New R/S glitch?

[Pokedrawer Z]

Well, at one point I was playing my Sapphire (lost now...) It was literally the first pokemon game I'd ever played. The first time I went through the Victory Road I encountered a door, not the exit, though. So, duh, I went through. I appeared in a valley full of flowers, long grass and orange mist. I walked into the long grass to see pokemon, and I encountered a weird, black, snake-like thing (huge). My strongest pokemon, a Lv. 83 Swampert, went out first. The thing was Lv. 100, and I still had my master ball, so I used that, but somehow the other thing struck before I threw the ball. It used some weird attack wich not only fainted Muddy (the Swampert) in 1 hit, it managed to take out all my party pokemon, too. Eek. When I got more strong pokemon out of the PC the door was gone. (Suspicious...) My friend also reported having encountered the same pokemon in the same area, before I told him about it! Glitch? Possibly.
Any comments?

[BuffyBoy]

Just one...

liar!

[Pokedrawer Z]

Geez, I'm not, it is hard to believe though.

[BonzaiRob]

My guess is you dreamt it

[psychoticeevee]

Only one problem about that though Bonzai...me and Z are friends in real life so my friend(who encountered the glitch) told me too, and I know that i didn't dream it! And I have read reports of that glitch before so are you suggesting that nearly 15 people had the exact same dream?
Sorry Bonzai sometimes i get carried away...

[Pokedrawer Z]

Ja.

[BuffyBoy]

Well maybe all of you should sto doing hallucinagenic drugs.

[psychoticeevee]

And maybe you should learn how to spell stop right

[mattgcn]

If this glitch existed, it would be widely known by now since people have ripped apart every bit of the source code.

[BuffyBoy]

psychoticeevee said:

And maybe you should learn how to spell stop right

Oh snap!

I just got told! If I cared, I would totally do something about that.

Anyway, all the cool people are leaving the p off of sto! Look I'm so coll I can't be try to do it.

[mls]

I find it hard to believe you. :/ Do you have any proof of its existence? Anybody willing to back it up? Pictures? Something?

I have never encountered this glitch, and I probably would have heard about it on the internet by now if it were real. (since I am interested in glitches) But its not impossible...

[FMY]

I find it hard to believe too, but if it's true, then it's most certainly not a glitch. How could the programmers ever accidentally make something like that? No, if it's real, it must be planned.

[eeveexz]

I want to add my two cents! As hard as it is to believe, I think I kinda have to think that it does exist. What I mean is that when red and blue came out, the glitch Missingno. was in there, ( along with mew ) which was the starting point for creating all the other pokemon on there. This was when they were programming with hex. The first time they use their newer system of Programming was RSE. It's quite possibly that the programmers did the same thing, but made a fail safe so no corrupt data would be released into the game. ( sort of like the bad egg program that pervents certain cheats to stop working. Instead it would use a sure fire attack that pervents all battle aspects to work, like going before the master ball) They may have planned this more then just glitch it. If it was only in select or older models of the game, then they could make it without making an uproar of a newer glitch. ...Yes, I'm crazy, but at least it's better background then it was just there and then disappeared.

Black snake... hmm... did it look like rayquesa or something completely different? Could be a old concept of Darkrai...

[Pokedrawer Z]

... Woah...Good idea... Anyways, it looked sorta like Arbok, you know, a cobra, but black, with no markings, and BIG. Oh, yeah, and it had red spikes on it's neck, just below the hood. OOEEOO... Darkrai has those... Maybe you're right, an old concept that got scrapped, but didn't totally get removed, and since you aren't supposed to catch a pokemon like that, it had the failsafe attack to stop you from catching it.

[BonzaiRob]

Don't you think it unusual that hackers found such things as the ? placeholder, and not this? People who comb every inch of the code? How do you suppose ROMs are made?
Also, anything you battle as a pokémon can be accessed with GameShark codes (don't tell me they can't because gameshark plays around with hex codes and how things are stored). Hundreds of people would have found it just by adding random codes to the meet-this-pokémon gameshark cheat.
Since I've been writing the battle part of JEPE, I know that it's not possible for a glitch to be uncatchabale. You'd either get the "trainer blocked the ball" message or it would escape the ball or be caught. Pokéballs always go first. To change this is way to much work for the developers to forget about (believe me , battles are a real headache). Basically, they'd have to write a whole new battle scenario.

[eeveexz]

Like I said, if this hidden event was only in select games, then there wouldn't be any type of uproar about it. A hacking device can only go as far as the stored info in the game cart. ( if everything is kept the same after being hacked. I don't know how many verison of gold and silver I see that had been ripped and then hacked into to change the storyline and stuff )

Now, if the story went that a hacker found this glitch and then looked at the code in the game and couldn't find it, I would have to say that he had to much beer and wine. But the thing is that, from the infomation I have and am deriving from, no hacker had this type of game cart; therefore, a rom with this event place within it couldn't exist.

As for why it's in there, I truly don't know. I'm guessing it has to do with the fact of the pokemon count being somewhat odd when RS came out. It was 151 ( 152 if you count Missing No. ) and then when to 251 ( Now Missing No. wasn't there. ), but the count jumped to 386 in the Advance series. This jump may not seem odd to everyone, but kinda confused me. ( why not just keep going till it was 400 even or something? ) They probably did plan to put more pokemon in, but time, money and unseen problem delays it from happening, just like it does to all other games. Someone probably was going to finish this event later, but some of it got published beforehand. ( Premo or Demo games. ) They probably corrected it within the mass produced ones and did a secret recall on the games in store machines.

As for the battle system, if it was a planned event, then you probably wouldn't be able to catch it at that time and place. Even with an complex battle system, it would be easy to reorder some orders of operations. Most programs start out as human statements which are then coded so the cpu can understand them. So if the original statement was " if said trainer uses a pokeball, then do this which will make the pokeball go first." , then all they have to do if remake a small 'event only' action which would say " if said trainer does anything, than make this pokemon use this. ." Evil to reprogram, but would make for a cool event if done right. And remembering it was a trash idea, you wouldn't be able to find it again.

In a nutshell, I'm saying that it was an isolated glitch that could exist, but because of isolation it wouldn't have a huge effect on the fan base.

...Yes, I'm somewhat of a dreamer with a confused mind. I think it could exist, but I'm not saying it does exist. ( I wished it existed. I would so love to see what Darkrai would have looked like. )

[BonzaiRob]

For a start, your theory of coding is slightly off XD We don't usually start with statements, we just kind of get on with it. They're not coded specifically for the cpu to understand them, they're coed to do things. The game isn't the graphics and plot, the game is the coding itself. That's why video games are so varied.


Secondly, the chances of the two of you getting a cartridge loaded with a different ROM to the rest of north america are slim to none. ROMS are loaded onto cartridges in a language-based system. The game is made in Japan and loaded into the japanese cartridges, then the ROM is sent to other regions (Europe, Brazil/South America, North America) for translation. In translation, glitches are usually gotten rid of (there are quite a few DP glitches in the Japanese version that don't happen in the rest of them). Also Mew, Celebi, etc get pretty much removed.

SO. For your cartridges to be different, you would need to have somehow got a pirate Japanese pre-release and had it professionally translated (seen any gana around? Is the grammar poor?).

So good luck with that. If you want to prove it, photo the new poké, scan your GBA screen, whatever. But we won't believe it until you have proof.

[eeveexz]

My theory isn't really theory at all... The only way for a program to be made exactly how the programmer wishes it to be is by first thinking about it. He make statements in his mind and then fine tunes the ideas to form what he is making. i.e. Someone said the Pokemon moves take damage if they hit. That 'if' was the start of the accuracy stat in Pokemon. ( Also in many RPG and other Action and Adventure games. That dimension in first and third person shooter games relies on the person ability to target someone. )

Because a computer can't understand human language, a program was made to convert easy human text and numbers to 0 and 1 so a Computer could understand it. This Basic system was the start of programming languages and their compliers, so in turn, you are coding stuff so the CPU ( or brain of the computer ) can understand it ( if they didn't understand what you are inputing, how could they do anything? ) . A computer can only read 0 and 1, even if it has 10 different program Langauges on it.

I was talking about Pokemon and console RP games... I know most games don't rely on those elements. ( People play Pong and it has no plot whatsoever. People play MUD and it has basically has no real picture formatted graphics whatsoever. ) RPGs tend to use graphics, plot and sound to attract people to play them, since most common RPG battle systems are the basically the same, being that the root of mass RP playing comes from Dungeons and Dragons. But I can say there are good exceptions to this fact, like the 'tales of' series, the world of mana collections, Zelda II : The Adventure of Link, and any game that has an element of tactics in it, like La Pucelle Tactics... I straying off course though. Could talk about that all day...

Most glitches are removed, but a translation is mainly that, a translation. Most of them are patches. ( which is why you can find old translations people made for Roms on sites, like the metal Pokemon series. ) It would take too much money and time to go through a source code to find all the glitch which are caused by imperfect programming and still have to go search for the foreign text and change it. On another note, beta testers have limits to what is found because of time. ( for Nintendo to know about the berry glitch before it got translated, they would have had to test the game for an year or two. )


...if you were actually reading Bon, you would know he already lost it...

[BonzaiRob]

I know how coding works, I dabble. We're making a game here, I made the navidex and a limited version of the battle engine.

There's not just one programmer either (I realise you might have meant 'a programmer'). They work in teams. And I've never started coding with making statements in my mind, it's pretty much "Well I want to do this, do I know how to do it? Can I work it out?" and then I write out the result. A good example of this was making the HP bars MOVE on the team screen, instead of going from one number to another. That's what happened at first, so I worked out that you need two numbers, the actual HP and a duplicate 'destination' HP. Then you remove some of the actual HP until it equals the new/destination one. This was written (roughly):

int HP = 20;
int destHP;

[user input] destHP = 10;

onRefresh{
 if (HP > destHP){
   HP --; //(This "--" means minus one)
 } else if (HP < destHP) {
   HP ++;
 }
}
I didn't start by saying "The HP needs to go down slowly" to myself. I just thought about refresh loops and stuff.

It would take too much money and time to go through a source code to find all the glitch which are caused by imperfect programming and still have to go search for the foreign text and change it.

Since it's rectified by the people who coded it ORIGINALLY (Nintendo of Japan send the patches with the translation ROMs) it's not such a big deal to search through the code. Besides that, even the lowest level editors have some sort of Find function. It's really not a waste of time and money, since they want their games to be perfect, and that's what they spend their money on.
Changing things to binary, in Java at least, is known as compiling. To fix faults, you edit your uncompiled version and recompile it. That would be a new version. However, most programs have a patch system, which is like a failsafe built into the game so you can edit the source code later, without uncompiling. Since we know there are patches for glitches ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokemon_diamond#Japanese_version_glitches ) this is what Nintendo does.

And again: Chances of having a different cartridge = very unlikely.

[FMY]

Now, what was that last sentence you wrote?

"...if you were actually reading Bon, you would know he already lost it..."

Why the hell are you saying that?

Look, even though it is possible for glitches to stay in the game, even after testing, most of them are very, very minor. It's almost impossible for a glitch of this size to stay in a finished game. For Christ sake, Nintendo has a whole team of testers, so don't blame them on not having enough time to test things like this (which isn't even necessary for a glitch like this one. You know it's impossible to be in the game, even without testing). Bugs don't take 50 lines of code or so (this thing is probably even longer).

Glitches are things you programmed by accident or forget to remove. Like you forget to close the door by key when you leave, you can forget to multiply something with 2. You can however not forget to close a door when you never programmed it, and really, why the hell would they program something like that? If it was programmed, then it was certainly not a glitch.

Also, what the hell has the way a computer stores information to do with all this? A game is indeed not coded for a specific CPU to understand it (mostly), the source code can mostly be recompiled to work on another CPU-architecture, but that's beside the point.

However having a different ROM on your GBA-cartridge than someone who bought the game earlier is indeed possible, it certainly is. They do change the ROMs on other occasions than translation alone. They do it whenever they find a big bug.

Your theory is however still a theory. Ever wondered why there are so many programs with a lot of version numbers? That's because their programmers got new ideas. For games that mostly means they just start programming a new game, but not before the first version is out. If their ideas evolve that means the game changes too. Games do start from ideas, that's true, but games evolve too. This leaves a possibility for bugs to keep hanging around, but like I said, this are mostly small things.

Anyways, it's like we're discussing God here. Nobody can prove he exists, no one can prove he doesn't, so some people believe in it, some don't. It's the same with this, but I for one don't tend to believe thing that can't be proved.