Jiggy-Ninja

The only difference between macro- and micro- evolution is scale, a difference that is easily solved by time. Time is NOT a deity. Evolution is a process of change that happens over time. It stand to reason then, that more time equals potentially more change, and that huge amounts of time have the potential for huge amounts of change. It might be necessary to suspend your disbelief to believe in macro-evolution, but that is not the same as faith. Quantum mechanics requires a massive, enormous amount f suspension of disbelief, but if you tried to argue against it just based on that alone you'd lose terribly since quantum mechanics has more than enough supporting evidence to justify the huge suspension of disbelief necessary to understand it. I'm not an expert in those fields, but I'll do my best to relate what I've read on the issue. Fossils can tell us what kind of skeletal structure, skin, muscles, brain, teeth, and probably a few other things I don't know about that animals had in the past. Similarities among those characteristics can be used to deduce if two different species had a common ancestor, or if the species was the cmmon ancestor of other, future species. Most of the animals on Earth have an enormous portion of DNA in common with each other. Most of that shared DNA seems useless, because it's never been seen used. One explanation for that is that the DNA is a remnant of evolution. Bacteria and fruit flies are researched for evolution because the reproduce and grow very quickly, letting people see the results of mutations and selection quickly. Neither of them are deities. Asking for a pine tree to become a dog is ridiculous, and betrays your misunderstanding of how evolution works. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the patience to correct it, and probably don't have the ability to either. Down's Syndrome begs to differ. Addition of genes is possible. And again, asking for a fly to change into a hummingbird is ridiculous. What's needed is to overcome the energy hump. A certain amount of energy is necessary, then the chemical reaction will occur, the gases will burn, and water will be formed. The average time necessary to have sex in order to procreate is something that is in principle measurable, so that is a reasonable statement to make if it's observed that dolphins fornicate on average longer than necessary to procreate. However, it makes more sense to say that all animals have sex for pleasure, since the pleasure is what causes them to have sex. Since sex is necessary for a species to survive, it makes sense that animals in which sex is pleasurable activity would procreate far more than animals where it was either a neutral activity or a painful one. Animals where sex is pleasurable would procreate more, causing pleasurable sex to be more widespread. The reason scientists cling so tightly to evolution is because it is so under attack by religious people.

Dinosaurs most likely did coexist with birds, on some level. It's a mistake to consider a species as a single, indivisible entity. Evolution doesn't work on species, it works on individual animals. With asexually reproducing animals, species is meaningless since every animal is a distinct, completely autonomous individual. With sexual reproduction all the animals of a species are a bit more intertwined with each other, but the forces of evolution, mutation and natural selection, still act only on individual animals, even if the intermixing of DNA would tend to cause a population to evolve more or less in unison. Because of that, it's possible that species can fork, one branch evolving one way, another a different way. It's thought that all the variation in the world's animals is a result of this forking. "Punctuated equilibrium" I believe is the name for what you're referring to, at least that's what I remember from biology. The idea that long periods of evolutionary stagnation were intermixed with short periods of rapid evolution. I'll admit, the idea doesn't really sit well with me either, but there's no other credible explanation I've come across. Intelligent Design fails the test of Occam's Razor terribly. Though Occam's Razor isn't rigorously scientific, it's principle does have sense to it. Creationism is not credible in the least bit, having no scientific evidence and based almost entirely an ancient, largely unverifiable book. And please give examples of the "distortions of truth" you claim that science has made over the years. This isn't witty or snark, it's a genuine question. I suspect that these distortions come not from science, but from people that claim to be scientists. It's important to remember that scientists are still human, and are vulnerable to the very same sins and pitfalls that other people are vulnerable to. Just because a statement is made by a scientist, doesn't make is a scientific statement.

We have fossils, anatomy, DNA, and fruit flies and bacteria research to observe. In fact, scientists observe evolution ALL THE TIME on small scales through research on bacteria and fruit flies. Since those creatures have some of the highest rates of reproduction in the animal kingdom, it's easiest to see with them. We don't need to be there to gain information about that era. Paleontology, archeology, and geology are means to look back to see what happened in the past. The things we can learn are limited by the things from the past left to study now, but there are things left, and those things have clues about the past. Sure, some conclusions made by people might stretch the boundaries of truth and border on opinion, but to dismiss everything just shows how much you don't understand about the subject. And time is not a God for evolutionists. It's not like they see "We don't know how, but somehow, through Time, birds formed from dinosaurs." On the contrary, evolution is very well defined process composed of two parts: genetic mutation and natural selection. Genetic mutation has been observed in ALL animal species, and ALL animal species face the axe of natural selection in one way or another. As I already mentioned, evolution is observed on small scales all the time in laboratories. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination to conclude that those small changes, each successive mutation compounding on top of the previous ones, would add up to big changes over very long periods of time. That is a highly unscientific statement. Many scientists constantly try to falsify their own ideas, and far more scientists attempt to falsify the ideas of others. To date, I don't think evolution has yet come across a credible falsification. Plus, I would like to say this now. Much of the arguments I see for Creationism/Intelligent Design (not just here, but anywhere I see this stuff) are actually against evolution. A basic principle of argumentation is that debunking your opponent's position does not strengthen your own. If evolution is somehow shown to be definitively false, that does not mean Creationism or Intelligent Design are true. Neither of those really have any legs to stand on currently, and eliminating their main competitor does not give them any more.

Cool. So, I've started testing each of these flags. I planned on taking a NoHeatran save and changing the flags back to the values from the Heatran saves one by one in every combination possible. I'll then load the game into Pokesav and save it to reset the checksum. The location for those saves is inside Heatran's room. Anyway, when I start a save with just the 2nd flag changed from 02h -> 01h, Heatran does not show up when the game loads, but when I exit the room and reenter, it appears to be battled again! I'll see what happens now with 03h. And, I'll test the rest of the 13 combinations too.

My bad. I didn't expect I remembered it right anyway, which is why I put the IIRC there. Still, that doesn't change the fact that the Bible was written by people, and is susceptible to the same potential faults that any human endeavor is subject to: corruption, misinterpretation, or just plain being wrong. Scientists are susceptible to these same pitfalls, which is why peer review, falsifiability, and repeatability are so important to the scientific method.

Darwin is far more logical and sensible. I'll attempt to refute your support of God. Yes, it is highly improbable that the universe would end up in exactly its current configuration. However, it obviously must end up in some kind of configuration, and all the possible configurations it could be in are all equally improbable, so it is inevitable that the universe would end up in an improbable configuration. There are an uncountable number of planets in an uncountable number of solar systems, each of them having different conditions. A common saying in probabilities is that anything that can happen, will happen, no matter how improbable, if given enough chances. Winning the lottery might be a 1 in a 1,000,000,000 chance, but if you play the lottery enough, it's highly, highly likely that you will win eventually. If, among the uncountable number of planets, none of them had the right characteristics to support life, I would find that even more shocking. As for how we happened to end up on a planet capable of supporting life, I believe it's known as the "Anthropic Principle". We ended up on a planet capable of supporting life because we could not exist anywhere else. If this planet was inhospitable to life, it wouldn't exist long enough to wonder why the planet could support life. I call strawman. A "miracle" is not something that can only happen once, it is something that cannot be explained by any rational means. The "ooze" might not be able to be feasibly repeated, however it is rational, and in principle can happen again. However, because the "ooze" has not been able to be repeated yet, its still only a hypothesis in need of more testing. It remains, however, the best explanation we have. Also, such a thing exists called "extrapolation". If we observe that, as we look at the fossil record as it progresses backwards through time, creatures get less and less complex, extrapolation will lead us to the conclusion that the progression began with the ultimate anti-complexity, the "ooze". The "ooze" explanation does have the weakness that in its current form, it is highly improbable. However, the transition from inanimate to animate only needs to happen once, and then evolution takes over. Transitional species do exist, and there are tons of similarities between species. A whale's flipper, a bat's wing, and a human hand all have very similar skeletal structure, despite being very different species and the relevant appendages being used for extremely different purposes. The best explanation science has come up with is that those species have a common ancestor. Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, there were dinosaurs that grew feathers. That's a transition from reptiles to birds. As for gaps in the fossil record, gaps are to be expected. It is impossible to complete since the only fossils we can study are those that were able to survive untold years of weathering. It's likely that only a very small portion of the whole record came through. If God and creation have far more holes than evolution does. IIRC, I heard that two of the Gospels don't even agree on what generation Joseph was down from David. You might think that's an insignificant detail, but if it can't even get a simple thing like that right, how can it be trusted on far bigger and more important things like the origin of life? (EDIT: Looks like I'm wrong about this. Didn't expect I remembered it right anyway) The theory that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old has radioactive dating and other evidence to support it. The 10,000 years only has an old book written 2,000 years ago with absolutely no way to verify its claims. I pick 4.6 billion. The Bible was written by people, not God. Even if it was based on God's world, there's no guarantee that His Word wasn't corrupted by people sometime between when it was written and now. There's no way to verify what God's will might be, if He even has a will that we need to be concerned about. To assume to know the Will of an omnipotent, omniscient Creator (if he even exists) is the HEIGHT of arrogance.

You're seeing right. Japanese English letters are slightly larger than the USA English ones, and have different letter codes.

At least it's not as bad as the original Yu-Gi-Oh. "Giant Soldier of Stone, attack the moon!" I'm still baffled by that entire duel to this day.

Not to mention it's incredibly easy once you get the initial set up of the FTP server out of the way.

Dude, we already know all of these, and many, many more.

Nope, they're all D/P codes that have been copied from here.

There's absolutely no Kanji in Pokemon. It'll all Hiragana and KAtakana, thankfully, since that's all I know so far. I think Jayc has the right idea. It's better to learn the basics of Katakana and Hiragana yourself so that you don't have to rely on an automated program that could make mistakes. One final note, when phonetically transcribing foreign words into Japanese kana, it's always Katakana that's used. Hiragana is used for native words of the language. Also, the Gundam example is more properly transcribed as ガンダム (Gandamu) rather than Gundamu, since the "u" vowels always sound like the "oo" in "poo". Remember, you're transcribing the pronunciation, not the spelling. EDIT: It's better to say that the Japanese language doesn't have any stand-alone consonants. All of them must be paired with a vowel. The only exception is ん (ン), which represents a nasal sound similar to our "n" or "m", depending on which consonant follows it.

Bay City, Michigan here. Why do you have 3 Americas? I thought there was only the United States of America? :bidoof: JK, I'm not that stupid. :kikkoman:

Tell me about. I'm sick and tired of of hearing about how much more powerful the other consoles and handhelds are compared to the DS and Wii, and their much better graphics. TBH, there hasn't been any really great graphics improvements since the N64, in any system. All we're getting is a higher polygon count and more realistic physics, both of which are only marginally good. Graphics are largely good enough and, and one of the awesome things about games is that they don't need to follow realistic physics. See Super Mario Galaxy as an example. Metroid Prime is the only game where I was literally amazed by the graphics, because they looked so much better and so much more detailed than any other Gamecube game I have ever seen. Other than that, as long as I can tell one object from another, I'm usually good. I want to see gaming companies stop spending so much on graphics and HD shit and seriously pour some money into bettering their AIs. Ideally, I want an AI to be like a person: creative, learns from mistakes, able to recognize effective tactics on its own (so it can actually fight effectively, and not how the game maker thinks it'll be effective), etc. It's tough, but that's the advance I really want to see. Until then, AI will always be able to be beaten by exploiting it's patterns. For example, in SSBM, Final Destination, Ganondorf (me) vs. Bowser (Lv9 CPU), I could get the first KO in less than 4 seconds if I didn't mess up the sequence. Dash, double jump over the fire breath, F-air, F-tilt 2-3 times, Short hop a D-air to spike him into the abyss. I won a 4 stock match once in 1:03, with only 32% damage. The computer was never able to learn that using Fire Breath on a Ganon running straight at you at the beginning of the match is not a good idea. It got boring after a while, and it's no fun to handicap your own fighting style to compensate for the CPU's predictability. I demand nothing less than an AI that can pass the video game version of the Turing Test. Until the, all the glitz that graphics advances bring is just polishing a turd, metaphorically speaking. Wow, that was more than I'd planned on doing.

Without changing anything else?

Unfortunately, I'm a little old school. I prefer pencil and paper over a computer for most writing tasks. So rather than spend an hour or so typing this up, I just decided to scan the paper I wrote it all down on. Hope you don't mind too much. Here's a graph I drew too.

I narrowed down the location of Heatran's flags to 4 locations in Platinum's Save file. I made 6 different save files. 3 from before Heatran, and 3 after I ran from Heatran's battle, making it disappear. Each was saved in a different location, and each was saved twice in a row to make each side of the save as identical as possible. Then, I used the Save Hacker Toolkit to compare all the combinations of the 6 saves to narrow down the locations as much as possible. That resulted in four locations in the save file (8 if you count both blocks). I'll list the locations, as well as the values in this format: "MemLoc: Heatran -> NoHeatran" 0x0E46: 0Eh -> 01h 0x0EE8: 01h -> 02h 0x1006: 40h -> C0h 0x1027: 5Dh -> 7Dh I've attached the 6 .sav files I used to this post. They were all dumped directly from my Japanese Platinum cart, which has an identical save structure to the English Platinum. This is as far as I think I can go, unless someone knows a way to easily fix the save's checksums. I can't poke at the RAM (and therefore, can't make AR codes) since No$GBA is bugged and doesn't work without sound. So...here you go. Heatran1.sav Heatran2.sav Hetran3.sav No Heatran1.sav No Heatran2.sav No Heatran3.sav

Something that should be noted, I was unable to get the 0.31f version of the Wifi backup tool working on my Acekard 2i using a DS Lite. It would stop just short of sending a full save file (only sent between 500 and 508 KB every time I tried), saying there was a data transmission error. After some searching, I found a version labeled 0.31 that works perfectly, and I've attached it to this post. The .ini file it needs is the same as the one for 0.31f. NDS_Backup_Tool_Wifi.nds

It hasn't been programmed in yet.

The reason this Arceus shows up as a ??? Arceus is due to a change in the Alternate Forms part of it's data. Changing this section to other values could also change it to any other type. However, whithout the appropriate plate held, it will revert to normal as soon as it enters battle.

You can't find it because at least on this site, people care more about the English one than the Jap one, since most people have the English one. Therefore, most codes are for the English version. Fortunately for you, I'm one of the few with the Jap one, so I do care. Try that. Works the exact same way as the D/P IV Check.

Was finally able to print some graph paper so I could visually lay out the Seal area's boundaries. Unfortunately, I need to reprint the damn thing since I didn't give it enough lines in the Y direction. I'll upload a scan of it when I'm done.

Ah, I see. My bad.

If the way the encounter check uses the PRNG is known, then yeah. This could potentially be used to manipulate ANY random event, even Legendary PID and IVs.

No, you still misunderstand. You're not changing your SID, you're changing the SID of the Pokemon you want to use it on. The IDs of the OT are stored in the Pokemon's data and it's that information that determined whether the Pokemon is Shiny or not. Changing your SID will do nothing, since it won't change the SID the Pokemon uses to calculate whether or not it's shiny. To change a Pokemon's SID, you either need to change it through Pokesav (meaning, you meed to rehack it), or use my AR code, which does all the math for you. Some might call you foolish for making life harder on yourself than it needs to be.