About 3 weeks ago I completely accidentally activated key item underflow in my gameplay of pokemon crystal. I could not replicate it and had no idea how I achieved it, but it resulted in me having so many different items and a literal neverending inventory..
After about 20 years later, I finally get an explanation on why when my save file in my Gold version bugged out it plopped me in the middle of Saffron City on the previous save file that I thought I had deleted when I made a new game, interesting.
Thanks, I've put a lot of work into learning new addons and techniques in After Effects, this was my first video where the entire timeline was done with AE compositions.
Underflow is fairly easy to achieve in the much more broken gen 1 games. They set out to find a way to do something similar to achieve underflow in gen 2. It's much more difficult, but possible a little earlier.
@@stuartdparnell No. It adds 128 to your 6th item... To a maximum of 255. So if you have 128 or more already it won't do anything. I have no idea why though.
I love the stuff the coin case can do. Would you ever consider a video on just glitches you can do with coin case? Like getting celebi and all that stuff?
Or how you can use box manipulation on Virtual Console to generate Bank-legal shinies! I've got a shiny Ho-Oh and a shiny Unbreon through the method and I honestly think it's way cool and a really easy payload for people who are just playing around with ACE for the first time.
12:20: Just a little explanation here: the memory register that keeps track of how many items are in each part of your bag is an "unsigned integer" meaning it can only hold positive values. In this case, the max value possible in the register is 255. So speedrunners are essentially tricking the game into thinking the key items count is -1, but since it's an unsigned integer, it wraps around back to 255.
That's not really why that occurs. The reason is simply the game used 255 (the maximum value for a byte) as the "terminator" (ie end of items) for the item list. There's no actual underflow occuring here per se. When merging two key items together, the quantities are attempted to be merged. However, this doesn't quite work correctly since Key Items are structured with 1 byte per item without a proceeding quantity byte. So for the first egg, the second egg's value is interpreted as the first egg's quantity, then the terminator after the second egg is interpreted as the quantity of the second egg. This means that when the game tries to shift the "remaining" items upwards due to merging those two eggs, it skips over the proper key items terminator. It ends up finding a terminator all the way at the balls pocket, which would be empty at this point. So the balls pocket terminator is shifted upwards... which results in that terminator being placed in the number of items byte, thereby giving 255 items in the balls pocket.
Correct, in this particular case the key items are stored in 1 byte and don't have a byte for quantity, so when you merge them the first egg uses the second eggs byte as its quantity which makes the second egg look for a value for its terminator, which it finds in the balls pocket
Yes, if you check the goals section of my Patreon you'll see what my next long video is. They are a risk to make because if they flop then I'm out a bunch of time and the chance to have put out three or four other videos, but the long narrative videos are my favorite to make for sure.
(1:04) Seven? But, there are eight badges in Kanto as well, and I'm pretty sure you're required to get them all when playing normally. EDIT: Yep, this is an "um ackshually" comment alright.
your explanations and visual assists set you apart -- you are really shoring up your weaknesses and I enjoy all of your videos and the breadth of different video games you cover I really liked your home run derby video :)
It's great to see speedrun history channels give props to the people who found the glitches in the first place. I know I've seen some speedrun videos from events where the runners/commentators namedropped the people that discovered them. It'd be interesting to see a video summarizing different roles that the discoverers can have, such as people who figure out the theories, ones who route the fastest paths through the game, ones who find the best positions/tells for activating the glitches... I'm sure there's others, which is why I'd like to know more about them!
When you calculate a checksum, the real number you would get is far larger than you can store easily in the game. Since the checksum is a smaller number than the true result from all that adding, there must be other save games that end up sharing the same number. There's just no way to assign a unique number to every single possible state you could save the game in.
You don't. The checksum is just a way to make yourself more certain that the save game actually wasn't corrupted. As he explained in the video (let me paraphrase) "due to the checksum mechanism it's easy to create the same checksum with another state"
Yes, the actual oversight, if you could call it that, is that they used a simplistic checksum function that is easy to manipulate. But the Game Boy Color was probably not powerful enough to compute a cryptographically secure hash function like MD5 (the standard at the time), especially on every save. Even MD2, a smaller hash function that’s better suited to 8-bit computers, is significantly more demanding of time and space than the checksum actually used, which literally just adds up the bytes of the save data.
no item dublication? WHAT?!?! Give Item to Pokemon, store Pokemon on PC, change box and start the save, wait a sacond reset without finishing the save, have pokemon with item in team and pokemon in box with item, repeat
How- how do you even find this shit out? Coming up with a specific trainer ID, naming each box specific bullshit, doing the most random stuff in the world and restarting during the saving process at a specific spot- I love this community
I was wondering if you'd mention the instant victory glitch, glad you did at the end. Also after coin case ACE but before current route checksum collision/item underflow, there was another route, using bad clones and type D0 ACE. Probably the worst route in all of Generation 2.
Appreciate all the info. I just use the duplication on my Silver. It works for the 3ds version. But I don’t know if crystal work. Love videos and info like this 😊
Got my sub from saying Kanto properly, love to hear it! Unreal how more gets discovered over the years. The Coin Case Glitch was always fun, so to see another variant is nice!
I remember how I and a group of friends figured out how to dupe pokemon in g/s from scratch. I'm sure it was already well documented at that point but man we were gods (in our little heads) for a few weeks.
Also like, it may have been documented, but this was early Internet era so no one really knew what to look for, most people (i assume your friends as well as mine) found it by accident on their own without having an knowledge how to post or document or explain what they did.
4:20 How did you find these instructions for developers?! Anyway, neat analysis video! Can't wait to see the history of Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal Any%! Thanks for uploading!
I scoured the internet for a gameboy dev manual but all the links I could find were dead, but my friend who had built a gameboy emulator had a link to the quote I used in the video.
"Boost my engagement by thanking people who will never read your appreciation" 😅 I'm not a hater, I just think that's a funny, yet wholesome way to get people to engage. And even my snarking still gets you the intended result so that works too 🤷♂️
You think we were scared of resetting during the save? Once we learned you could dupe Pokémon that’s basically all we did. Haha. Great video nonetheless. Cool to see how far this has come.
I used to type random shit on my game genie for the NES, born with that fuck around find out energy. I can't imagine how y'all figured out your ghost code
Hell yea dude great vid as always! Not trying to pry but I’m just curious how old you are? After that opening king about how Pokémon took over school cafeterias and playgrounds brought back memories of when I was in middle school. Man what a great time to grow up in
@@Abyssoft oh wow you sound a lot younger lol yea I’m 29 and hearing you talk about cafeteria Pokemon brought back so many good memories. Great vid again my dude and looking forward to the next as always! Cheers
Hold up... After you get the eight badges, there's 7 more badges to get AND you get to fight red!? Bruh... I thought I completed gold a long, long time ago... How wrong I was..
item duplication was there! due to the way save files are written to the storage and order of data in them you could make Pokemon hold an item, save, move it to (or from, not sure about details but the general idea should be clear), save again and turn off the power at the right moment, that way the Pokemon and item it held appeared both in your party and the box edit: aaaaand you mention this glitch later in the video
There actually is an item duplication cheat but it runs along a pokemon duplication cheat by making that certain pokemon hold the item you want duplicated
I understood the video very roughly and the part by part , but not the fundamental things and background due to my lack of knowledge and average intelligence. Though I did enjoy this educational video and would like to see it after some studying
Subscribe to my Patreon for sneak peaks at upcoming content and projects in the pipeline!
www.patreon.com/abyssoft
About 3 weeks ago I completely accidentally activated key item underflow in my gameplay of pokemon crystal. I could not replicate it and had no idea how I achieved it, but it resulted in me having so many different items and a literal neverending inventory..
@@storymaster21 a lot u a lot longer u to u the iiiiiiu
Interesting.
How the hell these things figured at the first place,and the steps after?
Thank you casual!
After about 20 years later, I finally get an explanation on why when my save file in my Gold version bugged out it plopped me in the middle of Saffron City on the previous save file that I thought I had deleted when I made a new game, interesting.
I like the gengar floppy disks representing "bad/corrupted" data, very nice detail. Great video, I am sure you'll get far.
mom: "you only 10 minutes of game boy"
boy: "ok ill beat the game"
"Let's battle!"
"I have zero Pokemon."
"Fuck, you win!"
Looks like bringing a gun worked
Pokémon logic lol
I would have assumed this was originally implemented to help with testing the game, but was accidentally left in.
It's most likely there as a failsafe, simce Gen 1 just goes insane if you battle with no Pokémon. @@3rdalbum
“You have to buy 11 antidotes and then stand on a specific tile and drop a potion.”
Sounds like what kids used to say about how to catch Deoxys.
Channel as amazing as ever, but the editing is seriously getting better
Thanks, I've put a lot of work into learning new addons and techniques in After Effects, this was my first video where the entire timeline was done with AE compositions.
@@Abyssoft First video I am seeing from you and I was extremely impressed with the editing. And insane storytelling ability.
I love speed runs that manipulate memory. They're really just incredible that people were able to figure them out.
This video was a blast, how the fuck did they figure this out? Seems insane to me
A very good understanding of the game and low level programming languages
@@Abyssoft personally, my kryptonite is programming, so having it told through Pokémon as the medium was super interesting!
Underflow is fairly easy to achieve in the much more broken gen 1 games. They set out to find a way to do something similar to achieve underflow in gen 2. It's much more difficult, but possible a little earlier.
@@ChrisPierreBacon would you call Missingno 6th item glitch underflow or?
@@stuartdparnell No. It adds 128 to your 6th item... To a maximum of 255. So if you have 128 or more already it won't do anything. I have no idea why though.
I love the stuff the coin case can do. Would you ever consider a video on just glitches you can do with coin case? Like getting celebi and all that stuff?
Maybe as a bonus video for Patreon or my shorts channel
Or maybe a video about some of the most notoriously glitchy places/items in the gen 1-2 games. Like the safari zone
Multiple people have already done videos for those. Try using the coin case glitch to get a Treecko.
Or how you can use box manipulation on Virtual Console to generate Bank-legal shinies! I've got a shiny Ho-Oh and a shiny Unbreon through the method and I honestly think it's way cool and a really easy payload for people who are just playing around with ACE for the first time.
@@Solaceon how easy is that on vc? I just did the shiny ditto thing to get all my gen 2 shinies beside the legendaries
A new Aby video gives me the same excitement as seeing a new Summoning Salt video up.
12:20: Just a little explanation here: the memory register that keeps track of how many items are in each part of your bag is an "unsigned integer" meaning it can only hold positive values. In this case, the max value possible in the register is 255. So speedrunners are essentially tricking the game into thinking the key items count is -1, but since it's an unsigned integer, it wraps around back to 255.
That's not really why that occurs. The reason is simply the game used 255 (the maximum value for a byte) as the "terminator" (ie end of items) for the item list. There's no actual underflow occuring here per se. When merging two key items together, the quantities are attempted to be merged. However, this doesn't quite work correctly since Key Items are structured with 1 byte per item without a proceeding quantity byte. So for the first egg, the second egg's value is interpreted as the first egg's quantity, then the terminator after the second egg is interpreted as the quantity of the second egg. This means that when the game tries to shift the "remaining" items upwards due to merging those two eggs, it skips over the proper key items terminator. It ends up finding a terminator all the way at the balls pocket, which would be empty at this point. So the balls pocket terminator is shifted upwards... which results in that terminator being placed in the number of items byte, thereby giving 255 items in the balls pocket.
Correct, in this particular case the key items are stored in 1 byte and don't have a byte for quantity, so when you merge them the first egg uses the second eggs byte as its quantity which makes the second egg look for a value for its terminator, which it finds in the balls pocket
@@Abyssoft Oh that makes sense. I think? It is actually underflow like I described in gen 1 though.
@@ChrisPierreBacon casualpokeplayer replied with a more detailed explanation above me, it should answer everything
@@Abyssoft I described how it works in gen 1. I (incorrectly) assumed it was the same thing in gen 2. Thanks for the detailed explanation!
Are you considering making more hour long videos? I imagine theyre hard and risky to make, but i really enjoy them. Great videos man
Yes, if you check the goals section of my Patreon you'll see what my next long video is.
They are a risk to make because if they flop then I'm out a bunch of time and the chance to have put out three or four other videos, but the long narrative videos are my favorite to make for sure.
(1:04) Seven? But, there are eight badges in Kanto as well, and I'm pretty sure you're required to get them all when playing normally.
EDIT: Yep, this is an "um ackshually" comment alright.
haha i was about to point this out too!
Loved this! Would really like to see a "History of Pokemon Gold/Silver any%" video! 😀 thanks again for the great video, love your content
dew it
How do they even figure all this out, though?!?!
We'll never know
My best guess is through a hex editor.
the technical knowledge required for this is amazing. but im still in it for glitchless
That was an amazing breakdown! I remember when the Coin Case manipulation was all the rage, crazy to see how far it's all come!
your explanations and visual assists set you apart -- you are really shoring up your weaknesses and I enjoy all of your videos and the breadth of different video games you cover
I really liked your home run derby video :)
It's great to see speedrun history channels give props to the people who found the glitches in the first place. I know I've seen some speedrun videos from events where the runners/commentators namedropped the people that discovered them. It'd be interesting to see a video summarizing different roles that the discoverers can have, such as people who figure out the theories, ones who route the fastest paths through the game, ones who find the best positions/tells for activating the glitches... I'm sure there's others, which is why I'd like to know more about them!
When you calculate a checksum, the real number you would get is far larger than you can store easily in the game. Since the checksum is a smaller number than the true result from all that adding, there must be other save games that end up sharing the same number. There's just no way to assign a unique number to every single possible state you could save the game in.
You don't. The checksum is just a way to make yourself more certain that the save game actually wasn't corrupted.
As he explained in the video (let me paraphrase) "due to the checksum mechanism it's easy to create the same checksum with another state"
Yes, the actual oversight, if you could call it that, is that they used a simplistic checksum function that is easy to manipulate. But the Game Boy Color was probably not powerful enough to compute a cryptographically secure hash function like MD5 (the standard at the time), especially on every save. Even MD2, a smaller hash function that’s better suited to 8-bit computers, is significantly more demanding of time and space than the checksum actually used, which literally just adds up the bytes of the save data.
Perfect writing, explanation, and editing. 10/10 video
this is probably one of the most impressive speedruns for any game
Gold is breaking his own Adventure in Johto by using the Box System 😂
That’s hilarious 😂
Wasn't expecting Danhausen. That was cool.
no item dublication? WHAT?!?! Give Item to Pokemon, store Pokemon on PC, change box and start the save, wait a sacond reset without finishing the save, have pokemon with item in team and pokemon in box with item, repeat
It’s not summoning salt but it made me just as excited 😜
A compliment of the highest regard
8:43 Checksum collision is no oversight. Every hash algorithm is prone to collisions. This is something you cannot avoid.
*Ay, Suprise Danhausen!* _The best kind of Danhausen._
I've said it before and will say it again: the glitch hunters behind this kind of setup are nothing short of wizards
12:32 the WHAT pocket??? :)
Glitch hunters are amazing. It's always astounding to me what they can find.
How- how do you even find this shit out? Coming up with a specific trainer ID, naming each box specific bullshit, doing the most random stuff in the world and restarting during the saving process at a specific spot-
I love this community
15:06 If I saw that as a kid, I would FREAK the hell out. 😂
I was wondering if you'd mention the instant victory glitch, glad you did at the end. Also after coin case ACE but before current route checksum collision/item underflow, there was another route, using bad clones and type D0 ACE. Probably the worst route in all of Generation 2.
Everyone from 90’s thing about how fucking cool you would be had you had this info back then
Love Jenny’s checksum at 6:30. Just missing the 9...
it's so weird to me that naming the trainer GOLD is actually like, integral to the trick. Gold is a time manipulator confirmed?
It's not actually. It's just done as it is faster in this case than a custom name, although a custom name wouldn't break the trick.
A custom name may theoretically lead to the same checksum, which would break your setup, but that is very unlikely.
@@CasualPokePlayer awe I am sad now
Appreciate all the info. I just use the duplication on my Silver. It works for the 3ds version. But I don’t know if crystal work. Love videos and info like this 😊
Got my sub from saying Kanto properly, love to hear it! Unreal how more gets discovered over the years. The Coin Case Glitch was always fun, so to see another variant is nice!
I remember how I and a group of friends figured out how to dupe pokemon in g/s from scratch. I'm sure it was already well documented at that point but man we were gods (in our little heads) for a few weeks.
Also like, it may have been documented, but this was early Internet era so no one really knew what to look for, most people (i assume your friends as well as mine) found it by accident on their own without having an knowledge how to post or document or explain what they did.
@@Dkgow True we didn't even have internet at home yet
Really well done video, especially like the improved sidejokes and musicbackground selection :) everything else was top notch as well
4:20 How did you find these instructions for developers?!
Anyway, neat analysis video! Can't wait to see the history of Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal Any%! Thanks for uploading!
I scoured the internet for a gameboy dev manual but all the links I could find were dead, but my friend who had built a gameboy emulator had a link to the quote I used in the video.
@@Abyssoft Neat! Thanks for answering!
@@sagacious03 Nintendo developer documentation is out there, it's just not always very easy to track down.
The GameBoy is a pretty interesting and easy-to understand architecture to get started with Z80 assembly.
The little mustache on the corrupted save
"Boost my engagement by thanking people who will never read your appreciation" 😅
I'm not a hater, I just think that's a funny, yet wholesome way to get people to engage. And even my snarking still gets you the intended result so that works too 🤷♂️
Now i need an explanation of how the heck did people figured this all put...
great video, great runs...
luckytyphlosion is also a member of the mario kart wii community! Great guy.
It’s crazy to me someone actually figured this out. Wild.
I don't even know how you explained all this hyper complex stuff so casually and simply, it's amazing content, great work.
With some help from the fantastic team that discovered it
You explained everything so well. Thankyou.
Wow, kudos to the speedrunners and glitch hunters for this run! This is incredibly complex stuff :0
As both a glitch hunter and world record holding speed runner, I can appreciate this
Being able to play Pokemon without having to do any of those annoying battles sounds like a good idea to me.
0:59 slight error, you said 7 more badges when there are 8 in Kanto to get, still done in glitchless.
"he's beginning to believe." - Morpheus
I should try this. Back in the day i used to beat pokemon yellow in under a minite in game time. This seems similar
You think we were scared of resetting during the save?
Once we learned you could dupe Pokémon that’s basically all we did. Haha.
Great video nonetheless.
Cool to see how far this has come.
Love your content!
The Speedrun is so fast that it takes longer to explain how it works than to actually do it yourself XD
Even looking at this from the view of a Software Engineer this shit is still mind blowing how these incredible individuals found these glitches.
Not really.
Maybe someone from the developers
intended it to be
A ridle
He was curious if anyone could figure it out
man do I love such videos
I used to type random shit on my game genie for the NES, born with that fuck around find out energy. I can't imagine how y'all figured out your ghost code
To think they beat that game in 7:59 is completely insane
I cannot wrap my head around how someone could figure this out
BRUH! 5 hundredths of a second from NOT being a sub 8 run? RNJesus is real xD
9:24 , Bless your souls Abyssoft. Very nice, very evil
i thoroughly appreciate the skillz.
Hell yea dude great vid as always! Not trying to pry but I’m just curious how old you are? After that opening king about how Pokémon took over school cafeterias and playgrounds brought back memories of when I was in middle school. Man what a great time to grow up in
31, I'm an elder millenial
@@Abyssoft oh wow you sound a lot younger lol yea I’m 29 and hearing you talk about cafeteria Pokemon brought back so many good memories. Great vid again my dude and looking forward to the next as always! Cheers
don't underestimate duct tape - or glitchhunters
besides loving the explanation, I appreciate the taste in memes, since you know AEW's Danhausen ;D
Nice video!
While you where watching this video, the speedrunners finished Pokemon gold twice
Im playing pokemon black. I got every shiny pokemon . Completes the pokedex. Now im going to collect badges and play the game the way I always WANTED.
Greetings from Finland!
This is incredible, thanks for sharing 🤘🏿
What an incredible story!!!!!!!!
Truly amazing!!!!!!!!!
Dude good stuff
Pfff in the time this video takes to watch, I can finish Pokémon Gold TWICE
Because of the Danhausen reference, you, sir, get a like.
I wouldn't even consider this a speed run, this is entirely glitching
Thanks for breaking the game!
That feeling when the explained video takes longer than the run.
My dude purposely did 867530 to bait people
Gamefreak makes it so 0 pokemon trainers can't lose fights and speedrunners abuse that to beat Red. This is why we can't have nice things.
I'd rather watch hours straight of 100% glitchless runs, as entertaining as the explanation and the process may be.
Hold up... After you get the eight badges, there's 7 more badges to get AND you get to fight red!? Bruh... I thought I completed gold a long, long time ago...
How wrong I was..
Are you for real?
item duplication was there! due to the way save files are written to the storage and order of data in them you could make Pokemon hold an item, save, move it to (or from, not sure about details but the general idea should be clear), save again and turn off the power at the right moment, that way the Pokemon and item it held appeared both in your party and the box
edit: aaaaand you mention this glitch later in the video
There actually is an item duplication cheat but it runs along a pokemon duplication cheat by making that certain pokemon hold the item you want duplicated
Im learning coding this is inspiring
Seems unreal but holy cow! Awesome sauce
It's kinda fitting the pc is used to glitch the game.
I wish I was smart enough to figure all that out and be able to do it just for my own emusment and fun.
A wild Danhausen appeared!
Wow fascinating!
Great work, glitchhounds!
I understood the video very roughly and the part by part , but not the fundamental things and background due to my lack of knowledge and average intelligence. Though I did enjoy this educational video and would like to see it after some studying
I have no idea how this happened to me but I was so close to completing the Pokédex in Crystal as a kid and my save corrupted 😭😭
takes almost 20 mins to explain an 8 min run, as the way it should be.
How do people figure this out? Someone within the dev team had to of built these things in and leaked the secret. These glitches are oddly specific.