Pokemon Pinball Glitchdex

[GARY 'M 9]

I'm currently starting to work on the Pokemon Pinball RB Glitchdex. This will be time consuming but it's pretty simple. Here's what I have so far:

97:

Name: [blank]
Cry effects: Sound channel cuts out and the glitch cry kicks in after a minute or so
Time to catch: 10 minutes
Adds no dex entry.
Time to evolve: 10 minutes
Type of evo: Find items
Evolves into: Dodrio

98:

Name: [blank]
Cry effects: Messes with sound channels + glitch sounds
Time to catch: 18 seconds
Adds no dex entry.

PICTURES:

ge.tt/83FI0p4

(-1 is first frame -2 is second frame -3 is frame when hit -flipped is sprite when completely flipped -sprite denotes that sprite is static)

(The type of Pokéball that appears for glitch pokemon that use the ball sprite depends on what kind of ball you have.)

[Torchickens]

Great idea. For some reason I get an error message when trying to extract the files from the 7z folder along the lines of "unknown method in x" for every file. Though its probably just because I'm using Windows and have an old version of WinRAR.

Are these from the US or European version? I'm not sure if the actual pinball glitch Pokémon are different between them but I know that some of their names are. In the EU version when forcing the Pokédex cursor past 151 you can sometimes see glitch Pokémon with Pokémon names from another language than the one which you selected, as you can select five languages in the PAL version (e.g. one of them was called 'BULBIZARRE'; the French name of Bulbasaur in the English mode).

[GARY 'M 9]

The 7z I compressed uses the newer LZMA2 algorithm so that might be your problem. I'm doing the US version atm... I was going to do Pinball RS but I couldn't find an encounter code. As for scrolling past 151, do you have a code for that? (Even if it's PAL, give it to me, and if it IS PAL, give me the encounter mod with it as I can try to see the offset difference and generate a US code.)

[Yuzihax]

for whatever reason it never occurred to me that games like Pinball would have stuff like this even though its fairly obvious that it would.

fairly interesting, at any rate.

[Adrian Malacoda]

Jun 4, 2011 15:09:43 GMT -5 Torchickens said:

Great idea. For some reason I get an error message when trying to extract the files from the 7z folder along the lines of "unknown method in x" for every file. Though its probably just because I'm using Windows and have an old version of WinRAR.

winrar is proprietary (not free as in freedom, or not "open source" if you prefer) and uses a secret format. being the zealot I am I would recommend 7zip instead, it's free and imho better in a practical sense too.

[Torchickens]

Jun 4, 2011 16:34:55 GMT -5 Adrian Malacoda said:

Jun 4, 2011 15:09:43 GMT -5 Torchickens said:

Great idea. For some reason I get an error message when trying to extract the files from the 7z folder along the lines of "unknown method in x" for every file. Though its probably just because I'm using Windows and have an old version of WinRAR.

winrar is proprietary (not free as in freedom, or not "open source" if you prefer) and uses a secret format. being the zealot I am I would recommend 7zip instead, it's free and imho better in a practical sense too.

Thank you, I'll try it out.

It looks like the offsets are ±0. I tried a US version code and it worked.

Encounter modifier: 01XX79D5

Cursor position: 01XX71D9.

The Pokémon numbers (shown in the actual menu) past 151 aren't in order, e.g. after 151 came 136. They actually seem to be just character strings rather than numbers e.g. some had numbers like 4136 or (blackblock)*2 84

When you scroll down past 151, it will corrupt the header and something like this will happen.



(Note I pressed A on this one to see its entry)

There's a kind of Pokémon Pinball Super Glitch effect. Sometimes the music will change and when you scroll back up the shown Pokédex numbers of ordinary Pokémon will temporarily change.

e.g. page 1 turned into this:

[iimarckus]

Jun 4, 2011 16:34:55 GMT -5 Adrian Malacoda said:

Jun 4, 2011 15:09:43 GMT -5 Torchickens said:

Great idea. For some reason I get an error message when trying to extract the files from the 7z folder along the lines of "unknown method in x" for every file. Though its probably just because I'm using Windows and have an old version of WinRAR.

winrar is proprietary (not free as in freedom, or not "open source" if you prefer) and uses a secret format. being the zealot I am I would recommend 7zip instead, it's free and imho better in a practical sense too.

Honestly, who has 7zip installed? Not me. I would stick to zip, as it’s free these days and everyone (including Windows users) has it installed.

Of course, I prefer gz’d or bz2’d tarballs, but only when distributing to Unix users. Zip is more practical for a wider audience.

[Adrian Malacoda]

Zip as a format is preferred for the internet because there's a virtual guarantee that everyone can access a zip. But 7zip the program is excellent.

[GARY 'M 9]

Seems somewhere, the byte offset changes by +$18 from US to PAL. The US cursor placement code is 01XX59D9. This code acts in a weird manner making me have to press up or down to get to an area near my desired location and I have to disable the code and search for #151 to find my bearings to get to the glitch because as long as you do not have Mew seen or owned, 151 does not trigger scroll lock.

The code you gave me, Torchickens, for some reason changes seen Pokemon, but only gave me Pidgey when I put in $97. Currently I'm looking for where the game stores SEEN/OWNED data so that I can force it to give me entries and sprites.

Edit: The game has a very, very RAM-Wasteful way of handling the Pokedex. Each Pokemon has its own byte where 00 is not seen/owned, 01 is seen, but not flipped, 02 is owned, 04 and any other bit that isn't 0,1,2 is seen and flipped but not owned.

For the US version, the offsets start at D962 with Bulbasaur ($00) and (theoretically) "end" at DA61. (For glitch Pokemon, real pokemon end at D9F8 with Mew.)

[winmaster]

I agree, 7-Zip is a must have (and why would anyone pay for WinRAR these days???).

7-Zip is useful because it can open everything. .zip, .rar, .7z, .iso, .cab, even .exe's, 7-Zip can open them all.

I also like it because it creates self extracting archives.

[GARY 'M 9]

I can get the sprites of the Dex entries but it will take some work as the game scrambles tile placement in a weird manner. I'm hoping it doesn't re-scramble for each invalid hex because if it did, this will be very hard to do. The palette is also spewed throughout the header so I'll need to find a tile that is normal. It'll take a bit of reconstructing but I can handle it.

Edit: Using a reference picture and VBA's map viewer, I was able to completely reconstruct Mewtwo's picture and find the correct palette.

With this method, if it does not rescramble, I'll be able to render each
Glitch's Dex sprite, both flipped and unflipped.

[iimarckus]

Jun 4, 2011 22:50:10 GMT -5 @winmaster said:

I agree, 7-Zip is a must have (and why would anyone pay for WinRAR these days???).

7-Zip is useful because it can open everything. .zip, .rar, .7z, .iso, .cab, even .exe's, 7-Zip can open them all.

I also like it because it creates self extracting archives.

7zip the program is useful.

7zip the format is not.

[blahpy]

I never even considered Pinball for glitching, are there any glitches which are activated without cheat codes? This is a very interesting project indeed.

[GARY 'M 9]

@blahpy: Dunno, I haven't really played Pokemon Pinball much.

---

I'm not going to post much more individual info on these glitches after this post, but I have gotten both dex sprites of 97 and its dex entry. Its unflipped sprite is blank.

Dex entry:

Page 1:

ry
quick, it is a
common sight in

Page 2:

many places.

Flipped Dex sprite:



This sprite does not appear like this in the game. It is scrambled due to glitches, but using map viewer and looking at other Pokemon layouts with scrambling in game, I have reconstructed the sprite and found its correct palette -- Bulbasaur's.

For some reason, Bulbasaur's sprite and palette is always loaded somewhere in the Gameboy's map banks while in the Pokedex, or at least while you have its data. I'll have to test this later.

[blahpy]

www.youtube.com/user/duffrageous appears to have some pokemon pinball glitch videos, if you search for pokemon pinball in his uploads.