Is PGE safe to use?

Hello, so while using PGE I have noticed it does weird, unwanted things to your ROM... I'm not sure how malicious the program is but here is what I recorded just doing a simple change (changing Torchic, Combusken, Blaziken ability from Blaze to Speed Boost/Blaze)

1) It does the change we want which is change the ability, great
2) However, at adress 450C50 in FR there is text 'YOUNG FOWL'. For some reason PGE changes the last 2 letters to 'space n'
So essentially... 'YOUNG FOWL' becomes 'YOUNG FO n'.
3) At adress 450C74 there is text for BLAZE, after this text there is 00 00 00 00 00 00, PGE changes this likeso: 00 00 FE FF 00 00
4) At adress 450CA0 there is text for MUD FISH, this text ends with FF but PGE changes this FF to 03...
Which makes me think the game could crash if this text ever were to appear in-game because the game wouldn't know when to stop because there's no FF to break the code after the text...

In short, to me PGE esp the Pokemon Editor seems very risky to use!!

Sakakii said:

Hello, so while using PGE I have noticed it does weird, unwanted things to your ROM... I'm not sure how malicious the program is but here is what I recorded just doing a simple change (changing Torchic, Combusken, Blaziken ability from Blaze to Speed Boost/Blaze)

1) It does the change we want which is change the ability, great
2) However, at adress 450C50 in FR there is text 'YOUNG FOWL'. For some reason PGE changes the last 2 letters to 'space n'
So essentially... 'YOUNG FOWL' becomes 'YOUNG FO n'.
3) At adress 450C74 there is text for BLAZE, after this text there is 00 00 00 00 00 00, PGE changes this likeso: 00 00 FE FF 00 00
4) At adress 450CA0 there is text for MUD FISH, this text ends with FF but PGE changes this FF to 03...
Which makes me think the game could crash if this text ever were to appear in-game because the game wouldn't know when to stop because there's no FF to break the code after the text...

In short, to me PGE esp the Pokemon Editor seems very risky to use!!

Click to expand...

I've found PGE to be very risky, and so have a lot of other ROM hackers. If I remember correctly even the creator himself said that it's not completely safe. Try using G3HS's PKMN editor instead, I've had better results with less bugs.

This post triggered my alert. Oh boy here we go.

Sakakii said:

Hello, so while using PGE I have noticed it does weird, unwanted things to your ROM... I'm not sure how malicious the program is but here is what I recorded just doing a simple change (changing Torchic, Combusken, Blaziken ability from Blaze to Speed Boost/Blaze)

1) It does the change we want which is change the ability, great
2) However, at adress 450C50 in FR there is text 'YOUNG FOWL'. For some reason PGE changes the last 2 letters to 'space n'
So essentially... 'YOUNG FOWL' becomes 'YOUNG FO n'.
3) At adress 450C74 there is text for BLAZE, after this text there is 00 00 00 00 00 00, PGE changes this likeso: 00 00 FE FF 00 00
4) At adress 450CA0 there is text for MUD FISH, this text ends with FF but PGE changes this FF to 03...
Which makes me think the game could crash if this text ever were to appear in-game because the game wouldn't know when to stop because there's no FF to break the code after the text...

In short, to me PGE esp the Pokemon Editor seems very risky to use!!

Click to expand...

Strange, no one has ever reported an issue like that. I would make sure that you are using the latest PGE from the official source and of course the correct rom dump.

PGE hasn't been posted on this site for years. Currently minimal support is being offered here. Feel free to post on there and we'll try to figure out what is going on. I'll see if I can confirm your findings after dinner.

Also please keep in mind that while I'm not actively updating PGE it is open source and I am currently looking for someone to hand it off to. If there is in fact an issue and it is a quick fix, I may fix it.

Thoriére said:

I've found PGE to be very risky, and so have a lot of other ROM hackers. If I remember correctly even the creator himself said that it's not completely safe. Try using G3HS's PKMN editor instead, I've had better results with less bugs.

Click to expand...

Wow, that is one of the most misinformed things I have read since Trump met with the President of the Virgin Islands. The creator has never said any such thing, I should know.

G3HS is an incomplete imitator program that the creator eventually abandoned. Unfortunately, there are several data tables and new findings that G3HS wasn't coded to handle; so much so that G3HS even breaks compatibility with PGE and can cause weird stuff as well.

We should be moving to disassemblies anyway people!

Gamer2020 said:

Wow, that is one of the most misinformed things I have read since Trump met with the President of the Virgin Islands. The creator has never said any such thing, I should know.

G3HS is an incomplete imitator program that the creator eventually abandoned. Unfortunately, there are several data tables and new findings that G3HS wasn't coded to handle; so much so that G3HS even breaks compatibility with PGE and can cause weird stuff as well.

We should be moving to disassemblies anyway people!

Click to expand...

I've never experienced issues with G3HS but PGE completely broke my entire ROM :thinking:

BirdstarCat13 said:

I've never experienced issues with G3HS but PGE completely broke my entire ROM :thinking:

Click to expand...

As I've already pointed out to you, G3HS most likely broke your ROM.

Gamer2020 said:

Wow, that is one of the most misinformed things I have read since Trump met with the President of the Virgin Islands. The creator has never said any such thing, I should know.

G3HS is an incomplete imitator program that the creator eventually abandoned. Unfortunately, there are several data tables and new findings that G3HS wasn't coded to handle; so much so that G3HS even breaks compatibility with PGE and can cause weird stuff as well.

We should be moving to disassemblies anyway people!

Click to expand...

Then I have to apologize to you. I've been away from here for a while (was last hacking when people were really into G3HS) and only came back about a week ago -- upon my return I ran PGE briefly on an older version of my hack, one that I just scrapped because of bugs in favor of working from the ground up, and I haven't tried it on the new one because I saw someone say that you (the creator) had warned that it was an unstable program. It's on me to verify that information, though, and I didn't, and I'm sorry for spreading misinformation. It was careless of me.

Well, it keeps doing weird things, I've noticed because I now do file compares after every change and it lets me see exactly what bytes the program changed, and while it does change the bytes it needs to to do the desired change to the ROM, it also does other unwanted things, some of them seem pretty dangerous. These are my findings, if you GAMER2020 could confirm it, that'd be great...

Sakakii said:

Well, it keeps doing weird things, I've noticed because I now do file compares after every change and it lets me see exactly what bytes the program changed, and while it does change the bytes it needs to to do the desired change to the ROM, it also does other unwanted things, some of them seem pretty dangerous. These are my findings, if you GAMER2020 could confirm it, that'd be great...

Click to expand...

I'll follow up with you in the PGE support thread. I don't really check this site other then alerts.

I took a look last night and it only seems to miswrite the pokedex species name and only on Fire Red. Nothing game breaking at all. The game wouldn't load anything past the character limit for that.

I've always preferred Emerald over Fire Red anyway. But like I said, we should be moving to dissassemblies.

Personally, I find Gen 3 Tools (G3T) and D&D work best for me. No noticeable bugs found there. PGE may have some text bugs, but I think its real flaw, like most rom hacking tools, is its error handling (as in there is none). A real way to improve the tool would be to provide a notification of why an error is being caused rather than just showing an unhandled exception error.

Gamer2020 said:

But like I said, we should be moving to disassemblies.

Click to expand...

Although this may seem like the best course of action for you, its an opinion that's not shared by most of the Rom Hacking community. Most casual hackers want a quick and easy way to open up a rom and modify it. Plus, there are way more tutorials out there for casual hacking than there are for disassemblies.

Noodlewhiz said:

Personally, I find Gen 3 Tools (G3T) and D&D work best for me. No noticeable bugs found there. PGE may have some text bugs, but I think its real flaw, like most rom hacking tools, is its error handling (as in there is none). A real way to improve the tool would be to provide a notification of why an error is being caused rather than just showing an unhandled exception error.

Click to expand...

PGE generates an errors.txt file...

Noodlewhiz said:

Although this may seem like the best course of action for you, its an opinion that's not shared by most of the Rom Hacking community. Most casual hackers want a quick and easy way to open up a rom and modify it. Plus, there are way more tutorials out there for casual hacking than there are for disassemblies.

Click to expand...

This is a mindset that needs to be moved away from. Only then can we accomplish great things.

Gamer2020 said:

I'll follow up with you in the PGE support thread. I don't really check this site other then alerts.

I took a look last night and it only seems to miswrite the pokedex species name and only on Fire Red. Nothing game breaking at all. The game wouldn't load anything past the character limit for that.

Click to expand...

Ok nevermind I re-read your post I understand now. So these changes that PGE has been doing are nothing game-breaking, that's all I need to hear! Thank you!!

Gamer2020 said:

As I've already pointed out to you, G3HS most likely broke your ROM.

Click to expand...

No, you actually never pointed that out. I didn't use G3HS until AFTER PGE completely destroyed the entire thing, and I've been using G3HS on one of my backups with 0 issues. Going back to the same backup with PGE? Performs even worse than before. I've done plenty of other experimenting that has proven that PGE is completely useless. Don't even try to tell me that I said anything about using G3HS on your forum because I explicitly said I was using G3T, which is, in fact, *the* most stable Pokémon editor to date.

Sakakii said:

Ok nevermind I re-read your post I understand now. So these changes that PGE has been doing are nothing game-breaking, that's all I need to hear! Thank you!!

Click to expand...

Thank you for pointing this out. While not game breaking this should still be fixed. I will do my best to address this but I am currently invested in other projects. In the future please use the official support thread.

BirdstarCat13 said:

No, you actually never pointed that out. I didn't use G3HS until AFTER PGE completely destroyed the entire thing, and I've been using G3HS on one of my backups with 0 issues. Going back to the same backup with PGE? Performs even worse than before. I've done plenty of other experimenting that has proven that PGE is completely useless. Don't even try to tell me that I said anything about using G3HS on your forum because I explicitly said I was using G3T, which is, in fact, *the* most stable Pokémon editor to date.

Click to expand...

Pleased stop posting in someone else's thread about your issue.

Please see below for where you said you used G3HS.

https://i.imgur.com/TGgc5rn.png

As I have told you in the proper thread support is voided due to using this tool. This is because G3HS breaks compatibility!

I've also told you that the issue needs to be reproducible on a clean ROM. You haven't even provided steps for the exact changes that allegedly break the ROM. Without this, nothing can be done!

Gamer2020 said:

Thank you for pointing this out. While not game breaking this should still be fixed. I will do my best to address this but I am currently invested in other projects. In the future please use the official support thread.


Pleased stop posting in someone else's thread about your issue.

Please see below for where you said you used G3HS.

https://i.imgur.com/TGgc5rn.png

As I have told you in the proper thread support is voided due to using this tool. This is because G3HS breaks compatibility!

I've also told you that the issue needs to be reproducible on a clean ROM. You haven't even provided steps for the exact changes that allegedly break the ROM. Without this, nothing can be done!

Click to expand...

Okay, now you've proven you're just blind at this point. I didn't say I used the damn program, simply opening the file with the program doesn't modify it in any way, and I NEVER opened my ROM with G3HS until after PGE broke it, as a last-ditch effort to see if I could use G3HS to salvage it, since it would have been too tedious with G3T. If you'd actually read the thread I linked you to on your thread, instead of just deleting the link, you'd see all the details.