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Forbidden Tempura

I am good at being angry about video games.

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Settling the debate once and for all: Is Shedinja legal in a Nuzlocke ruleset for Pokémon Emerald?

Forbidden Tempura 3/9/2026

Context What is a Nuzlocke? To set the stage, let's first provide some context to the curious-but-unfamiliar reader as is tradition in essays that portray niche topics that are only ever read by the curious-but-definitely-familiar reader. The “Nuzlocke” ruleset refers to a particular set of rules to create a self-imposed challenge in Pokémon games. These go back to a web comic called Nuzlocke (content warning: swearing, intentional misgendering), later renamed to Pokémon: Hard Mode to differentiate them from other web comics now hosted on the site called Nuzlocke. The original Nuzlocke challenge had two rules written exactly as follows: > release a pokemon if it faints > have to catch the 1st pokemon in each area and nothing else Subsequently, internet autists did what internet autists did best and tried this kind of challenge for their own. Today, you can find a sprawling set of rulesets all derived therefrom. Out of these, I only would like to examine one more: du

A Mystery Involving Hardware Security Modules and Value Tokens

Forbidden Tempura 10/7/2025

Context Historical context In July, 2021, the phenomenon known as the “Gigaleak” continued. The Gigaleak was a drip-feed of part of the ill-gotten data from the 2018 Nintendo data breach. On July 20, 2021, the iqcvs.tar.xz file was uploaded to the now-defunct file sharing website anonfiles.com and thereby made available to the public by The Hacker Known as 4chan. This file contains a dump of CVS repositories. The repository sw contains the BroadOn network infrastructure around the middle of the year 2006. This is shortly before the Nintendo Wii launched. The network infrastructure was initially launched alongside the iQue Player, a variant of the Nintendo 64 featuring downloadable games and some anti-piracy measures of questionable quality (non-HTTPS link) intended for the Chinese market, which was and still is notorious for being particularly prone to piracy. It was developed by a company then called BroadOn Communications Corp., a California corporation. The iQue Player u

ITInfodump

How to appear as a kinder person

Forbidden Tempura 8/24/2025

Your life is difficult. You have a hard time getting along with others. Yet you can't identify why. This post gives some pointers on appearing as a kinder person. Perhaps appearing kind isn't the problem you have. But maybe it is. If you're in doubt, try it out and see. Disclaimer: I hold neither a degree in psychology or political sciences. These are merely personal observations of mine. Anyone pitching in with solid research to disprove my claims or to provide a stronger foundation thereto would be greatly appreciated. Important context: This text is aimed at people who aren't kind people at heart but who need to blend in with society. Maybe they just don't want to be hobos like in Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. If you find yourself here, you should have already exhausted all avenues of genuine improvement. Mindset about life and death It matters a lot how you frame things in your mind. Your mental framing frequently carries over into your phrasing, even without

OtherOpinion

What Is Going on Inside Their Head: the Pokémon Emerald Random Number Generator

Forbidden Tempura 6/16/2024

In Pokémon Emerald, there are several random number generators. The main one, pp_rand(), uses the following generator: seed = (1103515245 * seed + 24691) as u32 return (seed >> 16) as u16 Where do these constants come from? The 1103515245 constant is easily explained: It is what ISO/IEC 9899 in all editions provides as an example for how to implement rand(), which itself traces back to 70s UNIX libc rand.c. That function returns a signed 16-bit integer with RAND_MAX == 32767. Game Freak, however, wanted to have an unsigned 16-bit integer. Therefore, they doubled RAND_MAX to be 65535 instead of 32767. Unsure if this was safe, they also doubled the increment from 12345 to 24690 and added 1 to make sure it was relatively prime to 1103515245, as evidenced by the following comment in calctool.c: // 12345*2+1 (RAND_MAX=32727の時に12345なら65535の時は倍必要なのではないか？テスト) In other words, Game Freak was unsure if they also needed to double the increment when doubling RAND_MAX, displaying a failure t

Games

A Brief Look at the 3DS Cartridge Protocol

Forbidden Tempura 6/2/2024

About a week ago, there has been a little addition to the 3dbrew wiki page about 3DS cartridges (carts) that outlines the technical details of how the 3DS cartridge controller and a 3DS cartridge talk to each other. I would like to take this opportunity to also include the 3DS itself in the conversation to illuminate which part of which device performs which step. I will then proceed to outline where I think the corresponding design decisions originate. Finally, I will conclude with some concrete ideas for improvement. But first, we need to talk about parallel universes This protocol makes no sense unless you have a basic overview of the 3DS AES engine. The 3DS AES engine can load 128-bit AES keys in two ways: Using key-derivation from a keyX and keyY (officially called KeyId and KeySeed, respectively). Directly specifying a full AES key. The key derivation from a keyX and keyY works as follows: AES key = (((keyX ROL 2) XOR keyY) + C1) ROR 41, where ROL is left rotation on a 128-bit

ITGamesInfodump

Reconstructing the 3DS Bootstrapping Process at the Factory

Forbidden Tempura 5/13/2024

Motivation The Nintendo 3DS was a fairly popular console. In spite of that, surprisingly little is known about how it is put together at the factory. Working with information that was uncovered during the so-called Gigaleak, I will try to recover as much information as I can about the manufacturing process up and until the point the 3DS is able to complete a normal boot sequence. One-Time Programmable (OTP) region Every 3DS ships with 0x100 of one-time programmable persistent memory at 0x10012000-0x10012100, containing console-unique keys and information. This obviously has to occur before any normal firmware runs on the system because significant amounts of all data written would fail to account for console-unique information and thus the encrypted values would be all encrypted for the wrong keys. An interesting observations: ctr.7z (SHA-256: 8b05072361254437277576d53c08b95e5f076c6b33a2871fad74eaa5561d1d38) ctr/sources/bootrom/CTR/private/build/bootrom/ctr_bootrom/ARM9/main.c has a pr

ITGamesInfodump

Generation 3 of Pokémon is held together by duct tape and I can prove it

Forbidden Tempura 4/16/2024

The problem space Pokémon is a franchise that needs no introduction. Millions upon millions of people have had some exposure thereto. I would like to focus on one tiny implementation detail of the games that formed the third generation of Pokémon: Ruby, Sapphire, FireRed, LeafGreen, and Emerald. In this generation of the games, the developers of the series first started trying to discourage cheating. To understand what they did, I first need to introduce a few concepts. A Pokémon is an individual member of a Pokémon species. Think of it like a specific individual, just like how there is a sheep that you encounter and there is the species of sheep, of which the aforementioned individual of a member. Every Pokémon has a 32-bit personality value (also commonly called personality ID or PID for short). A (Pokémon) trainer is a concept in the games: Trainers go around and make their Pokémon fight against other Pokémon. They hold contests to find out who is the strongest trainer. Supposedly

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