Writing a Program in Pokemon Blue | Hacker News Reader

Writing a Program in Pokemon Blue

forums.glitchcity.info

145 pointsjackhammer202224 comments

This is insanely cool. Someone on the thread linked to this Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3EvpRHL_vk . He uses the glitch to program an entire game into ram and then runs his own breakout clone style game through this code execution glitch.

I predict this could be more popular than Node.JS

Already has a good install base. Hardware is proprietary, but it is cheap. There are emulators/VMs to run on more commodity hardware. The demographic is young so it will have time to mature before enterprise adoption. It will be awesome.

Here's a similar exploit for Gold/Silver: http://forums.glitchcity.info/index.php/topic,6716.0.html

edit; If you are interested in finding other glitches, there's commented source code over here:

Red/Blue: https://github.com/iimarckus/pokered

Crystal: https://github.com/kanzure/pokecrystal (Gold/Silver doesn't compile yet)

The explanation (and subsequent discussion) in your first link is wonderful.

I love that there are nerds tucked away in random corners of the internet, making themselves happy by working on obscure, challenging problems like these.

These sorts of "exploits" have also been used in Pokemon and other games for extremely fast tool-assisted speedruns:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UnB1fomvAw (Pokemon Yellow)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDx6gzvLqWs (Super Mario World)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CvJqzYpWms (EarthBound)

I love these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALFvB-UWaxg (Chrono Trigger in less than 4 minutes)

Is this machine assisted or could I do this on a regular Game Boy? Regardless, this is very interesting. That music brings back childhood memories of insomnia.

There are various bugs in the game that can be exploited to achieve this, without the need of an emulator or cheating device. The creator of the thread demonstrates how to obtain the special "item" in the game that makes it possible in a YouTube video [0] and has a video demonstration of actually running a program here [1]

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD_GVaQwn8o

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3EvpRHL_vk

This is one of the most elaborate hacks I've ever heard of. Programming via adding items to your inventory in Pokemon. Incredible.

Seconded. Hands down the most sophisticated hack I've seen in my life. I am absolutely amazed that something like this is possible.

This is easily in my top five, but the hack that had me buzzing all night with its cleverness when I read about it is Nils Schneider's method of extracting the ipod bootloader:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7085

Reading that thread felt like being on the play ground as a kid and some noisy classmate "who's dad worked at Nintendo" explains how to get a 152th Pokemon. I was pretty amazed that at the end it wasn't a made-up lie or joke but that those trivial steps (5 steps to the left, go there and there) actually led to something.

I want a pokemon-type game with robots, where this isn't a cool trick, but a critical part of the game.

Something like Core War, but with more RPG (or possibly MOBA) elements?

Yes, similar. Also, the collectibility aspect is key to knowledge acquisition. Or, you could also go the Jade Cocoon route, which used genetic combination.

Hack'n'Slash[1] from Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnight (where they spend 2 weeks prototyping a bunch of game ideas) is a little like that.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpTZNRH9iZw

It's neat how many glitches people have found in these particular games. A couple other Pokemon "arbitrary code" hacks (in the Yellow version):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UnB1fomvAw (Pi day celebration)

http://aurellem.org/vba-clojure/html/total-control.html (proof-of-concept for a clojure-to-pokemon-to-assembly compiler)

A "normal" playthrough in which the author shows off various glitches (most without any kind of cheat device): http://lparchive.org/Pokemon-Blue/Update%2001/

This was my favorite part of playing around with old Pokemon games. It's actually unfortunate you can't do them in the newer games

I think it's mostly because old games written in ASM, while newer ones in C/C++.

Writing an entire game in ASM must be a pain.

What are you implying?

More importantly, new hardware has proper memory protection, so instead of cool tricks you just get segfaults...

For people who are interested in Pokemon hack, checkout http://www.pokecommunity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=156

awesome! Fun example to teach arbitrary code exploitation!

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