iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 18h

Guys, they did it. Morpha looks correct. They didn't reference inaccurate emulation for the visuals like they did for the 3DS version. Obviously, the most important aspect of the Ocarina of Time visual style, noticed by everybody. 10/10 remake. ok but really this makes me happy

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Not only this, but the moment you switch to another compiler or platform, your nonsense decomp might not even work at all. It turns out when your "decompiled" code manually creates and dereferences stack pointers instead of passing function arguments, it isn't very portable...

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Disclosure, I'm a bit biased as I know the devs who worked on it very well and I technically contributed a tiny bit myself, but I can attest to the quality of the decompilation. It's not AI garbage, quality standards were upheld, and even near the end variables were named (by humans) descriptively.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The reasons it sped up like that afaict: 1. it started with just one person (who took frequent long breaks), then a handful, but at ~50% lots caught onto the progress and joined the effort 2. early code was largely big daunting system libraries and the latter half was mainly approachable game code

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I made an arrangement of "Turning of Leaves (Crow Town)" from Mina the Hollower! youtu.be/AZJTWielTs8

youtu.be

Mina the Hollower - Turning of Leaves (Crow Town) Arrangement

YouTube video by Meatball132

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Yeah, I can't imagine them not extending this to Xbox 360 games at some point.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

They ported the Xbox 360 emulator used by the Xbox One/Series backwards compatibility to the PC. Then, inside that Xbox 360 emulator, runs the emulator for original XBOX games.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Unsurprisingly, the XBOX ROM inside is encrypted.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Classic XBOX games are now rolling out for Win11 PCs: news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/0... I've taken a look inside one. This works by running the "Fusion" XBOX emulator used for 360 inside the "XEO3" 360 emulator used for One/Series. Same as backwards compatibility on those consoles.

news.xbox.com

Play More of the Games You Love, Wherever You Play with XBOX Backward Compatibility on PC - XBOX Wire

Today, we’re introducing XBOX Backward Compatibility on PC, making it easier to play classic XBOX games from the past across PC and handhelds, including the ROG XBOX Ally and XBOX Ally X.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

YOU CAN OPEN IT ON DESKTOP NOW IT'S PEAK

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

They already track this stuff in other Pokemon games and have used it for recap posts on social media: twitter.com/Pokemon/stat...

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

There's more but it's all just stuff exactly like that, nothing personally identifying.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

With past Pokemon games the data they collected like this ended up being used for cute infographics on social media to share global player stats. Extremely evil invasion of privacy that is, obviously.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

You'd have to modify the ROM to remove the syscalls. I'm not familiar enough with this game (or the GBA in general, really) to be able to do that myself, sadly.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Yes, it has been confirmed to me by another researcher that it's used as a whitelist to avoid situations like that.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

We saw the GCM file and thought that meant it was normal emulation at first so that's what early reports said. We only realised it was static recompilation later. SMG is different, it's natively recompiled, just with an emulation shim for specific things like GPU and DSP.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Here's a mostly-reverse-engineered structure from New Super Mario Bros. U that outlines what kinds of things they were collecting in 2012:

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Man, I didn't mean to get people fear mongering about this... This is completely normal, inoffensive, they've been doing it for decades, and you agreed to it when you signed up for your Nintendo account. You can even disable it here, if you'd like: accounts.nintendo.com/privacy

accounts.nintendo.com

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

I have a pet theory that Sunshine is the way it is because it was a last ditch effort to try to get GC emulation viable on Switch 1's NSO, before having to move it to Switch 2 due to poor performance. SMG in the same collection is more of a proper port that relies on the emu for the SDK only.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Mario Galaxy is a bit different, actually. They hooked up the low-level SDK stuff to their GC/Wii emulator and then recompiled the source code directly for Switch. In other words, it's a port that relies on some emulation behind the scenes.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

This is brand new. I was actually only partially correct - the ROM was modified to add a syscall that tells the emulator to compare the name to the Switch's built-in bad word list. It's not 100% done within the ROM.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

It's certainly not a first for Nintendo. All games in the Zelda Collector's Edition for GameCube were recompiled, and the 3D All Stars version of Super Mario Sunshine was recompiled from source and then afterwards *statically* recompiled from PPC to ARM. Not to mention all the ports of old titles.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

I believe thunking is different. The words I would use here are "stub" for the incomplete behaviour in the game, and possibly "hypercall" for the syscall extension the emulator responds to, although I don't think that latter one is quite right, just the closest term I can think of.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Yeah, I was told only after I posted this >.> whoops

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Also, I saw what appears to be some assert strings omitted when looking at the ROM. I don't know what else might have been changed, though.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

One of the changes is the addition of custom syscalls the emulator can respond to, which is used to, for example, check your name and Pokemon nicknames against the Switch's naughty word list. Your name is treated as empty by default (is randomised to a premade name) unless the emu says it's OK.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

One of the changes is the addition of custom syscalls the emulator can respond to, which is used to, for example, check your name and Pokemon nicknames against the Switch's funny naughty word list.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Could be so Nintendo has random fun fact stats to post on social media, lol. Or maybe to gauge how players play their game so they can keep it in mind for future game design/marketing. I suppose if you're being pessimistic it's to suss out cheaters. Shrug.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

i feel guilty spending $20 on this already

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Correction: the word filter is implemented on the Switch side, not in the ROM. The game always fails the check when played outside the Switch emu, and only succeeds after the emulator tells it the name is OK.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Nope, as I said here, it's in the ROM: bsky.app/profile/meat... You can play it in another emulator like mGBA and the word gets filtered there too.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

This was still more interesting than I expected, at least, especially as a non-Pokemon fan!

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Well, I tried very hard to find what the list of Pokemon names is used for, and we gave up on searching for the naughty words list. It'd also be neat to figure out what other differences might exist in the ROM. But I'm gonna have to call it quits here.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

I found a function that initialises the emulator hacks based on the GBA ROM's ID. These are the IDs the emulator recognises for the Pokemon hacks. BPR and BPG are FireRed and LeafGreen, respectively, but AXV, AXP, and BPE are Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald, respectively. Huh.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Here's something from the emulator code: it sends telemetry about your game progress to Nintendo. There's quite a lot, including some things that aren't pictured, like which Pokemon you have and what level they're each at.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

I'm not familiar enough with the GBA Classics app to have determined this myself, but I spoke with @luigiblood.bsky.social who confirmed for me that this is the same "Sloop" emulator.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Dumping the strings from the emulator executable, and holy hardcodes; it seems to have the name of every Pokemon in here. I didn't look very hard, but i didn't find what these are used for. Pokemon Home transfers or something, maybe? IDK.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Default player names (thanks to Skawo for finding these): RED LEAF FIRE GARY KAZ TORU ASH KENE GEKI JAK JANNE JONN KAMON KARL TAYLOR OSCAR HIRO MAX JON RALPH KAY TOSH ROAK OMI JODI AMANDA HILLARY MAKEY MICHI PAULA JUNE CASSIE REY SEDA KIKO MINA NORIE SAI MOMO SUZI

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

The game has a word filter - implemented in the ROM itself, not as an emulator patch. If you name yourself a swear, your name reverts to one of several default names. Offensive Pokemon nicknames revert to the species name.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

The ROM opens up in mGBA, but it complains about an unimplemented syscall, which presumably means there are some emulator-specific hack shenanigans.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Notably, the ROMs contain the build date! Revision 0: 2004 04 26 11:20 Revision 1: 2004 07 20 09:30 Revision A: 2025 12 19 16:01 2025 12 19 15:38 22afedd9 (The second looks like a version control commit ID maybe?)

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Of course, I immediately compared this ROM to the original. FireRed originally had two revisions (revisions 0 and 1). This ROM, surprisingly, isn't revision 1; it's a brand new revision A, and the ROM is very different.

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

OK, here's my "the (English) Pokemon Pokémon game for the Nintendo Switch system" cursory analysis. First of all, I dumped the game to immediately discover the most sad romfs ever:

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

they removed the n64 trees new pokemon gen looks visually good wtf

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Meatball132 @meatball132.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

$20 is automatically overpriced for a GBA ROM, but what do you MEAN each language is a separate purchase??? That is *offensive*. And no, "but they did it on 3DS a million years ago" doesn't make it OK. And "well it's better than buying the og cart for $500" isn't helpful either.

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