Research: Custom Pokémon Global Link Musical Songs

[Spiky-Eared Pichu]

Hello all! If you have ever played Pokémon Black or White an accessed the Global Link, you'll sure know there's downloadable content for your game. You can download:

• C-Gear Skins
• Pokédex Skins
• Pokémon Musical Songs

You can download up to three things at the same time (one of each). If you try to add a second one, the previous one disappears.


I'm now focusing on the third (Musical Songs). So, how does the cart handle the content? It's easy. Here's an explanation:

1. The musical is chosen on the Pokémon GL website.
2. On the next sync, the website communicates with the cart and checks its donwloaded content.
3. The sleeping Pokémon is enabled/disabled on the website and the cart.
4. If the musical in the cart matches the one selected online, it jumps to step 5. If it's different, the website sends a NARC file to the cart with the musical contents.
5. The sync ends.

You may be wondering, where's that NARC stored if a ROM can't be modified? The answer is simple: inside the saved game. The saved game has free read/write space, so that's logical.


The NARC archive contains 6 files. The first three are unknown (maybe musical name and settings?), but the other three are a SSEQ, a SBNK and a SWAR, generic Nitro Composer files.


Knowing this, creating custom musical songs and inserting them to saved games would be really easy. However, I don't know everything about how it is set, so I would need people to download musicals from the Global Link, extract the NARC (by hex it's simple) and tell what do they have. We currently need (I already have a "Charming Munna" NARC):

• Japanese "Pokémon Smash!" musical
• Japanese "Carnival Pokémon" musical
• American/European "Carnival Pokémon" musical

This will be enough to discover if musicals are region-locked and a first step to custom Pokémon Musicals.