[Other] How the flip do I edit Missingno.?

[cultistofvertigo]

First of all, let just say thank you so much to the admins here at pokecommunity for running a great board that actually bothers to send activation emails. You tend to take those for granted until the day you end up on some backwash, nonsense RPG Maker XP board whose admins don't even have a valid email address.

I have a dream-game I've wanted to play for many years now (try since 2001), and thats a pokemon game with at least SNES caliber graphics on a console. Now, thanks to a neato Visual Boy I can play on a Wii, that dream is almost a reality, but there are alot of road blocks, and not to overwhelm you guys or anything, but just in case anyone can help with absolutely anything, i'm going to list them all:

1. the GBA pokemon games are split into two groups: pokemon and some flipping nonsense called ruby and sapphire that felt as though it needed to add Yog-Sothoth as a pokemon because Mewtwo is no longer cool enough I guess.
2. The real pokemon games, fire red and leaf green, are almost perfect in every way but for a few details, these are:
3. Missingno. has been beyond nerfed by nintendo because they refuse to acknowledge that a game can have a life outside of them, and try to keep anyone from catching him. His sprites, states, types, and everything else OTHER THAN POKEDEX NUMBER have been changed.
4. No Mew Glitch, no normally obtainable Mew. Not worth playing for this and Missingno alone, but theres more:
5. The secret islands with GS pokemon exclude a few of the early leaked GS ones that I really liked. Minor, yes, but if I can fix 'M and Mew, I can fix this.
6. Rayquaza showing up in SSBB really improved my opinion of him. So much, in fact, that as long as I was editing pokemon, I might as well take 252-255 and put Ray and those other couple in there and replace the Deoxys event with him.

These were a few of the edits I needed to make, but I'm not done yet:

7. If i'm going to hack a rom for the Wii-Visual Boy directly, I am entirely at the mercy of what programs are available for doing this, and those programs are mostly unreliable and split between the two types of of Advance pokemon games, this means
8. That some programs that work like a snow day for FRLG do wonders for RSE, and vice versa, but the majority of working, reliable apps i've downloaded are specifically for RSE, so that I at one point decided to just remake FRLG on ruby, BUT
9. Regardless of small victories, I can never edit the few simple things that were the only reason I began trying to hack in the first place, Missingno., Mew, etc. AND
10. Using a rom creates a whole new set of problems that are just as touch and go as normal pokemon editing, like I have to change all the pokemon that evolve through trade, elliminate version differences, etc.

Now, apparently I'm the odd guy out here, because when I think "pokemon advance hacking" the very first thing i think of is, what should be obvious, the very first pokemon, number 000, Missingno., but:

11. The only hacking tool I've been able to access Missingno. on is PokeTronic, which is a good, reliable program, but it changes nothing that I need.

So the biggest problem here is that even with advance map, I can't put down the only permanent ????? in the wild, edit stats, etc. Even this might be gotten around if I had a pokedex editor that could put a no.256 Missingno. at 000 in a pokedex, but, of course,

12. The only such tool I could find is completely useless.

I haven't even begun to talk about the nonsense with the RPG Maker XP thing. And I don't want to go on with this any further.

At any point in reading this laundry list of going back and forth between nonsense things have any of you come up with an idea that might help me play a normal game of GBA Pokemon with all 152 originals catchable and some neat GS with nothing above 255 (you know what I mean), then please speak up. I'm hoping that maybe one guy will have something to say about even just one thing that might help.

On the other hand, if anyone has heard of a hacked VBA rom that is literally just FRLG with a catchable Mew and old-school (water gun, water gun, sky attack, pound) Missingno. already available, then that would just solve all my problems then and there.

Most of all, thanks to everyone who actually took the time to read all that nonsense. I'm not trying to add 500 original pokemon or anything, but all is takes is one stupid glitch to make playing this dream game of mine almost impossible. I've been at this a while and it's kinda a big deal for me, since I really liked playing pokemon back in the day. My team was always Venusaur, Missingno., Mew, Dragonite, Porygon, and Gengar, and I can't really experience that on one of these new-fangled game machines with the terrible Decamark laughing at me the whole time. So... now i've run out of things to say.

Thanks in advance,
POKEMON advance,
C.O.V.

 

[MegaMaccer]

Anyway, onto your question. Due to Missingo being a glitch of the colour games, it wouldn't really be possible to re-create him in the fire red, unless of course you made a sprite of him and inserted him as a new pokemon, with new stats and all. Its all very easy, believe me. You could go the whole hog, and replace Unown with him, and have different pictures to replace every Unown. If you didn't want twenty four different glitch pokemon, you could always replace six or seven Unown with the same sprite, which would cut down the difference they showed up. Then you could also make the appearance rate extremely low, and only put him in certain areas of the region, where you choose. Its up to you, it would mean losing Unown, but you'd gain all the glitch pokemon, or close enough to, anyway. There will probably be a way to re-create the Unown appearnce system, so you wouldn't have to replace anyone, but just use the twenty five empty slots. I have no idea how it would work, but it could probably be done. You'd have to talk to someone with more knowledge about that than me though ^^ I hope I helped in some way~
P.S. Excellent post, it was really well thought out ^^

 

[Wichu]

As far as I know, it's impossible to recreate the Mew glitch the same way as it was in R/B/Y... It might be possible in RPG Maker, since you can change the underlying game code, but with a ROM hack, your options are more limited. You could always make use of the truck near the S.S. Anne, and recreate one of the rumours... I don't think it would be too hard to put an event there which would let you get Mew.
Same goes for having Water Gun twice. I think that the game would try to correct it, and you'd end up with a single Water Gun... But I think this is possible with ASM. The shiny hack uses ASM to check whether a flag is activated, and turns all Pokémon shiny by modifying their stats as you encounter them... It should be possible to do something similar, and add a second Water Gun if the wild Pokémon is a Missingno.. I have no idea how it would behave if you caught it, though.
And yes, your best option for adding Missingno. would be to replace an existing Pokémon. But if you did that, I guess it would no longer have the Pokédex number of 0... If you can figure out what the programs do, you could edit the Pokémon at slot 0 manually, with a hex editor. Same for encounters etc.

PS. I don't think original Missingno. knew Pound.

 

[HackMew]

As far as I know, it's impossible to recreate the Mew glitch the same way as it was in R/B/Y... It might be possible in RPG Maker, since you can change the underlying game code, but with a ROM hack, your options are more limited. You could always make use of the truck near the S.S. Anne, and recreate one of the rumours... I don't think it would be too hard to put an event there which would let you get Mew.
Same goes for having Water Gun twice. I think that the game would try to correct it, and you'd end up with a single Water Gun... But I think this is possible with ASM. The shiny hack uses ASM to check whether a flag is activated, and turns all Pokémon shiny by modifying their stats as you encounter them... It should be possible to do something similar, and add a second Water Gun if the wild Pokémon is a Missingno.. I have no idea how it would behave if you caught it, though.
And yes, your best option for adding Missingno. would be to replace an existing Pokémon. But if you did that, I guess it would no longer have the Pokédex number of 0... If you can figure out what the programs do, you could edit the Pokémon at slot 0 manually, with a hex editor. Same for encounters etc.

PS. I don't think original Missingno. knew Pound.

With a hack you're options aren't more limited. That's what ASM hacking is for, since you can change the underlying game code. Making a Mew obtainable is far easier than recreating the trainer glitch in R/B/Y, of course. And I don't think the game would be smart enough to "correct" a double attack. Also, MissingNo. is still there, entry #000. It even has it's own PokéDex entry. And yes, the original did know Pound. Some tools aren't good, I know. But you can always use a hex editor.

 

[Wichu]

Fair enough. But ASM is much harder to get to grips with than standard programming; that could be thought of as a limitation. It would take you longer to get the same results. Out of interest, do you think you, or anybody else you know, could recreate the Mew glitch in FR/LG? I'm pretty sure I could do it in RPG Maker, but I'd have no idea on how to get it to work in a ROM hack. The tricky bit would probably be allowing the player to Fly or Teleport right before a trainer battle; after that, getting the last Pokémon you fought's Special Attack/Defense stat and modifying the map change routine to spawn a wild Pokémon wouldn't be as difficult (assuming you can find the correct routines). But then, I don't really know much about ASM, so I probably made it sound too easy :P I'm just going off what I know about programming to infer how it works.
I'm pretty sure that when creating a wild Pokémon's movepool, it omits any moves it already knows... For example, Kakuna's level-up moves are Harden, at level 1, and Harden again at level 7. When you find a wild Kakuna at level 7 or higher, it doesn't know Harden twice... To get two Water Guns, you'd have to manipulate the Pokémon data with ASM when you encounter a Missingno..
Finally, Missingno. didn't learn Pound; the glitch Pokémon sometimes called 'M did. They're pretty similar, so I can see why you said that.

 

[HackMew]

Fair enough. But ASM is much harder to get to grips with than standard programming; that could be thought of as a limitation. It would take you longer to get the same results. Out of interest, do you think you, or anybody else you know, could recreate the Mew glitch in FR/LG? I'm pretty sure I could do it in RPG Maker, but I'd have no idea on how to get it to work in a ROM hack. The tricky bit would probably be allowing the player to Fly or Teleport right before a trainer battle; after that, getting the last Pokémon you fought's Special Attack/Defense stat and modifying the map change routine to spawn a wild Pokémon wouldn't be as difficult (assuming you can find the correct routines). But then, I don't really know much about ASM, so I probably made it sound too easy :P I'm just going off what I know about programming to infer how it works.
I'm pretty sure that when creating a wild Pokémon's movepool, it omits any moves it already knows... For example, Kakuna's level-up moves are Harden, at level 1, and Harden again at level 7. When you find a wild Kakuna at level 7 or higher, it doesn't know Harden twice... To get two Water Guns, you'd have to manipulate the Pokémon data with ASM when you encounter a Missingno..
Finally, Missingno. didn't learn Pound; the glitch Pokémon sometimes called 'M did. They're pretty similar, so I can see why you said that.

Much harder? Well, the main difference is that what you mean for programming is high level programming. Where you have all possible niceties. ASM instead is low level programming. You write code that's directly executed by the CPU. That doesn't mean that using a high level language is a joke of course. I don't know if I could recreate the glitch the exact same way it worked on the old games, but I could always try. Not that I'm that interested. Getting two Water Guns is the easiest part IMHO. Regarding Pound... well... "MissingNo." itself is pretty generic as there are many variants. No one can say which is the "true" one or something.

 

[NatureKeeper]

It's quite impossible to remake a color generation game on the original GB to the GBA. The 'glitchy' method of obtaining Mew is called tweaking. And FRLG's programming is far different from RBY's, so they do not have the same glitches. However, you could script them as intentional events, though.

As for 'Missingno.' He's no longer missingno, as a fact, missingno was a glitch in color and metal games. In GameBoy Advance, he's basically nothing. He has a proper sprite, a Pokédex entry, moveset, and everything, however, It's still out of the Pokédex, so it's quite pointless to edit it, because it:

No.1: When you catch it, it dissappears in the PC or disguise as the dangerous bad egg which freezes the game.

No.2: It faints after staying one turn in the field, and disappears forever, again.

So, If you want to change everything, use ASM or Hex Editing. We are no longer capable of helpingf you. ???????? is a GLITCH! It has proper dex, proper move and everything but it is more like called: (The party without presence of POKéMON.)

 

[Corvus of the Black Night]

Actually, what you could do is that you could do a simple series of flags based off of a simple ASM routine that grabs the Sp. Attack of the first Pokemon in your party, then stores it in a certain variable. If that variable comes out to be the same number in the tweaking trick, it could set a flag, that when you fly from there to Lavender Town, it would set off a script for Mew.

You'd have to make it though that the code resets if you fly anywhere else; i.e make a clearflag script in all of the level scripts of flyable areas in Kanto (namely the cities/towns)

For Missingno., you could generate a scripted encounter that has an ASM routine that buffers your sixth item in your item pocket, then simply give a ton of that one item (x129).

 

[HackMew]

Actually, what you could do is that you could do a simple series of flags based off of a simple ASM routine that grabs the Sp. Attack of the first Pokemon in your party, then stores it in a certain variable. If that variable comes out to be the same number in the tweaking trick, it could set a flag, that when you fly from there to Lavender Town, it would set off a script for Mew.

You'd have to make it though that the code resets if you fly anywhere else; i.e make a clearflag script in all of the level scripts of flyable areas in Kanto (namely the cities/towns)

For Missingno., you could generate a scripted encounter that has an ASM routine that buffers your sixth item in your item pocket, then simply give a ton of that one item (x129).

Yeah, indeed. Nice to see someone not using the word "impossible" for once. Anything is possible, as long as it's within the GBA limits, given enough effort.