RuneNet

TheZZAZZGlitch's April Fools

August 25, 2023 ◦ 4 min ◦

My (incomplete and unfinished) notes on my involvement in TheZZAZZGlitch's events. Honestly don't know what kind of tone I want to write this in, so to save on efforts I'll go for milquetoast for now.

Nature by RodrixAP licensed under CC BY 2.0

A quick Rundown

Check out TheZZAZZGlitch on Youtube! Many videos of theirs focus on the first and second generation of Pokemon games on the GameBoy. Those rudimentary and highly exploitable games have lots of bugs and glitches which lead to funnery and shenaniganery. In fact, arbitrary code execution is almost trivial to achieve in-game, even on the emulated version I had on the 3ds.

At some point ZZAZZ's produced April fools content, which quickly expanded to playable challenges. The April fools event of 2018 was the year I first joined. You bring your own (legally obtained) copy of a Pokémon Yellow ROM, then launch it with his supplied save file. The save file was modified in a way to trick the game into doing his bidding, a whole different game utilizing the assets from the read-only part of the cartridge. That year there was also a utility program you had to run in parallel, which allowed this GameBoy game from 1998 to connect to the internet, by creatively using the link cable functionality of yore.

This internet connectivity allowed for a large world map which the game would fetch zone-by-zone as you walked around.

A map of 2018's world, made by Darkshadows9.

A leaderboard with various challenges in-game was put on the event's website, allowing people to share their progress and race for greatness. In later years, the link cable client was replaced with different mechanisms to fetch new content and synchronize achievements. One year the map was procedurally generated.

Though some of the humor and references in the games or the player generated content might have started to age, it was incredible fun.

Cracker Caverns

The achievement list prominently listed out the challenges CC1 through CC4. Outside of a few exploration notes, these small ctf's are the main focus of the writeups linked below. Going from knowing how to do basic cheating within the emulator, to reverse engineering assembly code or the client-server protocol.

These small ctf's would recurr in following years. And to be quite honest, many of them I barely scraped by and got carried by companions. I wasn't entirely useless (I hope), but jumping into this cold, having to learn the ROPes within a week, made a lot of effort from conceptually simple things. I doubt I would have continued even half as far, if not for the friendly chats we've had. I had learned a lot, even if I didn't go on to explore this niche much more, outside of these events.

A few little Highlights

todo

2023

In 2023 the event got cut down to a more mundane ctf challenge and my own time complexities made me not participate that year. Pure ctf's haven't yet drawn in my attention, but who knows where that will go, given the time.

Links and Writeups