Re: Strange glitch

[Merc]

Alright, so today I decided to go on Telefang 1 only to be greeted by this strange glitch.

Spoiler!

Seems everything in the enviroment has gone missing. I still collide with objects and get battles, though.
It doesn't end there. Further inspection reveals that it deleted my more recent save. Not a problem since I use save states anyway.

Spoiler!

That's the guy who blocks the shortcut during the T-Fanger tournament by the way, which I had completed on the recent save.
I stopped playing before because I reached the part where the translation ends.

Now another thing but unrelated to this glitch. Text messages. I had four of them when I loaded up the save. Most of them bring up strings of letters and numbers which are just untranslated things I'm guessing.
Anyway, this is the first time I had ever checked a text message in this game (I couldn't remember them from the bootleg but ten years is a long time...) Here are some of the worded messages that came up.

Spoiler!

Spooky.

These texts coupled with the fact that no enviroment textures were loading made me thought I had entered one of those silly creepypasta stories. I just dismissed it as incomplete translation spewing random things onto the texts, but if I run into any ghosts or something I'll let you know.

I assume it's a known glitch but I thought I'd share this with all of you.

[RacieB]

The blank maps thing is a glitch having to do with how the realtime clock is emulated in VBA. There is a separate map palette coded for every hour in the day (so that it's dark at night etc), if you manage to force the clock to display an unusual hour - like gamesharking it to be 60:00 or whatever - it will try to compensate by using what it thinks is a proper palette, usually ending up with some insane colors like dark brown and hot pink etc.

The reason that this causes blanking during otherwise normal gameplay is because VBA sees that it's around 12am (24:00) on your computer's clock but doesn't communicate this properly to the game (which wants this number as 00:00). It tries to read a palette that it shouldn't use, which happens to be a blank white one.

The short of it is wait an hour and it'll correct itself =)

The text messages thing, on the other hand, is a known patch issue. For some reason, the character display for text messages is coded in an annoying manner which makes using the VWF difficult. Texts are pretty much just flavor stuff though, not really relevant to gameplay at all, so I guess it's not a priority issue.

[Merc]

Figured as much. You were right about the clock display thing because as soon as it became 1am here I got my maps back.

[Blaziken257]

VBA-M emulates the clock correctly, so you can play it from 12:00am-12:59am without problems. I'm not sure what happens in BGB or any other emulator. Alternately, in VBA (not VBA-M), you can switch to Game Boy mode for an hour, since it doesn't load the color palettes.

Also, as a random point, in Pokémon G/S/C, when playing at 12am on VBA, the game thinks it's daytime. Weird.

[RacieB]

Didn't you make a patch for the glitch at some point? I swear I remember one but I've been searching and can't find it :<

[andwhyisit]

I don't recall there being a patch for it as it isn't really a bug in the game itself, but I suppose it would be easy enough to fix. I could take a look if I have the time.

[Sanqui]

Yeah, here's Blaziken's patch.

It would be possible to workaround better by figuring out how the game reads the palettes and repointing them, I suppose. Or just tell people not to use VBA. bgb obviously handles this properly.

[RacieB]

Yesss I knew I'd seen a greyscale patch for that before.

Whether or not it's deemed significant enough to fix later, I propose we refer to this bug as the Witching Hour. xD

[Merc]

On a related note it's wierd how it uses 24:00 rather than 0:00. Not once in my life have I seen a digital clock that uses 24:00.