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 Magical Wand and Game Data 
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Site Administrator
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Joined: Wed Jul 05, 2006 10:32 am
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Location: Brooklyn, NY
Let's just say I had a special ability, that I can extract the game's save file from the GBA, and put it onto a computer.

How do I extract data from that save file, like what IVs and EVs each pokemon has, and their gender code for mirage island?
And furthermore, the mirage island gender code for that save file?

This is all hypothetical, of course :wink: :D


Sat Apr 05, 2014 7:08 pm
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Ace Trainer
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Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2013 5:58 am
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You'd have to figure out exactly what format the Gen III Pokemon games store data in. Specifically, the version you're using. It's likely a bit different for each of the games, and I've seen no documentation on it. The easiest way would be to tear apart the game and try to find where the game either saves or loads the file, and reconstruct the format from that. Even then, you need to find out what each value it's grabbing and storing in each place. It's hardly anything to go off of, but your alternative is to stare at your save file trying to figure something out, which isn't likely to go anywhere.

You can try manipulating the data in certain ways in order to identify key areas. For example, organizing all your pokemon in your boxes so they're placed in a sort of checker board pattern, then look through the save data with a hex editor looking for an alternating pattern, and try to figure out the format of PC pokemon by comparing the chunks of data with each other. Doing that, you could determine some info on your pokemon, or at least the location of the info. As for the mirage island code, you could try turning on your game and loading it once a day, and check for changing values. To filter out unwanted values that change a little more often than the mirage island code (for example, play time) you could save twice each day and compare the two files. Any small, localized changes between the two can be safely ruled out. After a few days, you can assume that any areas that change only once a day are related to the time system, and one of them is probably the gender code. Although, this is all assuming that the games are saved without any witchcraft or tomfoolery involved. It doesn't make sense for them to implement any sort of protection for that kind of thing on the GBA, but it could just be that it's naturally complex. If there's some sort of cheat code for that kind of thing, you could try loading the save file in an emulator. Emulators also have memory debuggers which would also prove useful. If you can find the mirage island code in memory, you could change it.

tl;dr: It's complicated and I don't really understand most of it myself.

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Mon Apr 07, 2014 7:58 pm
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