I can't release this (for obvious reasons) but I thought I'd post some screenshots.

This Pokemon Ruby proto has a debug menu with some nice things and cheats.

Enjoy!





The game has menus for each programmer, likely for them to test their respective subprojects. The ID is the map ID. The X, Y, H numbers are the X, Y, Z coordinates.



Nothing seems to happen when you select WATANABE. A "successful save" sound plays but nothing apparent happens apart from that.



This is the SOGABE menu. Nothing seems to happen when you select either of these.



The TAMADA menu. No idea what this means.



The KAGAYA menu. The trainer's card, surprisingly, shows your trainer card. The "card to exchange" shows something like your foe's trainer card. The slot machine option runs the slot machine minigame.




The MATUDA menu.



The NOHARA menu.



NOHARA's TV submenu.



NOHARA's Fan submenu.



The next set of debug menus. Transport lets you fly to any place on the map (not just cities). Pretty nifty.



TOMOMITI's menu.


Trick house.



More trick house.

More trick house.



TOMIMITI's Control Events.



This is what happens when you select the first option.



The second option. The OPEN thing takes you to the last gym.



The flag menu.



The first flag submenu.



Flags




Control WORK. The next few shots are WORK submenus. And flag menus.



















TAYA's menu.






I can control the weather!
















I can even make the weather underwater!








Simple text.



Old man.



Award a ribbon.




You can rig the lottery.



IWASAWA's menu. The cable car options show the cable car cutscene. The Roulette options start the roulette minigame.



View a MAIL menu.



Something that happens when you select a bunch of them.



Make an item. You can give yourself a bunch of master balls.



Another set of menus. Teleport teleports you to your house. Edit your PKMN lets you edit your pokemon - their stats, etc. Use HM lets you use any HM and Flash.





Switch BG - you can turn off some layers on the screen.



For example.



The control encounter menu. Lets you disable wild pokemon fights. Repel forever, baby.



Mirage island RND. This probably controls whether Mirage island appears or not.




Another set of menus. National Pokedex seems to do nothing. Battle for debug is a confusing menu and I have no idea what it does.



Time records.



The create PKMN menu. Lets you create any pokemon you want.



PSN2 is toxic I think.




Apparently IV and EV are called rnd and exp internally.








The 'see pkmn graphics' menu. You can view all the pokemon and even edit their palettes. Oddly enough pokemon 252-276 are missing (treecko is 277). Removed pokemon perhaps? I wonder if they're still in the rom somewhere.






Ever wanted a sucky yellow Groudon?





I realized shiny Groudon are yellow so I made this ugly green-yellow Regice.



Yet another set of menus. Again National Dex does nothing. Neither does Safari BGM ON/OFF lets you disable music.



The Set Ram berry menu. No idea what it does.



The size comparison menu. Lets you resize the pictures and move them around.






The rematch trainers menu.



Another set of menus. Mystery event enables the Groudon/Kyogre thing.






Cell info. Seems to be about the current map tile you're standing on.



Next set of menus. Hoenn Pokedex does nothing yet again.



See trainers. Trainer editor, just like the pokemon one.




Random number test.



Me-too BackupMan. Savestates? I'm not sure, reading doesn't work.



The last menu.



PTIME





KINA's font test.







Fishing points.



NAKAMURA's menu.

I've also ripped the music from both final and the proto for someone curious to compare. I haven't been able to find any differences, but the filesizes do differ.

http://drx.pl/pkmn/rubydbg-music.tar.gz - debug
http://drx.pl/pkmn/rubyfinal-music.tar.gz - final

another great find drx. :) keep up your work! too bad that you cant release it for the fans.

The 'see pkmn graphics' menu. You can view all the pokemon and even edit their palettes. Oddly enough pokemon 252-276 are missing (treecko is 277). Removed pokemon perhaps? I wonder if they're still in the rom somewhere.

This has been known about for some time now. In the final version, this thing appears when you force data from any of those slots to appear:

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/ ... 3%A9mon%29

Its actually a beta version of the sprites used for unidentified pokemon in the pokedex.

The one in the final version of course uses this sprite:
http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/ ... tion_marks
Which is also a glitch pokemon in the final that occupies hex slots 00 and everything 19B and beyond.

-applause-

Although pokemon 252-276 are missing in the final version as well. Missing slots were common in Red/Blue as well (Labeled as Missingno). IIRC the stats for them are empty as well.

It's amazing how all this could be tweaked from within the ROM itself.

Thanks for the pics.

The amount of debugging features (and sprites with different palettes) makes this seem very similar to the Fire Emblem GBA protos from earlier.

This is absolutely awesome and thanks for releasing screenshots and info; it's better then nothing. I understand you can't release the ROM, so I'm happy I got to see this.

Coolboyman wrote:

-applause-

Although pokemon 252-276 are missing in the final version as well. Missing slots were common in Red/Blue as well (Labeled as Missingno). IIRC the stats for them are empty as well.

Yeah, I kind of explained that to him in my previous post. The way you said it sounds so much better though.

Well, if you cannot post a rom for others, why not a patch of some kind?

We went over that sort of issue before with the idea of "patching" the FE GBA protos. ROMs do not work that way. Prototypes are different builds with data stored in different locations, and current patching algorithms are not suited for patching a game into it's prototype form.

To put it bluntly, someone tried to make "patches" for the FE protos, but the filesizes were as big as the ROMs themselves, rendering the patches completely pointless.

Kiddo wrote:

We went over that sort of issue before with the idea of "patching" the FE GBA protos. ROMs do not work that way. Prototypes are different builds with data stored in different locations, and current patching algorithms are not suited for patching a game into it's prototype form.

To put it bluntly, someone tried to make "patches" for the FE protos, but the filesizes were as big as the ROMs themselves, rendering the patches completely pointless.

That's right.

However, the reason I'm not releasing this ROM is different. This was a condition of the sale.

It's theoretically possible to make this releasable, but the amount of work required would be of cosmic proportions (I'd have to change a lot of the ROM in order to make this untraceable to the source).

drx wrote:

Kiddo wrote:

We went over that sort of issue before with the idea of "patching" the FE GBA protos. ROMs do not work that way. Prototypes are different builds with data stored in different locations, and current patching algorithms are not suited for patching a game into it's prototype form.

To put it bluntly, someone tried to make "patches" for the FE protos, but the filesizes were as big as the ROMs themselves, rendering the patches completely pointless.

That's right.

However, the reason I'm not releasing this ROM is different. This was a condition of the sale.

It's theoretically possible to make this releasable, but the amount of work required would be of cosmic proportions (I'd have to change a lot of the ROM in order to make this untraceable to the source).

Kinda saddening. I really wanna try this. :'(
But, if things are in different locations, how come it works with repointed data in a rom hack? I am one myself, but sometimes, roms are expanded to make more room for data, and are beyond the original size of the rom in question. How come this isn't the case? I always thought patchers compared the two files and overwrote necessary changes? I really find that odd.

Team Fail wrote:

...

Suppose you have a ROM and you translate some lines in it from Japanese to English. Then the patch will be something like a list of commands like "At location XYZ, change XXXXXXXX to YYYYYYYY".

And even when ROMs are expanded, the size is usually insignificant compared to the original size (otherwise patching doesn't really make sense)

Now with two differently compiled versions of a game (like in the case of prototypes) almost every piece of data in the ROM is in a different locations. Plus, every address is now different so that has to be patched too. The resulting needed patch (done using the IPS method) size is significant enough to warrant including the ROM itself.

drx wrote:

Team Fail wrote:

...

Suppose you have a ROM and you translate some lines in it from Japanese to English. Then the patch will be something like a list of commands like "At location XYZ, change XXXXXXXX to YYYYYYYY".

And even when ROMs are expanded, the size is usually insignificant compared to the original size (otherwise patching doesn't really make sense)

Now with two differently compiled versions of a game (like in the case of prototypes) almost every piece of data in the ROM is in a different locations. Plus, every address is now different so that has to be patched too. The resulting needed patch (done using the IPS method) size is significant enough to warrant including the ROM itself.

Ok. I see where you're going now. But, what about different patching methods, like APS or UPS? Or is releasing a patch against what you can do, essentially "releasing" the game?

I've not seen many apps for creating patches besides IPS Format. Perhaps I could take a look, but it mostly depends on how the patchers work - and if they're not much different from IPS, the resutls would not be much an improvement.

Ok. I see where you're going now. But, what about different patching methods, like APS or UPS? Or is releasing a patch against what you can do, essentially "releasing" the game?

drx has already stated he's not going to release the ROM (that includes anything that can be used to create the ROM, like patches) for legal reasons. Basically, he can't put the person who leaked it in trouble.

Sanky wrote:

Ok. I see where you're going now. But, what about different patching methods, like APS or UPS? Or is releasing a patch against what you can do, essentially "releasing" the game?

drx has already stated he's not going to release the ROM (that includes anything that can be used to create the ROM, like patches) for legal reasons. Basically, he can't put the person who leaked it in trouble.

Ok. I see. Not trying to pressure, but can't the names be removed? That way, they'll never know who released it. (Please don't shoot me)

Team Fail wrote:

Sanky wrote:

Ok. I see where you're going now. But, what about different patching methods, like APS or UPS? Or is releasing a patch against what you can do, essentially "releasing" the game?

drx has already stated he's not going to release the ROM (that includes anything that can be used to create the ROM, like patches) for legal reasons. Basically, he can't put the person who leaked it in trouble.

Ok. I see. Not trying to pressure, but can't the names be removed? That way, they'll never know who released it. (Please don't shoot me)

Sadly I don't think that it's that simple

Superrayman4 wrote:

Team Fail wrote:

Sanky wrote:

Ok. I see where you're going now. But, what about different patching methods, like APS or UPS? Or is releasing a patch against what you can do, essentially "releasing" the game?

drx has already stated he's not going to release the ROM (that includes anything that can be used to create the ROM, like patches) for legal reasons. Basically, he can't put the person who leaked it in trouble.

Ok. I see. Not trying to pressure, but can't the names be removed? That way, they'll never know who released it. (Please don't shoot me)

Sadly I don't think that it's that simple

It's all the crap in the credits that has to be done. Let me see...