the cut scenes, I felt this was too much in the Gen 7 games.

Are you quite far from a Pokemon Center @argus1963 @Purin ?

@St. GIGA I can confirm both Meteor and Negaiboshi work on real hardware, the Negaiboshi distributes fine to a JPN copy of Pokemon Ruby and the Meteor distributes fine to an English copy of Pokemon Ruby. The ISO's load perfectly fine on more recent versions of Nintendont too.

It appears my problem was related to the Micro SD to SD Card adapter I was using (this has worked fine in my Wii for years!) the Wii ended up not reading the Micro SD card in the adapter, however my PC would read the Micro SD card fine. After Switching to a different Micro SD to SD adapter everything then worked fine.

After all that it appears I did produce a working ISO this morning too, I feel like I wasted so much time trying to figure out why it wasn't working now lol. Oh well, i'm glad this is finally working!  

2 hours ago, St. GIGA said:

I injected Meteor into the converted GCM of Wishmaker, and fixed it, before running it in Nintendon't. I used GCRebuilder, GCIsoTool, and TGCtoGCM

So the ISO you uploaded is that supposed to run as it is on Nintendont? I get the same error with your ISO as I do with my own on Nintendont.

If it does work on Nintendont for you what is the build date of the version of Nintendont you have?

I was under the impression the ISO had to be converted back to a TGC then injected back in to the demo disc to work on real hardware.

@Lycp01 Great work! I've tried multiple times to get this working in the past, however never managed to re-build a working iso.

So thank you for the detailed explanation. It is possible you could add some screenshots of each stage of the process so I can try and better understand where i'm going wrong? I've attempted both your Method 1/2-A(Old) and Method 1/2-B(New) and still not been able to build a working ISO.

For my latest attempt i've followed your Method 1/2-B(New) then the Actual machine section, however I can't produce an ISO that will actually load with Nintendont.

So its been a good 6 months since I really posted anything related to Pokemon Go here.

How are people doing if you are still playing?

I'm still playing, although the game had got a bit stale before Gen 3 finally dropped. It got to the point where I had obtained every Pokemon possible in Gen 2 apart from some raid only Pokemon I had missed. So it started walking Pokemon for candy which evolved again in Gen 4.

Gen 3 over Christmas was pretty interesting, especially with the Gen 3 starters spawning quite frequently. I had to play strategically and get 1000/1000 items in my bag, those been as many Pokeballs as possible and make them last over the Christmas holidays. Having only one Pokestop makes playing locally without many items a no go. Thankfully these lasted me quite well and I was able to re stock when visiting some family over Christmas as they had a lot of local Pokestops. So I just want out for 30 mins and stocked up on items which lasted me until the new year.

Normally I have no issues as I worked near many Pokestops so I just stock up before work if i'm early or after work if i feel like playing some Pokemon before I go home.

Dratini Community Day:

I went to the largest park in my town yesterday for the Dratini Pokemon Community Day event. It was a really good turnout with easily 100+ people there, which was surprising as it was so cold (1-2 degrees celsius), especially when the wind picked up.

Most people were there with there own groups of friends, myself included. Younger children were also there with their parents, who were playing the game with them which I thought was nice. However people would randomly see you were playing Pokemon and stop and chat for a few minutes. Everyone seemed to come together for the Rayquaza raid which spawned. So far it seems everyone who did that raid got an Ex raid pass for the same time in two weeks. So i'm hoping I can get back and get my first Mewtwo then.

I think in total I managed to catch around 120 Dratini over the space of the 3 hour event. In addition to a Shiny Swablu, 2x Bagons, a Beldum and the Rayquaza from the raid. 2x of my Dratini were also shiny, my cousin who was there managed to catch 11x Shiny Dratini! which was just crazy. He got 3x of them in a row too!

All in all I think the special community events are a good idea, it seems to re-create the effect of when the game first launched and everyone was out playing the game.

You might want to look in to setting up a Windows Virtual Machine on your Mac, its handy for easily using a lot of more obscure tools that are Windows only.

Virtual Box is free, however you would have to buy a Windows licence. Here in the UK it's around £30 on Amazon for an OEM Windows 10 licence.

Obviously its a bit of effort to go to just to use these two tools, however you might find this useful in the future for other stuff too.

As someone who uses both Windows and OSX day to day I can tell you its been useful to have easy access to a Windows install on OSX.

I've restored @RupeeClock's Pokemon Yellow save from directly after he received the Mew to my 3DS. Having never placed the Mew in the PC traded it directly to Pokemon Gold on another 3DS.

I can confirm on the VC version of Gold the Mew's name and OT are not messed up. I then restored the Yellow save and traded another, both Mew's were identical when extracted from my Gold save.

You can find the Mew from my testing attached, this Mew has never been deposited in the PC.

151 - MEW - 6545.pk2

Is it normal that the GEN 1 VC Mew's name doesn't display correctly when traded to GEN 2?

@Sabresite The save here:

Has an evolved Rocks Metang, maybe that could help determine?

"rocks metank(metagross evolved):_got from a class mate who actually went to the event pokemon rocks america back in 2005 in chicago.the event had demo of pokemon xd gale of darkness.the players who completed thye demo has recieved some kind of card for exchange of metang in counte.the metang lvl is lvl 30 whwn it was received and has a special move refresh.my friend actually recieved it in his fire red catridge(which he no longer wanted).thank god he didnt trade it to further generation.i traded it to this save file .it evoled to metagross and now lvl 84."

I've asked arjunnnn if he still has a save with the Rocks Metang before it was evolved.

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.

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.

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"

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.

I'll format an old memory card as JPN memory card and try that tonight. 

A few pages back ajxpk mentioned some demo discs looks very similar, however the big difference was one contained the distribution and the other didn't.

As the demo discs menu is essentially a webpage it would be very easy to simply remove a link to the distribution,then just leave the distribution files on the disc inaccessible. It might also have just been left there from a previous month as GameCube games are padded with garbage data anyway if not all the space is used on the disc. Nintendo do like to leave random bits on discs it appears, so in this instance we might have got lucky.

Presuming the distribution does actually work with a cart that doesn't have a dead battery, I could create a PPF patch for the Japanese Interactive Multi-Game Demo Disc from January 2004, so people who wish to use it on real hardware can easily patch a clean dump of the demo disc and make use of the distribution.

That might well be the best we get for now until a demo disc with the distribution accessible from the menu turns up.

My understanding of the discs menu system is:

1st Menu (Snowman) = Two Vidoes
2nd Menu (GC 2004) = Two Vidoes
3rd Menu (GBA 2004) = One Video
4th Menu (Zelda Four Swords) = Sub Menu's about the game and a video
5th Menu (Mario Kart Doble Dash) = Sub Menu's about game and a playable demo

They would easily have been space for a 6th menu which loaded the Pokemon distribution.

So the problem with the JPN Berry Glitch Shiny Zigzagoon is that it doesn't load on real hardware once extracted from the "Interactive Multi-Game Demo Disc - January 2004 (Japan)" disc.

To the best of my knowledge there is no way to load from the disc's menu system (unless i'm missing the obvious, having explored the menu the best I can without been able to read Japanese).

However the menu system on the disc is able to launch a Mario Kart Double Dash Demo, which is done via the kart_try_go.html, located in local > kart folder

You will also see a folder called pokemonrs in the "local" folder, in this folder the pokemonrs_p.html contains the parameters required to launch the Berry Glitch Shiny Zigzagoon distribution.

This is: <meta name="go-tgc" content="/local/tgc/Ruby_And_Sapphire_Rev param=file://client.bin">

So we can simply edit the kart_try_go.html in the kart folder to launch the Berry Glitch Shiny Zigzagoon distribution like so:

You will notice i've also removed most of the comments from the HTML code, this is to ensure the filesize is not larger than the file it's replacing, as GC-Tool will only allow you to replace a file that is the same size or smaller, not larger.

You can then right click and replace your modified file with GC-Tool:

After that you can load the ISO on real hardware and activate the distribution like so:

Be aware you don't put the GBA in multiboot mode, load the distribution on the GameCube and press "A" to get to the second screen, then power on the GBA and let it load Pokemon Ruby or Sapphire load and it should try distribute all been well.

However you will notice I seem to get an error when trying to distribute the Zigzagoon.

I think this is because the battery in my JPN Pokemon Ruby is dead, so it would be pointless in trying to fix the glitch and fails?

With that in mind does anyone have a JPN Pokemon Ruby / Sapphire cart with a working battery and the ability to test this to see if it works?

@ad2099 nice hack, does that work on real hardware too?

12 minutes ago, ajxpk said:

Awesome! So my guess was correct. Damn I'm happy about that.

A very good call indeed! I honestly never expected to find it on the first disc I checked either, if it all. Right under our nose this whole time. Better late then never  

4 minutes ago, Deoxyz said:

Awesome! Can you PM me the .tgc or a link to the exact iso you downloaded?

You should be able to find it on the site you released the Gen 3 distributions on

I found the JPN Berry Glitch Shiny Zigzagoon GameCube Distribution hidden away on the Japanese Interactive Multi-Game Demo Disc from January 2004! If its listed on the discs menu system its far from obvious to someone to someone who can't read Japanese, however it's easily found in the discs file system.

You will find it under local > tgc > Ruby_And_Sapphire_Rev.tgc and can convert it to an ISO to use on real hardware with tgc to gcm (untested at present).

If you look at the banner info you will find the name of the disc is "ジラーチ配布ディスク２００３年６月" which translates to "Jilachi Distribution Disk June 2003."

The banner description is "新ポケモン　ジラーチが君の手に！" which roughly translates to "New Pokemon Jirachi is in your hands!

We can speculate the JPN Pokemon Berry Glitch Shiny Zigzagoon Distribution is based on the the Wishing Star Jirachi distribution, which was distributed from June 1 to August 24, 2003 in Japan.

Does anyone actually own a disc with the JPN Berry Fix Glitch Zigzagoon?

I was trying to track this down last year however never could. Someone did sent a few of JPN GameCube Demo ISO's my way from around the time of the Berry Fix Glitch distribution, however none of them looked to have the distribution on the disc.

That's not to say it might not still be in the file system somewhere as @ajxpk mentioned, which leads me on to asking what are the best tool for exploring the contents of a GameCube game these days?

@ajxpk nicely done! how long did it take to figure everything out?

It snowed here yesterday, that seemed to have no effect on what spawned, however the in-game effects looked good:

The game also gave out extreme weather warnings every time I loaded it up:

Here's my desktop, i'm not one for desktop shortcuts. I'd sooner pin the apps I use to the task bar: