There’s A Mew Underneath The Truck Next To The SS Anne

March 17, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Before we dig into this, I need to spend a paragraph or two conveying the knowledge of a twelve-year-old in 1996. Of course, most Hackaday readers were twelve at least once, but we’re just going to do this anyway. The payoff? This is an arbitrary-code-execution virus for Pokemon, and maybe the most amazing Game Boy hack of all time.

In the first generation of Pokemon games, there is a spectacularly rare Pokemon. Mew, the 151st Pokemon, could learn every move in the game. It was a psychic type, which was overpowered in the first gen. You could not acquire a Mew except by taking your Game Boy to a special event (or to Toys R Us that one time). If someone on the playground had a Mew, they really only had a GameShark.

There was a mythos surrounding Mew. Legend said if you went to the SS Anne and used Strength to move a truck sprite that appeared nowhere else in the game, a Mew would appear. Due to the storyline of the game, you didn’t have the ability to get to this truck the first time you passed it. However, if you started a new game – thus losing all your progress and your entire roster of Pokemon – you could test this theory out. Don’t worry, you can just trade me all your good Pokemon. I’ll give them back once you have a Mew. Screw you, Dylan. Screw you.

Now the Mew truck trick is real. You can do it on a copy of Red or Blue on an original Game Boy. If this hack existed in 1998, kids would have lost their god damned minds.

The basis for this hack comes from [MrCheeze], who created a ‘virus’ of sorts for the first generation of Pokemon games. Basically, given the ability to manually edit a save file, it is possible to replicate this save file over a Game Link cable. The result is a glitchy mess, but each Pokemon game has the same save file when it’s done.

Combine this virus with arbitrary code execution, and you have something remarkable. [MrCheeze] created a save file that allows you to move the truck next to the SS Anne. When the truck is moved, a Mew appears. It’s exactly what everyone was talking about over the sound of their sister’s Backstreet Boys marathon.

The new ‘Mew Truck virus’ is not as glitchy as the first attempt at a self-replicating save file. In fact, except for the music glitching for a few seconds, nothing appears abnormal about this Pokemon virus. It’s only when the Mew truck trick is attempted does something seem weird, and it’s only weird because we know it shouldn’t happen. Combine the self-replicating nature of this virus, and you have something that would have drawn the attention of Big N. This is a masterpiece of Pokemon-based arbitrary code execution and a hack that may never be equaled.

You can check out the video below.

Continue reading “There’s A Mew Underneath The Truck Next To The SS Anne” →

Beware Of Tall Grass: Pokemon Go On The Gameboy Pocket

July 25, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 13 Comments

[Pepijn de Vos] was excited to interact with the world’s most popular augmented reality pedometer, Pokemon Go, and was extremely disappointed to find that his Blackberry couldn’t run it. Still, as far as he could tell from behind his wall of obsolete technology, Pokemon Go is all about walking distractedly, being suspicious, and occasionally catching a Pokemon. That should be possible.

Not a stranger to hacking Pokemon on the Gameboy, [Pepijn] put together a plan. Using his TCPoke module, he took it a step further. Rather than just emulating the original gameboy trade signals over the internet, he hacked a Pokemon Red ROM with some custom Z80 assembly to add some features to the Cable Club in the game.

After some waiting for the delivery man to bring a flashable cartridge and along with some Arduino code, he could now translate the steps he took in the game to his steps in the real world. Well, mostly. He could pick the location where he would like to catch a Pokemon. The character stands there. Somewhere around 100m the game will trigger a random pokemon battle.

[Pepijn] is now no longer a social outcast, as you can see in the video after the break. On a simple trip to the grocery store he caught two Pokemon!

Continue reading “Beware Of Tall Grass: Pokemon Go On The Gameboy Pocket” →

Twitching Fish Plays Pokemon Underwater

August 9, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 12 Comments

fishypokemon

Over a matter of a few days, thousands of people were simultaneously watching this fish named [Grayson Hopper] float around a bowl of water as a webcam recorded its every move and translated the directions it took into a working gameplay of Pokemon Red. Each section of the tank was split into partitions, with each section acting like a button. So when the fish swam over a specific area, the main Pokemon character [Ash] was told where to go.

It was created during a hackNY hackathon within 24 hours when the fish started its journey in to the world of Pokemon. Already, a subreddit popped up documenting the adventure. Amazingly enough, [Grayson] chose Charmander as its starting Pokemon and has defeated its rival Squirtle.

This project was great for watching hours on end, especially at work, as the cute little fish went about its life unaware that it is becoming a popular internet star.

Check out the link above to stream the video. There is even a chat bar on the side, which allows anyone to jump into the fishy conversation. If the fish looks dead though, it’s probably just sleeping.

[Thanks for the tip Bailey!]

Also, Pokemon was reborn some vintage hardware recently which allows the player to game via the web. Check that out too!

Pokáde: Twitch Plays Pokemon, Reborn On Vintage Hardware

August 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

poke Early this year, Twitch Plays Pokemon, a webstream of tens of thousands of people playing the same game of Pokemon via web chat. It was certainly an interesting sociological phenomenon, but as in any system where thousands of people try to do a single thing, progress was exceedingly slow at points. This was compounded by the fact the Twitch stream delayed the chat by about 30 seconds.

At the time, there was some talk about setting up an alternative to the emulator-based Twitch stream. Ideas were floated, but until now, no one has yet come up with a workable solution. Now we have Pokáde: real Pokemon games (Red and Blue) running on real hardware (two Super Game Boys, two super Nintendos, and two Game Genies), streamed live to the Internet with an IRC-like chat function.

Simply for the ease of capturing the video of the stream, [Johannes], the guy behind all of this, is using a pair of Super Nintendos and Super Game Boys connected to USB video capture dongles. The Super Game Boys are modded to enable trading between the Red and Blue versions of the game, and controls are handled with a USB connection to the PC running the server.

Anyone can play the game, simply by going to the Pokáde Chat, entering the chat, and clicking on random buttons on the brick Game Boy GUI. The game ROMs have been slightly modified to disable the option of starting a new game, but this is still the classic Twitch Plays Pokemon experience: people all around the globe mashing buttons and creating a religion around a fossil pokemon.