Part 42: Mini Note 01: Chatter

Mini Notes 01: Chatter

Why the heck is there one of these devoted to a single move. Well sit back and find out. By itself, Chatter seems standard, a 60BP special Flying move with 20PP and 100% accuracy, with a chance of confusion. What is the chance? Well it's not that simple.

The standard cry of Chatot gives Chatter a 1% chance of confusion, but if you use it out of battle, you're able to use the DS's microphone and record a short clip to use as its cry. What do you mean it's shouting swear words over Wi-Fi? Who could have possibly seen this coming???

More specifically, the louder the volume of the clip, the higher the confusion chance. How this is all converted is as so: The recording is stored as a 1000-byte structure within the game as a 4-bit PCM (pulse-code modulation) recording. When a sound is recorded, 1984 8-bit samples of microphone input are taken at roughly 2000 samples per second. 16 zero bytes are appended onto the end of this recording to create a 2000 byte 8-bit PCM recording, which is then downsized to a 4-bit PCM recording via a translation table:



From there, the first sample takes up the lower four bits and the second sample takes up the upper four bits. The value of the 16th byte of the 4-bit recording, which translates to the 31st and 32nd sample in the original recording, the chance of confusion is:



As, uh, as easy as that. Since the chance is taken from the start of the recording, you don't need to maintain the same volume throughout, but it's still not a crazy chance regardless. It's unaffected by Serene Grace, but is negated by Shield Dust. And now you know how it works, ain't that grand?