So what you're telling me is that the real shape of glitch pokemon is impossible to be processed by the gameboy. They're literal eldritch abominations.
Plus some of them can learn a move known as Super Glitch. It's name is blank so it goes by that. I suggest watching a video of it in action. It's a perfect move for an Eldritch Abomination and very interesting.
Missigno is actually a irl animal and the universe doesn't know how to awnser it, that's why it's a "type bird" the pokémon universe just doesn't know what a "bird" is and missigno (a bird) somehow made into that universe
I wanna hear it. It sounds like it could be interesting. There is one very creepy glitch pokemon known as “♀ .” Which takes the form of an 80 foot tall blood spire surrounded by pure darkness that emits an eerie tune when encountered. Also random tidbit but My personal favourite creepypasta is unown king.
That's the human brain for you. Our object recognition and permeance skills are so good that they're often better than our eyesight. This leads to over compensation from the brain as it almost always assumes what the eyes are looking at is a logical shape. There's no actual Pokémon sprite data in it, as the location in memory it reads from is far outside the bounds of where the sprites are held.
There isn't actually any sort of pokemon design in it, but it would be cool to see some fanart interpretations of what it might look like if there was.
so few people on here actually do caption their videos, especially egregious when it comes to bigger creators with bigger platforms & more resources, so it's always wonderful to find channels where the people running them go that extra mile to make their videos more accessible. My auditory processing disorder is super thankful for this.
I probably wouldn't have gone in the direction of supporting sprite placement in up to a 256x2048px area for a system with a 160x144px screen resolution, but where would the fun in that be?
I'm really interested in the fact that Tentacruel, Magnemite, Bulbasaur, and Bulbasaur/Human hybrid sprites turn up more or less comprehensible among the glitches by doing this, often multiple times.
All pokemon past Bulbasaur ($99) occupy the same sprite bank, including glitch pokemon. so a hybrid of one of those pokemon would have the same sprite as its normal counterpart. the corrupted Bulbasaur sprite is a result of the game loading the coordinates for Dodrio's sprite, which occupies the same position in its intended sprite bank. in foreign versions there are other hybrid pokemon with unusual sprites - Green has a jolteon hybrid that looks like the pokemon tower ghost because the coordinates for jolteon happen to be in the same place as the ghost. and some of the european versions have a growlithe hybrid that looks like bulbasaur!
Missingno can only learn Water Gun twice and Sky Attack in Red and Blue. Then Pay Day, Bind, and Water Gun in Yellow. So the true form is that it's dual wielding Supersoakers or something?
My personal favourite is ID number 191, found in Yellow. This Pokémon has a sprite that’s 256x256. Unlike most glitch Pokémon, the game tries to display the full thing. The absurd size of the sprite somehow causes the ENTIRE ROM to be copied to the RAM. Insane.
actually 4 4 (191)'s reason the game may crash is because 4 4's front sprite is an unusually large 256x256 pixels, which causes it to overflow from RAM to SRAM and corrupt the current sound bank identifier address to invalid sound banks, and invalid sound banks usually crash. Even if the game doesn't crash, 4 4's front sprite will overwrite enough RAM to otherwise prevent play.
6:23, That is due to the decompression tampering the sound bank to an invalid value. In Red/Blue, it crashes instantly, but in Yellow, it crashes when the next sound effect plays in that invalid sound bank. You can see what happens if I freeze the sound banks on my Revealed glitch Pokemon front sprite crashers video.
I really like the fact that you take time to go into such detail about how these glitches work - it’s very enjoyable and I appreciate the hard work you must be doing behind the scenes to make these videos.
I love how the game is so unbelievably robust that it can meaningfully interpret all sorts of random gibberish as normal pokemon that could (almost) be useable.
So theoretically, if you extend the ROM through the arcane magic of hacking and alter the pokedex and index pointer tables, you can add sprite data for every pokemon from Gen 2 into Gen1? I know they did some crazy compression tricks to make that (and the two-region thing) work.
@@TinchoX Quite likely by expanding values in the code, and adding the entries into the lists and the spritework, etc. Whether or not the resulting ROM would play in an emulator probably depends upon the emulator being willing to overlook boundaries. I know BSNES in particular refuses anything that wouldn't work on real hardware (which is why certain fan-translated games don't work on BSNES, because they took shortcuts and did other things that would fail on real hardware).
It's especially frustrating because the result of that was, as you'd expect, most games nowadays tend to be poorly optimized if at all. The specs needed to run them can get massively inflated for no good reason, making it unplayable on hardware that would otherwise be able to handle it.
8:43 Looks like a Yearbook for a really weird school. Tentacruel being the angsty edgy teenager that's like "whatever, I can't wait for graduation to never see this weirdos again"
There is something pure and beautiful about asserting that your presentation of garbage data is more faithful than the game's presentation of the same garbage data. Shine on.
So, I found this chart of unused Pokémon appearances and some of them look pretty strange and some even creepy (probably why they were removed) but one of them, if you look really closely at your “fixed” sprite of the very popular ‘M missingno it seems like it may be the cactus one. Which is odd because missingno’s type says it’s a bird… but the sprite does seem to have the echo of the overlapping circles and little feet and spines of the cactus Pokémon that was never used.
I'd love to see fixed versions of Yellow's Glitch Pokemon sprites too!Also, wouldn't the graphics differ between the different language releases of the games?
Given it's name, it appears to be self aware and waiting for a chance to take control of humanity, but had it's obfuscated code overwritten during cleanup.
has anyone ever told you you've got a really calming voice? like, I have no idea what you're talking about ever, but listening to your videos is like wrapping a blanket around my brain.
At 5:18, I'm seeing a fighter jet in the lower-right corner of the right-most Missingno image. I love this video! In the middle of 2020, about a quarter century after the release of the games, we're still learning new things and seeing things in new ways thanks to you!
4:08 I like how the blank spaces to the right of the sprite take the shape of the original missingno. It could be a coincidence, but it's v fun to see!
I use After Effects to make videos! This one was a bit of an outlier since it was fairly straightforward, I would say I spent around 15-18 hours on video editing.
Damn, this game continues to amaze me - I've been following glitch research in these games since they came out and I was a little kid (though I was only active in contributing to research for a few of my pre-teen years). To think there's a whole set of glitch Pokemon I've never seen hidden by unused Pokedex numbers blows my mind. Thank you for these really cool videos!
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Just want to say I enjoy watching your videos, even if I don't understand everything you're talking about. You don't bs around at the beginning; you simply jump into the video. I wish more content creators were like that. :)
Beautifully made video as always! Gave me an idea too, players who love crazy challenges should try and do some sort of speedrun in getting all non-crashing glitch pokemon! Would love to see someone attempt that
Can you do 4 4's sprite, it's Yellow exclusive but I want to see the entire sprite in all it's VRAM induced glory. Plus a full analysis of that sprite may help out ZZAZZGlitch with their research.
Sir Embrum49 The Great Moth I mean, that seems to be the obvious answer. Even though I doubt it plays a whole song. Maybe a phrase or something. How does music work in Pokemon anyway?
IIRC, that signifies a note in the programing (like using #s in Java, which tells all Java applications to ignore whatever is on those lines), so when these weird pointers point to unintended places, the name data pulled for them reads whatever is "written" in the code, sometimes containing that symbol since a lot of the glitches point into non-Pokemon related code/data.
The small katakana "u" is tile hex EA. When interpreted as code, this byte stands for the instruction "ld (a16), a". This is a very common instruction, very likely to appear in game code. And thus, it commonly appears in glitch Pokémon names, because these names are in fact pieces of game code interpreted as text strings. The digit "4" also appears pretty frequently. Its tile ID is hex FA, which stands for a different, very common instruction: "ld a, (a16)".
In the Game Boy, there are just four base colors, but the color range expands beyond that if you use either a Super Game Boy accessory, Pokemon Stadium's GB Tower feature, or a Game Boy Color. Of course the color isn't so much real color as they are based on one specific color palette. Missingno's normal sprite; for instance, used the same palette as the Ghost sprite. Color is based on a pokemon's Pokedex number, as shown when looking at Pokemon IDs C3 and D4, both having the dex number #94. Both glitch pokemon share the same color palette as Gengar. If the Pokedex number theory is true and if this is possible, we can more easily differentiate the hypothetical/unused glitch pokemon from the real pokemon if we can get the color data for them as well.
9:04 lolz I saw that. 10:56 Clamp, Scratch. So, a Krabby? Or perhaps, a Kabuto? What I see in those boxes of glitch graphics, aside from the Game Graphic Glitch Gremlin's favorite hangouts (lolz), are what appears to be lots, and lots, of textbox window border graphics.
Do you ever plan on doing a similar analysis on versions other than Red/Blue? Such as Yellow, the Spaceworld Demo glitch species, or perhaps even out of bounds Decamark in gen 3? There is a particular glitch pokemon less known than Missingno, that is somewhat infamous in the glitching community due to having a sprite so large, the entire games RAM is overwritten and overflowed. (aka. 4 4, which is a very interesting case with how the game handles loading it differently than it's cousin from Red/Blue, which you shown here.)
Constructive criticism: I think some relaxing music during the scrolling of sprites would be good instead of "nothing". Some classical, non-copyright song, just for us to listen while we enjoy the graphics ^^
Yes, use public domain or some custom music. Too many creators use copyrighted music, and then get upset they get flagged. Taking content to just use in the background isn't fair use; only if you actually critique the music, you can play it legally. See: A Dose of Buckley - Musical Autopsy. Also see Tom Scott's video about copyright.
Yeah, if you can't think of or find anything else, Incompetech (aka Kevin McLeod) is always a good bet... Everyone uses his music, but then, that's because it's fairly good, and an easy to find resource that can be freely used (as long as you credit it appropriately...)
I prefer silence. I'm not against non-intrusive music either but decided to mention that the opinion is at least non-unanimous. Viewers can also play any music they like in the background if they wish, although doing that may be quite inconvenient.
@@purplegill10 The programmer displayed the game's actual code on screen graphically to create a vertical ribbon of scrambled colors down the screen. He also did it to display the ending explosion/screen wipe when you win.
The amount of reverse engineering and problem solving in these videos is staggering. I don't know how you learned all this, but good on you for doing it. Reverse engineering and problem solving are two traits I wish everyone had.
I remember that one. It's name is Q ◣ ( a Hybrid of Starmie ) having the ability to combine pokemon, either regular or glitched and you can even combine both! Like one time I saw someone use Q ◣ glitch to combine Porygon and X ゥ- xゥ, which makes a Porygon sprite with the purple background of X ゥ- xゥ, as well as having the stats of X ゥ- xゥ,. It's VERY powerful!
I watched a minute of your video and instantly subscribed I love this type of content, you don't dumb things out to simplify you just get straight to the point Keep up man, it's great !
these remind me of when you'd take an image into paint and try to fill in areas only for it to fill in random spots because it was using several different shades.
so my question is, what WAS missingno exactly? Where did his data come from? I can understand that a part of his glitch is reading the incorrect bounding box of a wrong pointer data, but what was that data supposed to be in the first place?
The data that gets used as MissingNo.'s graphics is some data that describes what Pokémon and at what level some of the Biker trainers have in their parties.
@@RGMechEx Can you fix it to show an actual image and not a garbled mess coz i know thay were placeholders for some gen 2 data so i expecting a missingno to show a chickorita or a cyndaquill or some other gen 2 pokemon so can you revisit and show this please
@@EmperorIC the pokemon missingno was supposed to be were entirely blanked out with pokedex number 0 which gives them the signature look and the sprite data was replaced with other data
2:39 I find it humorous that the resulting graphics size of this Game Boy pokemon can only be seen "properly" on at least a 4K display. The dimensions of a screen right below 4K is 1920 pixels horizontally by 1080 pixels vertically. This pokemon has a width of *2048* pixels horizontally. So forget about the Game Boy's screen, not even an HD 1080p can correctly display this, LOL.
"4K" isn't a specific screen resolution, and is a category of them. But (16:9) 1080p is exactly 1920×1080. The common 4K resolution people usually refer to is 16:9 2160p, or 3840×2160. - But you don't need to go up to that resolution to see the sprite in full. You only need a slightly higher resolution than 1080p. A common size is 1440p, which is 2560×1440. (This resolution is also carelessly known as "2K", even though 1080p should fill that role, which people deny. So please don't use "K" resolutions, it's just a mess). - But you can technically use any resolution. For 16:9, you can use 1152p, or 2048×1152. That will fit it exactly.
If glitched Pokemon's true forms cannot be bound by the in game bounding box, resulting in their true forms not being fully shown on screen, could it be deduced that by translating the in game logic to real world logic that glitched Pokemon are actually extra-dimensional beings, and that the form they present to us is actually just the form that can be constrained to 3 dimensions?
Hey just wanted to say a few things in regards to your videos. 1. Your videos are freakin amazing and i absolutely love how you break down and explain everything. You really know what your talking about and i think thats genuinely amazing. Please keep up the awesome work please. 2. a suggestion/request of sorts. The Q Trick or pokemon merge glitch broken down and explained well how and why it does what it does from a similar well researched and explained stand point like you've done with the graphics.
Ever since watching your first Missingno. sprite video, I've been kinda wondering what a "Gen 2 Missingno." would look like, if a Pokemon sprite in GSC were modified to have the same height/width and gfx pointer as Missingno. does
Not exactly what you want, but there ARE gen2 missingnos. They can be optained by using the celebi egg-glitch, but since that kills the daycare and can only be used once...I think we should just use wild encounter cheatcodes instead xD
Can you explain the music and audio corruptions that happened on Pokemon R/B/Y? Like the corrupted screaming of glitch pokemon? Also, can you explain whatever the hell happens in this glitch? ua-cam.com/video/OyhEKG_g53o/v-deo.html It's most likely a form of Arbitrary Code Execution, but what are the intricacies behind it?
My expectations going into the video: oh man he’s gonna reveal that missingno actually looks like a beta version of rydon, an unreleased Pokémon, or even gorochu!!! Reality: Misingno but bigger.
5:11 I see a trainer in the sprite on the right but in the left sprite I see a cute little dog ghost. It really looks like it could be a real Pokémon. Its head looks like a dog skull and it has "hair lumps" that look like Lucario's or Chancey's, as well as an extra one on top of its head. Its body is like a ghost sheet with little tiny arms at the front and it totally has a collar. Its also floating and it has a round shadow in the bottom right corner.
Not the dude, but I think the answer is generally no, simply because there's no need to anymore. For as cool as these space saving tricks are, they arose out of necessity because of how limited memory and disk space were back then, not out of some desire to be clever. Those resources aren't even remotely as limited today as they were back then, so the cases in which you'd actually need anything like this are near non-existent, and trying to do stuff like this in situations where you don't need to is just kinda over-engineering for the sake of over-engineering, which is bad for a whole other host of reasons (complex algorithms tend to be more bug-prone, execution time generally gets worse, code readability goes out the window, upkeep can get obnoxious if future codebase changes force changes to the over-engineered system, etc). Obviously paying attention to memory allocation is important, you shouldn't just be throwing it out for no reason, but yeah, this is going overboard for today's standards. That all said, there are specific domains where memory constraints are much tighter than normal (eg. embedded systems applications), and in those cases you might start seeing more use for this sort of stuff, but those cases are definitely not the norm as far as typical videogame and software development goes.
@@fastmovingvolcanomatter I was asking because if they work well for modern consoles they could be used for make more complex games, with more content in a smaller space, and well, I think it's used in some way, like when you port a game to a less powerful console.
Never developed a game for console, so there are definitely people with more knowledge here than me, but I don't imagine these sorts of optimizations are generally going to be the things that make or break a modern port, just because of the difference in scale between them. The sorts of optimization you see in retro games like these are generally saving memory on the order of bytes. Not megabytes, not kilobytes, but bytes. While those sorts of savings can very quickly add up in a Gameboy or NES game (where you're working with literally 8KB or 2KB of RAM respectively), they do very little for you when you're working with GIGABYTES of memory at your disposal. For a sense of the scale we're talking about here, saving 128 bytes of memory is MASSIVE on the Gameboy, that's saving 1/64th of your entire memory budget. A proportionally equivalent optimization on the PS4, however (which has 8GB total memory, but only ~4.5GB available for actually running games), would need to save 4.5/64 == ~0.07GB == 72MB == 75,497,472 bytes. Those sorts of savings (at least in my experience) don't tend to come from the sorts of clever low-level space saving tricks you see in these games, but rather from higher-level system/algorithm/data-structure rewrites, which in general call for a different (but still very fun) brand of trickery.
So what you're telling me is that the real shape of glitch pokemon is impossible to be processed by the gameboy. They're literal eldritch abominations.
The reality in which they're interpreted cannot contain nor comprehend their true form. Yeah, they're eldrich alright
Plus some of them can learn a move known as Super Glitch. It's name is blank so it goes by that. I suggest watching a video of it in action. It's a perfect move for an Eldritch Abomination and very interesting.
Cthulhu’s Offspring*
@David Gray Maybe we're all just in a higher dimensional gameboy game, and thus can never truly decompress thine sprites of eld.
Considering people sometimes try to implement them as monsters in horror games, I'd love to see their whole, gameboy-incomprehensible size be used.
"What if I revealed Missigno's true form" sounds like the premise for creepypasta.
Someone write this down! Write that down!
Yellow-form Missingno. actually exists, and it crashes the game a lot. It also has "Missingno.'s true cry" when it doesn't crash.
Missingno assumes its true form and sings you to death with its endless true cry
Missigno is actually a irl animal and the universe doesn't know how to awnser it, that's why it's a "type bird" the pokémon universe just doesn't know what a "bird" is and missigno (a bird) somehow made into that universe
I wanna hear it. It sounds like it could be interesting. There is one very creepy glitch pokemon known as “♀ .” Which takes the form of an 80 foot tall blood spire surrounded by pure darkness that emits an eerie tune when encountered.
Also random tidbit but My personal favourite creepypasta is unown king.
13:31 I like how there's one that is absolutely massive, but also only consists of a tiny square of glitch.
Even better, there’s a second one that shows up a little later
69 likes...
Nice
(Grabs large sprite area) This is mine now!
let me have all the sprite
@@Alium4060Obero I paid for the sprite tiles, I'm gonna use the whole sprite tiles
the 'corrected' missingno(s) actually looks like they have some sort of pokemon in it with a very weird overlay on top of it
It does look like there is a pokemon in there
Maybe it is reading graphical data occasionally?
That's the human brain for you. Our object recognition and permeance skills are so good that they're often better than our eyesight. This leads to over compensation from the brain as it almost always assumes what the eyes are looking at is a logical shape.
There's no actual Pokémon sprite data in it, as the location in memory it reads from is far outside the bounds of where the sprites are held.
There isn't actually any sort of pokemon design in it, but it would be cool to see some fanart interpretations of what it might look like if there was.
The 13x13 looks like something coiled and serpentine. Vaguely like Rayquaza or Steelix.
this whole video feels like looking at those ink blob pictures
You mean the Rorshach test? Yeah...
@@SakuraCourageSolo duh that's what they mean
How does that make you feel 🤣
That explains why most of these sprites look like two bears high fiving.
Rorschach...
my personal favorite is dex #248. it is literally only one tile in a huge space of 32×256 tiles.
13:31
#242 as well
and its even black so you know its ALWAYS like this! hahahah so excessive!
@@lutyanoalves444 it's also the same sprites too
It's looking at you...
lmao
Optimization
just a side note, i really appreciate the fact that you have subtitles in all of your videos. that is really helpful
i agree!!! this makes things easier to process for my ADD brain. i love it when creators do this
so few people on here actually do caption their videos, especially egregious when it comes to bigger creators with bigger platforms & more resources, so it's always wonderful to find channels where the people running them go that extra mile to make their videos more accessible. My auditory processing disorder is super thankful for this.
yeah, im hearing impaired and it makes it much easier for me.
@@NoraQRosa it used to be way more common, *_When UA-cam allowed viewers to add subtitles themselves._*
It’s also useful for non-English native speakers, it lets our brain understand more of the video and let it even relax a bit
I probably wouldn't have gone in the direction of supporting sprite placement in up to a 256x2048px area for a system with a 160x144px screen resolution, but where would the fun in that be?
Severely limited space sometimes won't let you make that choice.
Bro, I have no idea what you just said
Diamond The Hedgehog same
@@spiko7 Basically the person who made the video made sure the decompression was better than the original ever could have been.
what resolution is god's screen?
I'm really interested in the fact that Tentacruel, Magnemite, Bulbasaur, and Bulbasaur/Human hybrid sprites turn up more or less comprehensible among the glitches by doing this, often multiple times.
Shared Dex number with data that coincidentally starts the same way, ig? Perhaps they're reading from offsets that are near each other
All pokemon past Bulbasaur ($99) occupy the same sprite bank, including glitch pokemon. so a hybrid of one of those pokemon would have the same sprite as its normal counterpart. the corrupted Bulbasaur sprite is a result of the game loading the coordinates for Dodrio's sprite, which occupies the same position in its intended sprite bank. in foreign versions there are other hybrid pokemon with unusual sprites - Green has a jolteon hybrid that looks like the pokemon tower ghost because the coordinates for jolteon happen to be in the same place as the ghost. and some of the european versions have a growlithe hybrid that looks like bulbasaur!
@@icecreamsamwich cool :0
5:00 I see a shape in the fog of that completed missing no. It almost looks like a classic "who's that pokemon?" silhouette.
WAIT I SEE IT TOO
By squinting really hard, I see Mario shrugging, but that's only what I see personally.
It's a Clefairy (or a Happiny) wearing a Vileplume / Venusaur head-flower.
@@Yze3 (shrug boye)
Looks like a raichu with a Spurdo Sparde face jumping over a poliwhirl/mankey crossbreed
YOU CANNOT GRASP THE TRUE FORM OF MISSINGNO'S ATTACK!
Hehe Earthbound reference
...
Missingno can only learn Water Gun twice and Sky Attack in Red and Blue. Then Pay Day, Bind, and Water Gun in Yellow. So the true form is that it's dual wielding Supersoakers or something?
WynExplode it must like summer or something
@@wynexplode2593 Holy shit you just *_leaked_* gen 9
Conclusion: there is a lot of glitched Magnamite sprites in Pokemon
Along with Bulbasaur.
itogi???
Magnamite = missigno
Magnemite is now magnamite.
Canonically.
They're just glitch Pokemon that happen to have Magnemite's dex number.
My personal favourite is ID number 191, found in Yellow.
This Pokémon has a sprite that’s 256x256.
Unlike most glitch Pokémon, the game tries to display the full thing. The absurd size of the sprite somehow causes the ENTIRE ROM to be copied to the RAM.
Insane.
imagine loading pokemon red or blue after this and then you somehow use yellow save fils on red or blue which doesnt end well
I believe you have encountered the infamous 4.4 glitchmon
That was 4, 4. Incredibly glitchy and inconsistent. It's sprite is exceedingly collosal. I always wanted to see how big the actual sprite is.
actually 4 4 (191)'s reason the game may crash is because 4 4's front sprite is an unusually large 256x256 pixels, which causes it to overflow from RAM to SRAM and corrupt the current sound bank identifier address to invalid sound banks, and invalid sound banks usually crash. Even if the game doesn't crash, 4 4's front sprite will overwrite enough RAM to otherwise prevent play.
191? That’s 4 4, isn’t it?
6:23, That is due to the decompression tampering the sound bank to an invalid value. In Red/Blue, it crashes instantly, but in Yellow, it crashes when the next sound effect plays in that invalid sound bank. You can see what happens if I freeze the sound banks on my Revealed glitch Pokemon front sprite crashers video.
I really like the fact that you take time to go into such detail about how these glitches work - it’s very enjoyable and I appreciate the hard work you must be doing behind the scenes to make these videos.
I love how the game is so unbelievably robust that it can meaningfully interpret all sorts of random gibberish as normal pokemon that could (almost) be useable.
8:47 Jesus, what is that humanoid bulbasaur abomination?!
Ah yes, the Bulba-Choke. I always thought it looked like it fused with a Machoke or something X3
Idk, I see MegaMan
I love it so much, I want to adopt it
I see some kid in a hoodie with hands in their pockets. Trippy
It's Bulbasaur's sprite, but with the wrong bounding box, which in turn fucks up the sprite.
All I learned from this is that Missingno's true form is beyond our comprehension.
these are beautiful. seeing all the sprites of the nonexistent glitch pokemon nearly brought a tear to my eye
So theoretically, if you extend the ROM through the arcane magic of hacking and alter the pokedex and index pointer tables, you can add sprite data for every pokemon from Gen 2 into Gen1? I know they did some crazy compression tricks to make that (and the two-region thing) work.
There's a hack out there that added every Pokemon up to Gen 6 into ROM.
@@mewnani WHAT!? HOW!?
@@TinchoX Quite likely by expanding values in the code, and adding the entries into the lists and the spritework, etc. Whether or not the resulting ROM would play in an emulator probably depends upon the emulator being willing to overlook boundaries. I know BSNES in particular refuses anything that wouldn't work on real hardware (which is why certain fan-translated games don't work on BSNES, because they took shortcuts and did other things that would fail on real hardware).
now. USE A.C.E AND MAKE EVERY POSSIBLE GLITCH POKEMON BY BRUTE FORCE@cameronl1859
Imagine if modern games had to optimize storage like old games had to. Sad that developers don't care to optimize because memory is expendable now.
It's especially frustrating because the result of that was, as you'd expect, most games nowadays tend to be poorly optimized if at all. The specs needed to run them can get massively inflated for no good reason, making it unplayable on hardware that would otherwise be able to handle it.
@@LilacMonarch and games nowadays tend to be over 30 gb don't forget that.
8:43 Looks like a Yearbook for a really weird school. Tentacruel being the angsty edgy teenager that's like "whatever, I can't wait for graduation to never see this weirdos again"
you ever just walk into class and it's full of eldritch tv static creatures
Something about these videos is calming. Tysm for this
It's like watching How It's Made or the Weather Channel
Couldn't agree more
The reason I watched every Pannenkoek video about Mario 64.
It's probably his voice. I find it soothing.
He feels like a modern day bob ross, as odd as that sounds
8:16 damn Trainer really looks a lot like Magnemite
XD
Everything is magnemite and bulbasaur
It has Magnemite's Dex ID, but I assume the 'name' is pointing to the save name.
Some very fun visualizations in this video! Definitely neat to see what unused Pokédex numbers would produce.
I don't recall Steelix being so petite.
There is something pure and beautiful about asserting that your presentation of garbage data is more faithful than the game's presentation of the same garbage data. Shine on.
A lot of the sprites look like an amalgamation of gun barrels and artillery. I'd hang some of them up.
this is a digital Rorschach test. fear not, two guys with a straight jacket are on the way.
one of these looks like the Dragon's Fury from TF2
Did you ever see the Spaceworld 1997 designs for Remoraid and Octillery? The revolver/tank motif used to be a lot more obvious.
11:22
I can't claim to understand what's going on, but I appreciate your dedication and all the work that went into decoding them and making this video
Huh... I'd like to see the movesets and statlines of unused Pokedex numbers.
Bulbapedia and Glitch City Labs may have that information. (GCL is more in-depth)
I find it interesting that there's a couple that are just Bulbasaur with the size incorrectly set.
So, I found this chart of unused Pokémon appearances and some of them look pretty strange and some even creepy (probably why they were removed) but one of them, if you look really closely at your “fixed” sprite of the very popular ‘M missingno it seems like it may be the cactus one. Which is odd because missingno’s type says it’s a bird… but the sprite does seem to have the echo of the overlapping circles and little feet and spines of the cactus Pokémon that was never used.
I'd love to see fixed versions of Yellow's Glitch Pokemon sprites too!Also, wouldn't the graphics differ between the different language releases of the games?
They do. Some Missingno are more unstable in other language versions. I believe Chickasaurus has a video about them
@@pokemario6456 yep
In the "fixed" Missingno sprite representation it totally looks like there's .. something in the lower half, second quarter.
Excuse me you broke time
I see a three-headed group at the very top that connects to that bottom half you describe
It is staring at me menacingly
@@AL1CE_
He could be a patron and therefore get to see the video earlier
I see a screaming monstrous face with bulging eyes facing left
8:14: That one magnamite that was in the wrong zone at the wrong time
It has seen some things...
the right magnamite in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world...
Given it's name, it appears to be self aware and waiting for a chance to take control of humanity, but had it's obfuscated code overwritten during cleanup.
Him and charzard m from around the end of the section.
And that Tentacruel wants to watch the world burn...
has anyone ever told you you've got a really calming voice? like, I have no idea what you're talking about ever, but listening to your videos is like wrapping a blanket around my brain.
At 5:18, I'm seeing a fighter jet in the lower-right corner of the right-most Missingno image.
I love this video! In the middle of 2020, about a quarter century after the release of the games, we're still learning new things and seeing things in new ways thanks to you!
In that sprite I just see demonic Mr. Mime
4:08 I like how the blank spaces to the right of the sprite take the shape of the original missingno. It could be a coincidence, but it's v fun to see!
I'm quite impressed by all the animations in this and the last video. How did you create them and how much time did it take to make them?
I use After Effects to make videos! This one was a bit of an outlier since it was fairly straightforward, I would say I spent around 15-18 hours on video editing.
Damn, this game continues to amaze me - I've been following glitch research in these games since they came out and I was a little kid (though I was only active in contributing to research for a few of my pre-teen years). To think there's a whole set of glitch Pokemon I've never seen hidden by unused Pokedex numbers blows my mind.
Thank you for these really cool videos!
8:45 bulbasaur what have they done to you?
You mean B͚͎̼͇̤̻̪̩̜͚͍̱̯̜͕̞̓͗̀̄̌̀̚ư̢̗͕̱͕̳̰͍̘͕̳͍̼͚̱̙̪̘͓͚ͧ͌͊ͤ̈̿̕̕͟l̴̷̷̽̑͗̆ͭͧ͊̈ͮ̇̈́ͨ̓ͩ̿̾̋̀͘͏̜̙͔̣̬̤̫̰ͅb̋̏̊ͣ̈ͧ̑̊̽͜҉̛̼̖̞͕͞a̼͙̱͉̥̘̫͖̲͎̫̙̝̻͇͆̓̐͊ͧͩ̔ͨͨ͊ͫ̔͆͂̎ͯͬ̓́͜s̡̨̘̬̜͖̦͛̏̔́̋͌ͪͨ̂̋̂͌ͣ̅̕͢a̢ͣͬ̉̽ͨ͆̈̓̀͒̐ͣ͑̏̔͠҉͕̬̳̤̤̰̫̠̳̳̱̭̙͕̯͎̹̗ų̡̨͔̠̹͙͕̠̼̳͓̗̹̥̘͉̲͓̼̉́͒̚͞͞r̸̸͍̫͎̯̖̥͇̼̪̳̆̅͂̐̋̾̉͑̔̈́̈́̓̾̾̐͋ͮ̚͞?
I love this channel. Finally actual technical explanations with no sugar coating.
Just want to say I enjoy watching your videos, even if I don't understand everything you're talking about. You don't bs around at the beginning; you simply jump into the video. I wish more content creators were like that. :)
So glad to see a post from you again!
5:00
Reminds me of the Japanese Blue Version of Missingno
Your aftereffects work is gorgeous. How is everything so mathematically perfect???
Math
I think he actually did a video on his editing process a while back
He'a mathematically perfect.
@@dj505 Wait, really? I need to understand how he does this. His editing skills are absolutely incredible.
a random person: "Hey, what are you watching?"
me: "Ehm... Contemporary art..."
Beautifully made video as always! Gave me an idea too, players who love crazy challenges should try and do some sort of speedrun in getting all non-crashing glitch pokemon! Would love to see someone attempt that
Can you do 4 4's sprite, it's Yellow exclusive but I want to see the entire sprite in all it's VRAM induced glory.
Plus a full analysis of that sprite may help out ZZAZZGlitch with their research.
Problem with 4.4 is that its sprite is way too large to compress.
I see you're a man of culture as well.
4 4 : the pikachu from the depths of hell
Also what cries do the off-pokédex Pokemon have?
Plaff what a bespoke nightmare. thanks i hate it
Sir Embrum49 The Great Moth I mean, that seems to be the obvious answer. Even though I doubt it plays a whole song. Maybe a phrase or something. How does music work in Pokemon anyway?
Is there a reason why the [ゥ] tile is seemingly used a lot in glitch sprites?
IIRC, that signifies a note in the programing (like using #s in Java, which tells all Java applications to ignore whatever is on those lines), so when these weird pointers point to unintended places, the name data pulled for them reads whatever is "written" in the code, sometimes containing that symbol since a lot of the glitches point into non-Pokemon related code/data.
@@samlay9588 Actually java uses //comment or /* block comment */
The small katakana "u" is tile hex EA. When interpreted as code, this byte stands for the instruction "ld (a16), a". This is a very common instruction, very likely to appear in game code. And thus, it commonly appears in glitch Pokémon names, because these names are in fact pieces of game code interpreted as text strings.
The digit "4" also appears pretty frequently. Its tile ID is hex FA, which stands for a different, very common instruction: "ld a, (a16)".
And my dumb self was sitting there thinking the game had too many NOPs.
@@samlay9588 There are no comments in gameboy ROMS. In general, there are no comments in binaries
That vertical Bulbasaur one is interesting, it's taken an angled section of the sprite and made it vertical.
With "missingno's true form" I can kinda see a guy in a hoodie with a dark obscured face amongst the garbled static. Creepy.
The amouunt of work and expertise that go into these videos is really impressive.
In the Game Boy, there are just four base colors, but the color range expands beyond that if you use either a Super Game Boy accessory, Pokemon Stadium's GB Tower feature, or a Game Boy Color. Of course the color isn't so much real color as they are based on one specific color palette. Missingno's normal sprite; for instance, used the same palette as the Ghost sprite.
Color is based on a pokemon's Pokedex number, as shown when looking at Pokemon IDs C3 and D4, both having the dex number #94. Both glitch pokemon share the same color palette as Gengar. If the Pokedex number theory is true and if this is possible, we can more easily differentiate the hypothetical/unused glitch pokemon from the real pokemon if we can get the color data for them as well.
9:04 lolz I saw that.
10:56 Clamp, Scratch. So, a Krabby? Or perhaps, a Kabuto?
What I see in those boxes of glitch graphics, aside from the Game Graphic Glitch Gremlin's favorite hangouts (lolz), are what appears to be lots, and lots, of textbox window border graphics.
it's wild how a lot of these sprites almost look like corrupted cityscapes laid on their left side, they're kinda beautiful in their own right
Do you ever plan on doing a similar analysis on versions other than Red/Blue? Such as Yellow, the Spaceworld Demo glitch species, or perhaps even out of bounds Decamark in gen 3?
There is a particular glitch pokemon less known than Missingno, that is somewhat infamous in the glitching community due to having a sprite so large, the entire games RAM is overwritten and overflowed. (aka. 4 4, which is a very interesting case with how the game handles loading it differently than it's cousin from Red/Blue, which you shown here.)
You're a genius. If NASA ever needs to decipher strange martian data, with your skills we can find out what they looked like unglitched.
Constructive criticism: I think some relaxing music during the scrolling of sprites would be good instead of "nothing".
Some classical, non-copyright song, just for us to listen while we enjoy the graphics ^^
Yes, use public domain or some custom music.
Too many creators use copyrighted music, and then get upset they get flagged. Taking content to just use in the background isn't fair use; only if you actually critique the music, you can play it legally. See: A Dose of Buckley - Musical Autopsy. Also see Tom Scott's video about copyright.
Yeah, if you can't think of or find anything else, Incompetech (aka Kevin McLeod) is always a good bet...
Everyone uses his music, but then, that's because it's fairly good, and an easy to find resource that can be freely used (as long as you credit it appropriately...)
I prefer silence.
I'm not against non-intrusive music either but decided to mention that the opinion is at least non-unanimous. Viewers can also play any music they like in the background if they wish, although doing that may be quite inconvenient.
He already addressed this in his first Q&A video
12:08 for Dex n°186, something is visible, but it's hard to make out...
It looks like a Monty mole with a long nose
it looks like E-102 Gamma to me :0
@@elianewinter2638 oh yeah. It does look like his gun quite a bit. Good eye!
@@braintwo3398 why, thank you
It's sort of like how the Neutral Zone is rendered in Yar's Revenge.
Yar's Revenge?
@@purplegill10 The programmer displayed the game's actual code on screen graphically to create a vertical ribbon of scrambled colors down the screen. He also did it to display the ending explosion/screen wipe when you win.
@@robintst Wait, are you serious? It's the actual code being rendered?
Alan Rizkallah Fascinating
i did not know that, but that is pretty freakin' clever!
my only experiences with that game are me failing horribly, though, so..
The amount of reverse engineering and problem solving in these videos is staggering. I don't know how you learned all this, but good on you for doing it. Reverse engineering and problem solving are two traits I wish everyone had.
You should talk about the glitch in the generation 1 games that allows you to merge Pokemon. It seems like it would be interesting to cover.
I remember that one. It's name is Q ◣ ( a Hybrid of Starmie ) having the ability to combine pokemon, either regular or glitched and you can even combine both! Like one time I saw someone use Q ◣ glitch to combine Porygon and X ゥ- xゥ, which makes a Porygon sprite with the purple background of X ゥ- xゥ, as well as having the stats of X ゥ- xゥ,. It's VERY powerful!
@@braintwo3398 Exactly. It's so very cool and interesting. More people should know about it.
I watched a minute of your video and instantly subscribed
I love this type of content, you don't dumb things out to simplify you just get straight to the point
Keep up man, it's great !
"don't and can't exist in the original game"
ACE: Are you challenging me?
these remind me of when you'd take an image into paint and try to fill in areas only for it to fill in random spots because it was using several different shades.
so my question is, what WAS missingno exactly? Where did his data come from? I can understand that a part of his glitch is reading the incorrect bounding box of a wrong pointer data, but what was that data supposed to be in the first place?
The data that gets used as MissingNo.'s graphics is some data that describes what Pokémon and at what level some of the Biker trainers have in their parties.
@@RGMechEx Can you fix it to show an actual image and not a garbled mess coz i know thay were placeholders for some gen 2 data so i expecting a missingno to show a chickorita or a cyndaquill or some other gen 2 pokemon so can you revisit and show this please
@@EmperorIC Unfortunately that's not true, it's just arbitrary data
@@EmperorIC the pokemon missingno was supposed to be were entirely blanked out with pokedex number 0 which gives them the signature look and the sprite data was replaced with other data
@@EmperorIC That's not true, it's just an urban legend
7:18
"...so he says "only a zero by zero bounding box," This leads to Retro Game Mechanics Explained pulling out a comically large bounding box."
Your dedication is impressive. I really enjoy your videos.
Either you are an AE expression genius, or I have no idea how you make all these animations, without spending hundreds of hours per video.
Anyone else see a cheep-cheep with a mustache at 4:58 ?
Oh God what the Hell I almost spat out my tea.
Yeah
I see an ant-like bug with crab arms sitting up and posing with its claws spread.
It looks like weezing or muk cuz i can see a face that is thicc and weird smile
Sometimes, I wonder if the decompressed and fixed sprites were originally drawn as the cut pokemon, ending up being corrupted in the final builds.
5:10 theres a dude chillin with headphones on near the bottom left lol
I cannot unsee it now!
I just got re-recommended your video, so I just re-watched it. Your content is amazing
11:37 I like number 171. It seems to fade into corruption.
I've never actually played Pokemon game, but yourese videos about their inner workings are really cool.
2:39 I find it humorous that the resulting graphics size of this Game Boy pokemon can only be seen "properly" on at least a 4K display. The dimensions of a screen right below 4K is 1920 pixels horizontally by 1080 pixels vertically. This pokemon has a width of *2048* pixels horizontally. So forget about the Game Boy's screen, not even an HD 1080p can correctly display this, LOL.
"4K" isn't a specific screen resolution, and is a category of them. But (16:9) 1080p is exactly 1920×1080. The common 4K resolution people usually refer to is 16:9 2160p, or 3840×2160.
-
But you don't need to go up to that resolution to see the sprite in full. You only need a slightly higher resolution than 1080p. A common size is 1440p, which is 2560×1440. (This resolution is also carelessly known as "2K", even though 1080p should fill that role, which people deny. So please don't use "K" resolutions, it's just a mess).
-
But you can technically use any resolution. For 16:9, you can use 1152p, or 2048×1152. That will fit it exactly.
It is interesting that you can see the RLE decompression result as large horizontal bars.
Glitch Pokémon include:
Missingno.
Missingno.
Missingno.
Rattata
Magnemite
Charizard
Bulbasaur
Tentacruel
Missingno.
you forgot Missingno., Missingno., and Missingno.
Once we have a proper Green version prototype leak, I'd love to see a mod that reintroduces the entire set of 171 pokemon meant for Gen 1.
5:22 oh that’s a good boye right there ooooooooooiohhhhhhhhhhhh he is such a good boye I want to pet him
These videos are incredibly impressive, thank you so much for putting the time and effort into making them!
Underrated channel.
No rime of this comment 100% likes
all these strange messed up sprites and then just Magnemite is what has got me on the floor
If glitched Pokemon's true forms cannot be bound by the in game bounding box, resulting in their true forms not being fully shown on screen, could it be deduced that by translating the in game logic to real world logic that glitched Pokemon are actually extra-dimensional beings, and that the form they present to us is actually just the form that can be constrained to 3 dimensions?
Yeah they are gods
For some dumb reason I expected some bad ass Pokemon designs we had never seen before! xD
Thanks for the interesting vid! :D
5:10 this smaller box looks like teddy bear with open mouth
Hey just wanted to say a few things in regards to your videos.
1. Your videos are freakin amazing and i absolutely love how you break down and explain everything. You really know what your talking about and i think thats genuinely amazing. Please keep up the awesome work please.
2. a suggestion/request of sorts. The Q Trick or pokemon merge glitch broken down and explained well how and why it does what it does from a similar well researched and explained stand point like you've done with the graphics.
Ever since watching your first Missingno. sprite video, I've been kinda wondering what a "Gen 2 Missingno." would look like, if a Pokemon sprite in GSC were modified to have the same height/width and gfx pointer as Missingno. does
Not exactly what you want, but there ARE gen2 missingnos. They can be optained by using the celebi egg-glitch, but since that kills the daycare and can only be used once...I think we should just use wild encounter cheatcodes instead xD
there are glitch unown letters in gen 2, and some look a lot like gen 1 glitch pokemon
This feels like one big, messy Rorschach test
I feel like I'm scrolling thru a porn site for machine learning algorithms.
i do not know if you understand how creepy that thought is.
Holy shit...
This is very cool and fascinating, props on writing the script, sounds like hard work
Can you explain the music and audio corruptions that happened on Pokemon R/B/Y?
Like the corrupted screaming of glitch pokemon?
Also, can you explain whatever the hell happens in this glitch?
ua-cam.com/video/OyhEKG_g53o/v-deo.html
It's most likely a form of Arbitrary Code Execution, but what are the intricacies behind it?
I'd also love to see how corrupted music & cries are caused, I haven't found too many videos explaining how it happens.
My expectations going into the video: oh man he’s gonna reveal that missingno actually looks like a beta version of rydon, an unreleased Pokémon, or even gorochu!!!
Reality:
Misingno but bigger.
5:05 why do I see Mario?
5:11 I see a trainer in the sprite on the right but in the left sprite I see a cute little dog ghost. It really looks like it could be a real Pokémon. Its head looks like a dog skull and it has "hair lumps" that look like Lucario's or Chancey's, as well as an extra one on top of its head. Its body is like a ghost sheet with little tiny arms at the front and it totally has a collar. Its also floating and it has a round shadow in the bottom right corner.
missingno number 234: B E N C H 5:55
*pokemon
YESSS!!! He’s back!! First upload since I subscribed!! YES!
1 question, Do you recomend to use those things to save memory in modern games?
Not the dude, but I think the answer is generally no, simply because there's no need to anymore. For as cool as these space saving tricks are, they arose out of necessity because of how limited memory and disk space were back then, not out of some desire to be clever. Those resources aren't even remotely as limited today as they were back then, so the cases in which you'd actually need anything like this are near non-existent, and trying to do stuff like this in situations where you don't need to is just kinda over-engineering for the sake of over-engineering, which is bad for a whole other host of reasons (complex algorithms tend to be more bug-prone, execution time generally gets worse, code readability goes out the window, upkeep can get obnoxious if future codebase changes force changes to the over-engineered system, etc). Obviously paying attention to memory allocation is important, you shouldn't just be throwing it out for no reason, but yeah, this is going overboard for today's standards.
That all said, there are specific domains where memory constraints are much tighter than normal (eg. embedded systems applications), and in those cases you might start seeing more use for this sort of stuff, but those cases are definitely not the norm as far as typical videogame and software development goes.
@@fastmovingvolcanomatter Well, makes sense, thank you for answering.
@@fastmovingvolcanomatter I was asking because if they work well for modern consoles they could be used for make more complex games, with more content in a smaller space, and well, I think it's used in some way, like when you port a game to a less powerful console.
Never developed a game for console, so there are definitely people with more knowledge here than me, but I don't imagine these sorts of optimizations are generally going to be the things that make or break a modern port, just because of the difference in scale between them.
The sorts of optimization you see in retro games like these are generally saving memory on the order of bytes. Not megabytes, not kilobytes, but bytes. While those sorts of savings can very quickly add up in a Gameboy or NES game (where you're working with literally 8KB or 2KB of RAM respectively), they do very little for you when you're working with GIGABYTES of memory at your disposal.
For a sense of the scale we're talking about here, saving 128 bytes of memory is MASSIVE on the Gameboy, that's saving 1/64th of your entire memory budget. A proportionally equivalent optimization on the PS4, however (which has 8GB total memory, but only ~4.5GB available for actually running games), would need to save 4.5/64 == ~0.07GB == 72MB == 75,497,472 bytes. Those sorts of savings (at least in my experience) don't tend to come from the sorts of clever low-level space saving tricks you see in these games, but rather from higher-level system/algorithm/data-structure rewrites, which in general call for a different (but still very fun) brand of trickery.
@@fastmovingvolcanomatter Interesting, I know that it's actually vary useless but, I think that it's interesting to know if those things would work.
I have been looking/hoping for a video almost exactly like this where it shows other possible glitch sprites for so long!!