Part 6: ACE Trainer

Today we start out small. I got the bike already so I can't do it now, but if you have no Bike Voucher when talking to this guy, and close the text box with B, you get this neat effect where, until you next open a menu, the text speed is instant. Normally the max speed is 1 letter printed per frame, but with the "Instant text" effect it all gets printed in one frame! You can gain this effect permanently by using the item underflow glitch, but this glitch is much simpler.

Of course its practical use pretty much lies solely in the speedrunning community, where it's allowed in their "Glitchless" category along with the Marowak Ghost skip.

Okay, I'm just an outsider to that community, so I can't tell them how to play, but come on. Marowak Ghost skip. Allowed in "Glitchless". Because it's apparently "not a glitch"? Come on guys, if you dislike the Game Corner that badly, you don't have to twist your logic, just name the category "No Mew Glitch No Old Man Glitch No Save Corruption No Glitch City Nidoking Only Final Destination"

Er, maybe that's also a little impractical. Moving on.



So I went and got one of these. I'll need it for this next glitch, and while other Pokémon work for it, I imagine that unless you've duplicated your Moon Stones you'll want Exeggcutor.



What's this got to do with Moon Stones? Well, I have a Nidorina that would really like to be beautiful, so we're going to help her.



To do this glitch, level up a Pokémon that evolves by Moon Stone and, in the same battle it leveled up, finish the battle with Exeggcutor as your active Pokémon.



Side note: Gen 1 Wigglytuff sprite.



The battle is won, but what's this?!



This might just be my favorite oversight. Exeggcutor and the Moon Stone have the same internal ID, so by finishing a battle with Exeggcutor, the game thinks any Pokémon that evolves by Moon Stone, that leveled up, is due for evolution. It will also work with other stones, as long as the battle is finished with a Pokémon whose ID matches the stone needed.

That's great for certain glitch Pokémon, because at least one of them evolves by Card Key. Pretty funny.



Onto today's main subject: Glitch items! To get glitch items, we need to take advantage of an interesting property of the Old Man Glitch.



Go to the 11th floor of Silph Co. and fight this Rocket. I think he disappears if you beat Giovanni at Silph Co. so this might not be possible if you're that far already.

What's special about him? He is what I like to call "Rocket #40". See, there are precisely 40 different Rocket trainers - more than any other trainer class. If a trainer is encountered using the Old Man Glitch, while the class used is whichever one was encountered, the team depends on the number of the team used in your most recent trainer battle.

The trick is, the Old Man Glitch only loads teams belonging to "Trainer Zero", who can be encountered using the Mew Glitch, but Trainer Zero is unstable and we need the 40th team, the Mew Glitch only goes up to 13. I just love it when all these convenient facts unintentionally create massive glitch potential.



So, just make sure you battle no trainers after Rocket #40, then do the Old Man Glitch to encounter a trainer!



Do prepare yourself, however. He's got a Level 250 team. First up is our old friend.



Then he brings in HIS friends. They all have stupid high defense and I forgot the special attacks, so I explode on this one. There were two of...that thing.



Then there's this asshole. That tiny little computer chip thing has like 999 HP! On the bright side, he's worth more EVs than anything else in the game, but what you should probably do in battles like this is bring in a OHKO move and use an X Accuracy. In Generation 1, X Accuracies give all moves perfect accuracy, even the OHKOs. Thanks, Generation 1!

By the way, using an X item also causes any stat boosts from badges (Yes these exist) to be re-applied.



Here I put the Town Map in the 4th slot. This is important.



And he has a Ghost Missingno., which...ugh...copies the stats of the asshole I just beat. Luckily for us, after that we face the star of this show.



Say hello to "94"! I was trying to get him earlier, with the Cooltrainer glitch, but this works out for me too. What does he do, you ask? Well, let's check my items!



"Congratulations, you've won the Boulder Badge!"

That's right! While Missingno. duplicates your sixth item, 94 mutates your fourth item! His encounter flag is the 4th bit in the ID of your fourth item. This will increase the ID of the item by 16 in most cases. If the 4th bit is already set (meaning the first digit in the item's hex ID is 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, B, D, or F) encountering 94 will do nothing.

So what happens if we use this new item?



Er. I guess the Boulder Badge is made out of candy.



Glitch moves also exist, but few of them are of any real interest. Most have terrible accuracy.



That didn't stop 94 and his amazing stats from messing me up, though.



But of course I'm not going to stop there, what happens if we mutate the bike?



These don't count as the actual badges, by the way. Those are on the trainer card.



The item effects work out of battle. Rocks and bait outside the Safari Zone, though? How could that be helpful?

Well, it can't, because you can just duplicate Master Balls, but let's say you don't do that. Bait halves the capture and run rate for the enemy hit with it, and rocks double it. Legendaries don't run, though, so you could use the Cascade Badge over and over, doubling their catch rates to the point a simple PokéBall could capture them. It's a darn shame Generation 1 doesn't track which ball captured the Pokémon, because you could REALLY wow your friends with a Mewtwo caught by a PokéBall.

But let's keep going, because there's MORE here.



Let's encounter 94 with a Good Rod in the 4th slot.



UNLIMITED POWER IS WITHIN MY GRASP!

8F is a very, VERY powerful item, but if you just used it straight away, the game would crash. Why? Because what this item does, is tell the game to run code at 0xD163 in the RAM - which is where the game keeps a list of your party Pokémon. In other words, it interprets your party as ASM code.

This, my friends, is your most powerful tool in hacking the game: Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). ACE is capable of crazy shit, but I'll keep it simple for now.



First of all, just the 7 bytes that make up the list of Pokémon in your party doesn't allow for much, so set up your party like this. The only important things here are the number of Pokémon, the species, and Pidgey's HP. Pidgey needs 233 remaining HP. If that's its maximum, fantastic, you're good to go, otherwise poison it, use a Max Potion, then walk around until it has 233 HP left and cure the poison. Fortunately, Generation 1 does not heal Pokémon that are stored in the PC, so you can store Pidgey safely if needed.

This party setup makes 8F run code from the third item in your inventory, which is much easier to edit and manipulate. As for actual codes, well, unfortunately I've never used ASM for the GBC. I've done ASM codes for the GBA, but there are enough differences to throw me off. If you're a coder and want to make me do something funny with 8F, write your code and compile it, then post the resulting machine code - from there, I can arrange my items to make that code in the game.

Here are some examples. If you have 20 TM34s as the third item and 201 TM15s as the fourth item, using 8F and then jumping off a ledge makes you walk through walls. Or even better, there's this possible item list:

Running that with 8F will give the player the Pokémon whose ID matches the number of Repels there. Now you can get any Pokémon, real or glitch.

There is much more you can do with 8F, so browsing this thread or ACE videos on Youtube is highly recommended extra research. Suffice to say this isn't the last we'll see of 8F, but there's more to see in the meantime.



Like this. B1F is another ACE item, only it runs the Hall of Fame data as code. You know, the Hall of Fame, which gets corrupted every time a glitch Pokémon is encountered. I tried it once and my save was erased. Oops! Good thing I had save states. Maybe it'll do something cool now though?



Oh. Oh crap.



There were like 15 Surf animations but it hit 0 times apparently.



When did I get Substitute??



Sadly the game crashed shortly after. It ain't a glitch playthrough until you totally break everything so it's a good thing I was able to do that.



The Super Rod mutates into 9F. Huh, I wonder what that does--



It...it restarts trainer battles apparently?!

Actually, apparently its real effect is to jump to the overworld loop without returning. Yeah, talking about 9F kinda turns into technobabble, but try to stay with me.



Using it outside trainer battles seems to put the game in a state where you can't move but the start menu can be brought up and closed, fixing everything.



Looks like it works in wild battles! I wonder how the game is affected?



That's how. We've escaped the battle without running.



Seems to have some weird graphical effects.



...and it makes items have their battle effects. Wow. So if there was a way to manipulate what the game thinks the enemy is (and I'm sure there is one) you could capture anything, anywhere.



Throwing another Ball captures a Ditto. How much more of those do I need?!



X items seem to do absolutely nothing.



I decide to attempt a trainer battle while I experiment.



Well I can't steal from trainers but I--



It exited the battle. Wow.

Now, apparently using 9F multiple times decreases the stack pointer, which...basically corrupts memory if you use 9F lots and lots.



I've got one last item to show. It can have many names, but most refer to it as "Jack's item" since it's named after a possible preset Rival name. It's easily gotten with item underflow.



Jack's item has the amazing, incredible, mind-blowing ability to...uh...open the Pokémon menu.



But WAIT! Upon exiting, all sprites are invisible but the Pokémon and I can still walk!



In fact, you can clip through walls! But there's a catch - in this state, the game checks the tile you're facing for collision detection, and you won't change the direction you're facing. So if I'm facing empty space I can move anywhere with this effect, until a wall is in front of me, then I'm stuck. So it's not a true Walk Through Walls item but you can at least get through walls 1-2 tiles in size at least, and that's powerful by itself!



Entering the Pokémon menu by pushing Start cancels the effect of the item and returns everything to normal.



So this leads absolutely nowhere. I wonder what else we can explore?



You can get back on the S.S. Anne with this, but if you go past the docks there's...no boat.



And I'm out of bounds! Always have a Teleporter when going out of bounds, though.



Oh dear, I'm stuck?



Oh, that explains it.



Back on the real S.S. Anne now, most people know that you can skip this area by trading a Pokémon that already knows Cut onto your save, allowing you to return when you have Surf.

If you already have HM01, another glitch can get you back here: Face any water, save the game, reset, reload, and then without doing anything else, try to Surf. You'll Surf 1 tile to the south, right through any boundary. The Surfboard item won't do it, however. You have to do it with a Surfing Pokémon.



And of course, the mysterious truck everyone thought had Mew in it for...some reason is here. In the remakes, they put a Lava Cookie there. Maybe this is one of those magical teleporting trucks from Metal Gear, and getting in will take us to Hoenn.

By the way, if you've never seen the SGDQ Pokémon glitch exhibition, I highly recommend it, there's something...interesting done with the truck here, heheh.



Jack's item allows me to clip back into the west side of Kanto. (Why didn't I just clip past Seafoam Island...?)



Hey, I'm in Viridian Forest!...Kind of!



Maybe we're ready for that Pokémon League thing at last.



Again, Jack's item lets us clip past the first gate. You can even walk north of the gate from the outside and wind up in Route 23 no problem. You don't need the first badge to beat the game after all! Unfortunately, the only way past the other gates is wrong-warping, which you can do by manipulating warp destinations with item underflow.

We've covered a lot in Pokémon Blue. We've collected many Pokémon and items, been to Glitch City and back, seems only fitting for me to wrong-warp into the Hall of Fame. Thank you all for joining me on this journey into the static abyss. I've had much fun showing off all the tricks and knowledge of Generation 1 I possess...

...but this LP ain't over quite yet. There is still much more to explore in this and the other GBC games! And if you think it's crazy so far? Oh, just you wait, it gets even more insane!