Single Player Trade Hack Devised for Classic Pokemon Titles

StewShearerOld

Geekdad News Writer
Jan 5, 2013
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Single Player Trade Hack Devised for Classic Pokemon Titles

Coder Pepijn de Vos has created a single player trade program using an Arduino board, a link cable and a Game Boy.

It's been a long time since I've played a <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/tag/view/pokemon>Pokemon game. It's funny because back when the series first debuted in North America, there was a period of a few years where I was absolutely obsessed with it. I played Pokemon Blue, Red and Yellow to death, spending hour after countless hour training my Pokemon, perfecting my team and, of course, striving to "catch 'em all". As much time as I invested in them however, I found myself forever foiled by the nature of the games themselves. Save for a few rare occasions, I never had anyone I could trade with to complete my Pokemon collection.

If only they'd made Arduino boards back in the late-90s. By combining one of the aforementioned devices with a Game Boy, a link cable and cartridge copies of the first generation Pokemon games, coder Pepijin de Vos was able to create a custom program giving him the ability to perform one person. All that's required is to attach your GameBoy to <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/tag/view/arduino>the Arduino and run Vos's code to initiate the trade. The process apparently works with the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance.

Granted, this ability isn't really all that useful now that modern Pokemon games and the advent of Wi-Fi have removed the necessity of archaic things like link cables. Even so, it's still a nifty little hack that makes my inner-child giddy from its possibilities. If only I'd know back then that someone someday would invent something like this, I might have been trading away my favorite Khangaskhan. It almost brings a tear to the eyes.

Source: Endgadget


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jurnag12

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Nov 9, 2009
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Might be necessary to point out that you're consistently misspelling the coder's first name in the article. It's "Pepijn", not "Pepijin".
 

PH3NOmenon

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Oct 23, 2009
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jurnag12 said:
Might be necessary to point out that you're consistently misspelling the coder's first name in the article. It's "Pepijn", not "Pepijin".
I think it's far more necessary to point out that hacked pokémon games are very unlikely to bring a teat to anyone's eye.

StewShearer said:
If only I'd know back then that someone someday would invent something like this, I might have been trading away my favorite Khangaskhan. It almost brings a teat to the eyes.



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Micalas

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Mar 5, 2011
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Unless I'm reading it wrong, he still had legit copies of Red and Blue. If that's the case, it sounds like time would've been better spent creating a way to send a pokemon he caught in an emulated version of the game to his physical game. All it sounds like he did was create a makeshift gameboy.
 

Lazy Kitty

Evil
May 1, 2009
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Awesome, this seems like something that could have been useful for storing your Pokemon on your actual PC, like pokemon box, except without the subscribtion cost because you run it on your own machines.
(I remember having a thing like that that allowed me to store pokemon from Ruby, I think on my Gamecube. Pretty sure it came with pokemon coloseum.)

Besides the obvious hacking purposes of being able to give yourself every single shiny pokemon ever or even altering existing pokemon.
Although 151 trades would be tedious.
 

Redlin5_v1legacy

Better Red than Dead
Aug 5, 2009
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This is the kind of stuff that me and my friend used to imagine "What if we could do that?" when trading. Now its real.

:D
 

Voulan

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Jul 18, 2011
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I'm just surprised that he has working game cartridges. I'll never forget the pain I had when I switched on Pokemon Red and later Silver to discover my save files were completely gone for good.

Also, feel free to take on sub-editors. I'll do it for free, even.
 

CrystalShadow

don't upset the insane catgirl
Apr 11, 2009
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Rex Dark said:
Awesome, this seems like something that could have been useful for storing your Pokemon on your actual PC, like pokemon box, except without the subscribtion cost because you run it on your own machines.
(I remember having a thing like that that allowed me to store pokemon from Ruby, I think on my Gamecube. Pretty sure it came with pokemon coloseum.)

Besides the obvious hacking purposes of being able to give yourself every single shiny pokemon ever or even altering existing pokemon.
Although 151 trades would be tedious.
If you have an arduino, (especially the MEGA variety) there are projects around for reading the cart directly into a PC...
Technically it's a way of performing a ROM dump (eg, how you get the files emulators use in the first place), but you can also read (and write) to anything else in the cart, such as the save files...

I've been wanting to build one for a while because of pokemon, so I can back up my saves. They were still ok last I checked, but they may be gone by now...

Problem was to build one of those, you need a game boy cartridge connector to wire up to the arduino. And I had almost no luck getting one. (Besides the connector, and some protection diodes if you're paranoid about damaging something, the rest of it is all arduino coding)
 

loa

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Jan 28, 2012
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So why exactly is this better than just cheating whatever pokemon you want with a gameshark?