Cracking Animal Crossing's e-Reader Cards
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 25 июн 2024
- The e-Reader returns as the key to unlock a bunch of unused and broken items. It’s now easier than ever to abuse custom e-Reader cards both on real hardware and on emulator!
e-Reader Character Card Creator Program:
github.com/Hunter-Raff/e-Read...
- Corrections -
• Common UPC barcodes technically do not actually contain pricing data embedded in the print, but rather contain data that points software to a lookup price value stored elsewhere. Some barcodes can store pricing data directly on them, though its not as common. The comparison is just to simplify the concept.
‣ Follow me on Twitter: / achunterr
‣ Support on Patreon: / hunter_r
‣ Become a channel member: www.youtube.com/@Hunter-R./join
This video was recorded with an HD community texture pack for the game ran through Dolphin emulator. You can find info about this highly detailed, custom-drawn pack here:
forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread...
Assets and other information were pulled from the Animal Crossing GameCube community megasheet:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
🎵 Music credits:
• 10 A.M. - Animal Crossing New Leaf:
• 10 A.M. - Animal Cross...
• Title Theme - Animal Crossing (Nintendo Sound Selection Vol.1):
• Nintendo Sound Selecti...
• Animal Crossing (Autumn) - Mario Kart 8:
• Animal Crossing (Autum...
• Timed Minigame - Animal Crossing New Horizons:
• Video
• 12 P.M. (Jazz Remix) - Animal Crossing New Horizons:
• Animal Crossing: New H...
• K.K. Cruisin’ (Jazz Remix):
• KK Cruisin Jazz Remix ...
0:00:00 Introduction
0:00:33 e-Reader Explanation
0:03:43 e-Reader CCC
0:05:25 Exploiting e-Reader Cards
0:07:11 Unused Items
0:10:11 Conclusions 
Игры
The e-Reader Card Creator program is now available to download following the link in the description. This initial version required some workarounds, but development will continue to improve this tool in the future. Thank you!
ok
Will it allow us to create e-Reader cards that will give us any item in the game? If so, I won't have to use the Save Editor to give myself the Forbidden 4 NES games on a new town.
@@kingbrettpro Yep! That’s the exact purpose of it; to try and make unused items easier to obtain on console without action replay. In future builds, you will also be able to modify the GBA data on the cards too which can be fun.
Alright dude! If you had problems with it, then this is the entirely right thing to do! I hope you’re able to get it to work! I’ll be very excited to get my hands on this and an E-Reader eventually! Until then, though, just keep up the amazing work with everything! You’re doing awesome so far and I fully believe that you will only keep going up from here!
@@coolest10293 I appreciate it! I’ll for sure get it up and running soon, just need to fix a few hiccups. I’ll unpin and edit my original comment once it’s up!
Dude strolls onto RUclips, pushes the whole community forward, and shrugs it off. What a legend.
"Now you too can send you friends a zip bomb in the form of paper airplane corruption disguised as a friendly letter!"
📃💥
😆
My stand, 「E 3 C」, can summon e-Reader cards from a 'parallel world.'
This is so insanely cool. Might just have to bust the old e-reader out of the closet to try this out.
Thanks for all you do for this game, Hunter R.
Thank you so much! I also heard from a few people that you recommended my channel on one of your streams a few weeks ago - so thank you for that shoutout as well. I’m super glad this stuff interests you! 😄
2 GIGACHADS???? Mog. I love your superflat shorts :)
23 min ago?????
why are you everywhere
Oh hey, Mogswamp.
This is funny timing, I've been working on a small e-Reader project myself the past couple days, trying to translate some japanese only e-Cards for Pokemon Pinball to English because a few Pokemon are locked behind it.
Sounds like a fun project! I believe all cards share the VPK0 format, so there may be some overlap here - but I have very little experience with Pokémon or their e-Reader cards. I know Pokémon has a far wider community working on the e-Reader stuff though.
@@Hunter-R. hi
@@Hunter-R. A translation tool for Super Mario Bros Advance did the region changing work for me, but I just need to fix the text and it should be fine. That and figuring out which tool deals with checksums.
damn that’s cool is there anywhere i can follow you on to see how it goes?
@@joedlvr I'm probably gonna post something whenever I finish the project. I'm balancing out like 3 or 4 projects at all times, so it might be a month or so despite being nearly complete.
Well, you've definitely earned that "you are a great debugger" message.
Anyway, my mind immediately goes (of course) to wondering whether an e-Reader card can be constructed to achieve ACE. Lots of possible angles of attack... Maybe one of the text control codes (which you've brought up before in the context of Nook codes) are too powerful and allow for memory corruption. Or, maybe at least one of the size fields in the e-reader structure can be set to a very large value.
Or, possibly the most viable approach: Exploiting the compression. The fact that the data is compressed means that you can force a relatively tiny amount of _compressed_ data to decompress into a basically arbitrarily large block of _uncompressed_ data, overflowing whatever buffer they set up for it. Since you can't know if this is going to happen without actually decompressing the data, the only way to protect against this would be if the entire decompression routine contains checks against it.
I wonder if any of the invalid items could execute memory, as seen in Pokemon.
I'm imagining people spawning buildings outside or just dropping a museum inside their house now.
I hope this continues to be expanded upon, this is so cool!
@@ZeranZeran Years ago, I'm talking late 2000s, there were some really cool videos about various unused Animal Crossing maps, but the channel which uploaded them has since disappeared and I can't seem to find any reuploads or other videos talking about them, so my memory on this is very fuzzy. But iirc, the items which correlate to buildings can't be dropped and/or if dropped crashes the game. The only way to insert such items is by editing the save file with a save editor, or before that was made, an action replay and saving the town. HOWEVER, I recall some unused items being droppable turning into walls and various other strange objects when reloading the map, in the same vein as the glowing test cubes.
EDIT: I was actually wrong; per Hunter's latest video, this game also has building seeds!! I remember being disappointed that they weren't in the GameCube game as a kid, so learning this is actually really exciting!
Yes, there is a slight possibility. I did some testing of this custom card creation several years ago (I created a Python implementation of this back then). Execution can be passed to NULL when opening a letter and a specific invalid character is attempted to be drawn to the screen. The callback is somewhere down the line in mMsg_Draw if you dig into the AC decomp.
@@jtbirdACC There’s actually a guy who goes by “TetraBitGaming” who did a few videos on the unused test maps I think, if I remember correctly.
This would be pretty cool as a present.
You right an actual letter to a friend with one of these custom cards they can scan and they can get a letter and present from you in game. It would be a fun thing to put in a Christmas card.
I wanted to do this so bad back in 2005 when we figured out how to dump and print cards, was going to send my friend K.K.'s card on the edge of a christmas card. But most home printers weren't accurate enough to reproduce the dot codes reliably, including mine.
There has been so much stuff going on in the AC gamecube community recently. Between Brian creating a ticket system and now you developing this, it's pretty crazy that a game over two decades old is still getting this treatment from fans. I'm excited to see what's coming up in the near future!
Indeed! I owe a lot of this channel to Brian, he’s inspired a lot of this content by documenting and pushing this game forward. Cuyler has also been working diligently on a lot of projects behind the scenes too!
I love the OK! YOU ARE GREAT debug message. It feels so passive aggressive, like "okay, you broke the game, proud of yourself?"
As someone with ADHD who tends to do niche stuff like this from time to time, your tool is absolutely NOT in vain or a waste of time!!! I wish more people with knowledge would do stuff like this. ;)
This is where I advise you to teach yourself instead of waiting for someone else to get around to it.
ehrrhhhh... *takes long draft of cigarette* you should larn it, sonny, instead uhv waytin fo somewin elz to dou iht.
That's kind of the disadvantage of ADHD. I often get super invested instuff and then my interest suddenly drops off...@@codyssmith73
Was the "acnl-4-2024" a hint for new videos this year covering Animal Crossing New Leaf? If yes was that very clever and great video as always!
Hehe…
4-2024 is april 2024. come on hunter tell us
I was lucky enough to have a uncle who'd do work all around, but did a few jobs in Japan, and I remember him bringing me back a few E-Reader card packs, and a japanese gameboy advance, just so I could play Mario Bros Advanced 4 levels. Unfortunately, was never able to use the e-reader for Pokemon nor' Animal Crossing as well... it got discountined before it came out here cause it wasn't selling well. However, I still have such fond memories of it and think the e-reader was still somewhat underutilized and overshadowed
The work on this is absolutely insane, thanks for sticking to such an intriguing niche, this will be so good to mess around with!
This opens many possibilities, not only for population growing, but for any game that actually uses e-reader cards. With some tweaking, this program could do some amazing things.
Thanks for making this, Hunter!
i don’t even have any way to use your e reader card program, but i wanted to say it’s super cool that you made it and awesome that it’s free. been loving your videos; keep it up!
You seem to misunderstand how UPC barcodes work. They contain a unique number (the Unique Product Code, as the name suggests) and the scanning system does the lookup to determine its name and price, etc.
The barcode does not contain pricing data. It just tells the computer which item you just scanned. If you do the swap with the banana sticker, whatever you scan will show up AS a banana, which flags to most cashier's that something is wrong.
Yea, I admittedly simplified it and compared it poorly by saying the bar code had pricing data. From a UPC perspective, they are still similar in that both have embedded unique IDs and it will scan exactly what is embedded no matter what it’s attached to. Sorry for the oversimplification!
It's much closer to a QR code.
I'm SO STOKED you made this!! I can't believe after all these years, somebody cracked the code. I'm *definitely* using this. Thank you!!
Absolutely wild to have such a comprehensive tool for something that has been more or less a mystery for decades. This is like getting DSfix for dark souls 15 years after launch. Incredible incredible work.
Your channel reminds me a lot of AsumSaus, with your videos centered on the original Animal Crossing, while his are centered on Super Smash Bros. Melee
Hey, funnily enough this is exactly the kind of thing I did to reverse engineer smash ultimate amiibo :D
I’d love to talk more about this with you and exchange stories of development n’ the like at some point ^^
Excellent video!! I was able to obtain a lot of the unobtainable items such as the NES games via action replay as a kid, which was super helpful and I had no idea how hard these were to get outside of that. You’re doing incredible work!
i've been following this account for a while now and i have to say i never found a person that explains such complex topics as good as you. I'm a big fan of the Animal Crossing franchise, and thanks to your videos now i know alot more about it, thanks :)
Truly an amazing creator, even making the tool open-source & free! I appreciate all your dedication to the content accuracy in your videos, especially the calming aura with your voice really tying it all together!! SO glad I got recommended your stuff, keep it up Hunter! :D
It’s crazy how different things were when you were a kid in the early 2000s. The e-reader was probably available to use back when we started playing AC Gamecube at age 7, but since we weren’t on the internet, we accepted it as a mystery and only speculated what it meant whenever we got the message at the terminal in the post office. It’s really cool to learn now, all these years later, about what it actually is!
What a strange mechanic, it requires so many physical items for someone to have utilized it I can’t imagine it actually being done by many people at all: game disc, GameCube, link cable, game boy, e reader, and the card.
@@Bulliegh yeah I know
You may as well include the memory card, the controller, the television, the house and the electricity if you're going to include the game and console, lol. Don't forget batteries for the GBA!
On a more serious note, I would imagine the GCNGBA link cable and the e-Reader were the biggest stumbling blocks for people. Off the top of my head, I can't recall any "killer apps" on the GameCube that would've made most people get one of those cables (closest would be the 3D Pokemon games, and even those ehhh idk), and the e-Reader was even worse in this regard; there's a reason it was such a flop outside of Japan and never even made it to Europe.
@@Bulliegh how so? as someone older than 30, ya, that was a lot of stuff, and judging by the fact the e-reader got discontinued due to poor sales, they have a very valid point.
@@LonelySpaceDetective my list was meant specifically for games that used the e-reader card lol. The entry cost being more than Game and Cube (controller included). I think it’s funny how invested into an ecosystem nintendo wanted people buying these inter-console accessories to be because each one of the components does provide value for multiple games and it would have taken some dev resources to create the stuff.
It also could be that I grew up in a GameCube only household and asking for even a single game meant weeks of chores.
For real, I grew up in that generation and it was impossible getting my dad to buy my own memory card (shared gamecube with my brother). There was no way of convincing him to buy gaming accessories, so I never got the cool stuff. Not to mention these niche items weren't really advertised or seen much, a rarity in stores.
I love the Internet man. I get to nerd out over random stuff like this and use programs made by people smarter than me to do things that overall do hardly anything for my daily life and that's just beautiful!
It's cool to see people making things like this for their favorite games. The tool UI looks nice. I like that you included a preview. I wonder what's in that drop-down box of item names though.
just binged all your videos yesterday and now this video comes out, perfect timing! Super interesting stuff, keep doing what you do :)
THIS is awesome! I don't even have animal crossing on the gamecube, or the e-reader, but that's one heck of a program you've made. You ARE great!
This is why you're becoming one of my favourite creators on RUclips. Making such cool tools like the e-reader ccc is so awesome. Seriously one of the best projects I've seen on RUclips. Amazing stuff Hunter!
hi dino ! i love you videos :)
Really love your content, man. It's extremely well put together and entertaining and informative at the same time.
While I never played Animal Crossing before nor have I ever searched for its content I'm really glad the RUclips algorithm decided to suggest this channel because these videos are genuinely enjoyable to watch and I'm amazed by the lengths you went through with helping with preservation.
Yes!!! A new video. My family LOVES your channel!
This is so impressive man. I've been itching to play the original (Gamecube) version for a while now and this gives me a great excuse.
You rock for making that tool free. This is so cool!
the things you do and putting them out for free is unbelievably admirable and impressive. i finally decided to get into the series after these videos unfortunately i didnt play the original for long since finding out theres no storage doesnt fit my style of play but i bought new horizons the next day and love it.
props for the hard work on the software, I would imagine the leap to reading other games e-reader cards isn't too far off with most of the work u did already, should give it a try
OK! YOU ARE GREAT!
Summarizes all of our thoughts about the uploader of these AC videos.
Thank you ¦3
This program looks really cool, great work for making it!
You're single-handedly making Animal Crossing history and bringing more people to the community! You got me to download it and start playing lol
need to get a Dolphin session with the boys going and start sending each other unhinged e-reader codes.
I never ever played any of these games but this stuff is so interesting xD
I have watched every single video on your channel and can't get enough
I'm so lucky to have found you after your first couple videos, I can't believe the quality of your content! Surely you have some background in RUclips from before??
This is my first and only RUclips channel, but I’m super glad people have been enjoying it! 😄
I know it’s obviously not your preferred area of expertise, but diving into the multitude of Pokemon e-reader codes (especially the battle tower codes etc) and adapting your tool for them would be massive for that community as well. Absolutely amazing work, can’t wait to see what you do next
I just finished binging all your videos today. I played this game so much as a kid and you are a gem. I am truly in awe. The discoveries are amazing and the quality of the videos equally spectacular
Thank you so much, that means a lot! I'm glad you discovered the channel and enjoy it!
Thats awesome! I wish there was some sort of a reusable way to print them, like a flash cart sort of thing just for e-reader cards. that would be really cool
Very informative video! It's quite rare to see youtubers make actual tools for the community
So excited to see a redux of my favorite mechanic
I love your content ! Always great to see you upload !
I love when you upload videos! Upgrades any day!
these videos keep my ACGC love alive
This is THE video I’ve been waiting for
Thank you so much for this!!! We never got the e-reader over here so I'm super excited to get to experience this kind of stuff :D
this is so cool dude. this channel is great.
Thank you so much for providing the source code! As a student software developer it's so fascinating to see C# especially be used in something I absolutely adore.
This is so cool Hunter i cant wait!
I love your Channel!
Wish I could use the E-reader Cards in a Pal Copy......
But this is still amazing
Thats insane! I didnt know the paper airplane was able to be used as real paper! Imagine you could write a letter, and throw the airplane, and have it end up in your friends town if you ever visited. That would be cool.
I wonder if the sickle still has left over functionality?
Everytime Hunter posts you know it's gonna be a great day, thanks for making such informative and creative content! Keep up the good work
Now I'm hooked onto tour channel. What other ideas are going to be turned into videos? Hoepfully not the ones that crash the game! Actually yes! Love your videos
This is honestly great timing for my series, definitely gonna use it to end it off with a bang.
As someone that still owns an eReader as well as an old save file for ACGC, color me intrigued! I never got any of the cards back in the day so this might be something for me to look into.
The real GOAT of the og Animal Crossing
I am definitely going to play Animal Crossing this spring break, primarily to investigate these various neat glitches & computer science projects for myself. 😁
Another Hunter R. banger
I just found your channel last week and I absolutely love it. I wish there was more in depth technical videos about Nintendo games. Hacking these kinds of games seems like a ton of fun. Is decompiling/reversing gamecube games convoluted?
Awesome work on the tool! Keep up the great videos :)
god these videos are so fun to watch
God i love this channel so much
as a compsci student I am so willing to watch a video to spoonfeed me on the e-readers compression and cryptography algorithms
Great work man 😊 absolutley amazing
Thank you for this so much. You're amazing
This is awesome! Kinda wanna get my own ereader now to play around with this
love your content, even more happy now that i know you are using C#
This should be very interesting! Got here less than a minute after release lol, here we go!
Would be pretty sick if you expanded this to other e-reader cards. You would be a legend for all time
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING THIS OPEN SOURCE!
I would actually love to modify it if.... there was anything _to_ modify other than UI (you know, since from what I gather it kinda already does everything it _could_ do: custom messages and summon any item)
Still, I'll 100% be taking a look into this!
your content and dedication to it is incredible
damn all these videos make me so gutted that i have the pal version of ac 😭 and no e reader lol i’d love to try this stuff out it’s amazing what you’re doing it’s crazy that this game that’s probably older than a lotta viewers is still getting cracked open like this
Already jonesing for the next video. Neat stuff!
another banger of a video, convinced me to try and get an e-reader after over 20 years
Releasing your work for free and open source and not putting it behind a paywall like Patreon, one more reason for me to give that video a like and letting it run until the last second for the RUclips algorithm.
Too many Content Creator are putting things like these behind such paywall. Thanks!
This is really cool, amazing work!
*cries in European*
My condolences… 🥲
This video poped up in my recomended and i was lloking for a way to spawn items in the og animal crossing this help thanks
This is super cool, just making it more accessible is always good :D.
Dude, I love your videos.
Sweet. Nice work.
You are so flipping modest! This is an amazing tool!! If humanity had half of your munificence, the world would be a much better place.
So, just to summarize or recap, what we are doing is reproducing e-reader card codes for easy access? That is very impressive. I lack the knowledge of absolutely everything else, but the concept itself is very interesting.
I would have never guessed that the e-Reader was such a powerful tool given to us by Nintendo officially.
Wooo here we go new upload!
This is so cool, I actually do have a e-Reader GBA cart and a copy of the game, it would be fun to experiment with this on the real hardware someday!
Thankfully, prices aren't actually stored in a UPC barcode; they're stored in an inventory database, and the UPC is the key in the database. They're *slightly* more secure than Animal Crossing e-Reader cards: you can't make your own barcodes with a price of zero :P
With deli items, where each can have a different weight and thus price, some stores do put it right in the barcode...
you *can* however, often... reprogram the firmware of a barcode reader.. or .. since a barcode reader works as a keyboard inject keypresses outside of what is expected to exit out of the PoS software ! .. or you can enter the 'staff mode' and that *does* have an option to change the price ..
:D
This is amazing. I might need to get a GBA just to try your program. Lol
8:44 And by resetting, you get to hear Resetti's hilarious rants!
Win-win!
Man, I love that guy...
Your videos are amazing!! Would love to see a tech deep dives for an engineering audience on some topics
you slid on this one twin 😤🔥
This is amazing!!
What a great project! Plus needing to buy a printer for my GameCube/GBA wouldn't even be the weirdest thing I need to get for them this week.