Research: The 4th gen class split in 3rd gen

[NintendoBoyDX]

Definitely possible, it just hasn't been done for emerald as of yet..

[diegoisawesome]

Originally Posted by Ivee

Hello.

I'm a friend of Windslash's (actually, I pointed this thread out to him). The earlier patch he posted with all the special moves was flawed, so he fixed it and asked me to post the patch. I personally tested out a move (Gust, which is one that was never special typed in gen 3 and older). I gave it to Squirtle, gave it max special attack and gave Bulbasaur minimum special defense. Then tested it again leaving Squirtle's SA and Bulbasaur's special defense was maxed. Bulbasaur was 1-hit KO'd first and the next time Gust did a little less than half damage.

Anyway, here's the patch, please give credit to Windslash and not me. And keep testing moves so we can be sure he doesn't need to do anymore work!

Hey Windslash, ther are a lot of moves that haven't been switched. Take Confusion, for example.
This is extremely annoying and I think I'll need to switch back to the old system until the moves are fixed.

[BlackHayate]

uhh confusion is still special (please correct me if I'm lost to what he's talking about)

[diegoisawesome]

Originally Posted by BlackHayate

uhh confusion is still special (please correct me if I'm lost to what he's talking about)

Well, with this patch, everything was set to Physical (talking about the system's patch) and Windslash's patch is supposed to automatically convert all of the should-be special moves to are-special moves.

[Quilava's Master]

Originally Posted by diegoisawesome

Well, with this patch, everything was set to Physical (talking about the system's patch) and Windslash's patch is supposed to automatically convert all of the should-be special moves to are-special moves.

Well you could alway just do it manually like I did.

[diegoisawesome]

Originally Posted by Quilava's Master

Well you could alway just do it manually like I did.

I know, and I will someday.
But right now, I have a beta to release, and I needed to get it out to my beta testers this past weekend.

[JJames19119]

I'm posting to notify everyone expecting an Emerald port of this that there will be none. At least, not from me.

No, it isn't that I got lazy or anything, trust me, I tried. Emerald's mechanics are a mess. Everything was reorganized and more over, a lot of vital parts that were changed in Fire Red's code are completely missing in Emerald's code. I tried my best to reverse engineer a lot of it, but I am unskilled in ASM, as all my hacking expertise, if you can call it that, mainly deals with hex editing, something that isn't qualified to make this work for Emerald.

So I'm going to offer my deepest apologies to anyone expecting to see this for Emerald. Trust me, I wanted to get it working for Emerald myself, as a friend of mine really wanted it. But I don't think it's a job that's within my boundaries. Hopefully, someone who's really, really good at ASM can take a whack at it.

[BlackHayate]

Yeh there are some differences between the engines, I haven't looked at the programing but I noticed som differences throughout gameplay, for example: the double kick critical glitch (Double kick thinks its power per hit is 60 when the hit is a critical) doesn't work in FR/LG But Does in Emerald; also interestingly on D,P,Plat with double hit as well.

[Ivee]

@diegoisawesome, can you specify all of the moves you found mistakes on?

[diegoisawesome]

Uh, I found Confusion, for sure. And some around that area as well.
As for others, I can't be sure.

[Pogeygothaxed]

Originally Posted by JJames19119

I'm posting to notify everyone expecting an Emerald port of this that there will be none. At least, not from me.

No, it isn't that I got lazy or anything, trust me, I tried. Emerald's mechanics are a mess. Everything was reorganized and more over, a lot of vital parts that were changed in Fire Red's code are completely missing in Emerald's code. I tried my best to reverse engineer a lot of it, but I am unskilled in ASM, as all my hacking expertise, if you can call it that, mainly deals with hex editing, something that isn't qualified to make this work for Emerald.

So I'm going to offer my deepest apologies to anyone expecting to see this for Emerald. Trust me, I wanted to get it working for Emerald myself, as a friend of mine really wanted it. But I don't think it's a job that's within my boundaries. Hopefully, someone who's really, really good at ASM can take a whack at it.

Emerald always gets the shaft. >: btw, if the "mechanics are reorganized" then how come whenever you open it in a MoveEditor it's in the same order as the other games? Same with effects, etc. I understand they have different offsets, but they still use the same bytes to define what they do and where they are. x_x?

[Xenesis]

Just because the game has the same data tables (which likely get copied and pasted between games) doesn't mean that the game has the same code to read those data tables.

Do recall that Emerald added a bunch of features, fixed some bugs and introduced some new bugs.

[Quilava's Master]

Just wanted to reply here and warn everyone of an error that I get with this patch. Applying James' patch casues an error with Minun. Whenever Minun uses a damage dealing move, such as Quick Attack & Spark, the game freezes. The music plays but the screen just hangs there. I've testes three different roms and the error happened in all three. When a different pokemon uses quick attack or spark nothing goes wrong. Even with Plusle the problem isn't present. I'm not sure who else it affects but I know for a fact it happens with Minun.

[Joshuablevins]

Originally Posted by Pogeygothaxed

Emerald always gets the shaft. >: btw, if the "mechanics are reorganized" then how come whenever you open it in a MoveEditor it's in the same order as the other games? Same with effects, etc. I understand they have different offsets, but they still use the same bytes to define what they do and where they are. x_x?

just because the games mechanics are reorganized doesn't mean that the program will convey it differently

[Joshuablevins]

i also tested the minum problem and it did the same thing for me this cannot be a coincidental error

[bcrobert]

Minun's also the only pokemon with the "Minus" ability. Is it possible that this has something to do with it or is it more likely due to Minun's species? If someone were to keep tooling around Minun's various traits and pointers, they might find something. I would, but I prefer to hack Emerald. So at the moment, I'm just a brainstormer in this matter.

And I'm aware that the ability being related is a strange guess, but it's also a strange glitch. Something about Minun has to be affecting the attack type, as it's incredibly strange that Plusle is unaffected. My theory is that it could be a programming error related to the ability and special/physical attack of Minun (the glitch was probably small enough that Nintendo's developers either missed it or ignored it).

EDIT. And perhaps the game's routine for checking the special attack modifier from "Minus" is different than the routine for "Plus" somehow? I'm just throwing things out there so don't overreact if I'm way off base with this one.

[NintendoBoyDX]

I've searched and found all the places in Ruby code that match the places where Firered is edited by this patch. I applied the same edits hoping to port it, but that failed(go figure). I'm not sure if that's because the ram addresses are different or it uses a couple of different registers in certain spots (r6 for r7, r1 for r2, etc). Anyways, if anyone wants to try or is interested here are the addresses:

http://codepad.org/UmwoSKKN

[linkandzelda]

Ive applied this, and the ability Flash Fire now causes the game to crash when the poke uses a fire move next (the opponent) or perhaps any move.

This, with the Minun bug makes me think something isn't quite flawless here. I'm just saying..

[klemniops]

I played around with this a bit too, and it seems to me that the Minun glitch is definitely caused by the ability Minus. I changed its ability around using YAPE and when I switched it to something other than Minus it worked fine. Except for Flash Fire, as mentioned above; that seems to crash the game if you use a fire-type attack after receiving damage from a fire-type attack, but not before.

This patch should probably be tested with all abilities that react to damage. I'll certainly be doing some of that, since I plan to use this patch for the hack I'm working on (first-time hacker - and poster - here!).

I played around with this a bit too, and it seems to me that the Minun glitch is definitely caused by the ability Minus. I changed its ability around using YAPE and when I switched it to something other than Minus it worked fine. Except for Flash Fire, as mentioned above; that seems to crash the game if you use a fire-type attack after receiving damage from a fire-type attack, but not before.

This patch should probably be tested with all abilities that react to damage. I'll certainly be doing some of that, since I plan to use this patch for the hack I'm working on (first-time hacker - and poster - here!).

Edit: I did a bit of testing with some abilities that I thought might be relevant. Volt Absorb, Water Absorb, Plus, Huge Power, Hustle, and Pure Power all do not crash the game, although with Pure Power I couldn't really tell whether or not the effect actually worked.

[Putin]

That, and the blaringly obvious error that grass- and fire-type STAB moves (or it could be certain Pokemon using STAB, I haven't ascertained yet) cause the game to crash in no$, which I prefer because it can emulate at about twice the speed of VBA.

Around the time you came out with this, I was already working with it in the same way (comparing the Japanese Touhoumon Renkou version and an unpatched Japanese rom), so I may try that again (or take a closer look at what you've taken note of). If I find anything, I will post it here, but you've done pretty much as much as I expected to be able to (get a buggy version working).

To document what I've tested in no$gba:
-Using a fire-type move with charmander causes a crash. Normal has no such effect
-Using grass-type move with Bulbasaur crashes; Normal and fire have no effect
-Using water-type move with Lapras and psychic-type move with Hypno has no effect

So obviously there are some types I haven't checked, and it's possible that it's just Pokemon up to a certain point in the dex.

[Xiber]

The "STAB move"-error does not occur in VBA (though you might already know this) and I tested whether Confusion was regarded physical or not by editing with YAPE (too lazy to check hex) and Squirtle almost OHKOd Bulbasaur with Confusion, with ~5 Attack and ~30 Sp. Atk, therefore I would think Confusion is indeed Special.

I only applied the patch posted by Ivee, so perhaps you applying both patches messed something up.

The freeze with Minun does occur however, but I can deal with that since Minun is kinda redundant... I am not experienced by any means, but I will check some stuff in Hex and see if I can find any obvious things that cause this.

edit:

Further tests: Pure Power seems to not have an effect at all.

[Putin]

Has anybody run into (or had the chance to) on the Touhoumon roms? Such as Pure Power, Flash Fire and Minus not working or causing issues. I know the STAB thing isn't a problem on any emulator with Renko version (which is the rom I was using), but it is possible that the other problems were solved by simply not using those abilities, since everything in Touhoumon is fakemon (sort of). I suppose I'll be looking into that tonight.

As for actually looking at the code involved in this, I haven't had much more chance to look at it, as I've been struggling to fix a variety of problems that cropped up in one of my hacks after an hardware failure (such as everything past about offset E-something, including basically a bunch of FF freespace and about a thousand bytes of actual game mechanics, being overwritten by 00's), which is taking all my time.

[Gamer2020]

Can someone put up the Japanese patch? I don't feel like doing the changes to BPRJ manually just to look into this.

[Putin]

Oh wow, I derped up hard in my previous comment.

If the Japanese hackers figured out how to implement this so far in advance of us, I doubt they'd put up with just working around really dumb problems like what we're having. Probably we just need to find the code where the info for those abilities is accessed in our game and in those games, and perhaps the information for STAB bonus as well, see that, oh, wow, it's different from the original code, and change it ourselves. I doubt it'll take more than a bit of trial-and-error from there to get a fully working patch.

With that said, I guess we should kind of try to figure out what has actually been done here, in ASM. Just maybe later. To paraphrase Bacon, science should be done in pursuit of practicality.

Originally Posted by Gamer2020

Can someone put up the Japanese patch? I don't feel like doing the changes to BPRJ manually just to look into this.

Hang on, I'll make a patch and edit my post.

EDIT:
Sorry, I'm still getting the hang of using Linux again.
http://www.mediafire.com/?q4zhxnh2gndua2s
I did the patch on BPRE 1.0 so that anybody else interested doesn't need to find BPRJ.

[Amabane~*]

I found the ROMs of Touhoumon Emerald on my PC, normal & DPSS versions. So, I made a pair of IPS patches from them. Feel free to use it to improve the DPSS FR patch, AND make an Emerald version too:

http://www.mediafire.com/?z4ckut6o2yi6gcx

Remember it to use it on a Japanese Emerald ROM. Sorry if I can't help more, but good luck for you all on the hacking works!