Hey guys, how's it going? I been on the site a long while, but haven't really been that active unfortunately. So I'm hoping to finally break that... about 15 years later.

I been playing every Animal Crossing game since the GameCube days, and have recently shifted back pretty much exclusively to the GameCube again. I'm sure that'll change a bit once the Switch iteration hits, but I digress.

Friends
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I'm looking for other fellow GC players to be buds with. Sure we likely can't interact on a town-to-town basis all that often, but thankfully we have the password system for at least doing some gift exchanges. And of course, chatting up is also cool! And of course, age, gender, race and all that doesn't matter so reach out!

And while not a goal, I'd like to just throw it out there that I am single presently. So it'd be a cool bonus meeting another single guy who's also into AC. But again not a goal, so if we're just buddies that's perfect too.

Developers
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Speaking of the password system, it's particularly interesting to me from a developer perspective too. I'm a programmer for both work and hobby, and have really been into reverse engineering the GC version of AC. I've been looking at ways I may be able to add to the GC experience using these skills. I've nearly finished mapping the save file format, have the game assembly dumped, and have ideas to make an interactive companion website for the game. And another guy as of last year found a way to do arbitrary code execution in the game via the NES console, which has lots of exciting potential! I'd like to note that my focus would be on finding ways to enhance the game, and not finding ways to cheat it or mess with the core experience.

I used a cheating device over a decade ago on my town and am actively looking into ways to remove the Wishing Well's dreaded message of “I sense a great sadness about the land. You must reflect deeply on how to best care and tend for your town.” Before I really dive into the assembly step by step, I'm looking into comparing save files to try and get clues.

So if anyone else here is a programmer, I'd love to chat with you and see if we can perhaps do a collaborative effort on making something for the game!

e-Reader Cards
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And to wrap up my massive, brain dump of a post, I'd like to say I'm also actively trying to complete my Animal Crossing e-Reader card collection I started back in the day. I'm about half way there, and have series 3 completed. I need to update my listing for series 1,2 and 4, but feel free to check my cards and reach out if I have a double of something you are after. I'd love to trade for anything I'm missing.

That's It
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Phew, this is quite a post. And there's a lot of topics going on. Hopefully I didn't scare anyone off with my infamous 'wall of text' post style. But definitely reach out to me either via PM or direct post if any of these topics appeal to you.

Have  great day!

I joined the site years ago and am back into it recently because I restarted my New Leaf file while I wait for the switch version. I just wanted to reach out and say that this post is awesome and I love that you're reverse engineering the GC version. I'm a CSE that graduated 3 years ago and my current job is as a web developer. I wasn't planning on getting back into the GC version but reading this post is a making me a bit tempted to go blow the dust off of it. Mostly just wanted to say hi from one dev to another!!

That's awesome! Thanks for saying hey, it's always great to run into other developers out in the wild!

You should consider dusting off the ol' GC version! There's lots of interesting aspects to explore - for instance, the left over assembly related to the paper airplane and there was apparently a windmill object left in too! That and the password system, although admittedly a bit cumbersome nowadays, still has quite some power to unlock with it. Also those N64 graphics it carried are so endearing in a low poly way.

Amazingly, I think I stumbled across some information regarding the broken Wishing Well when you use AR. The forever "I sense a great sadness about the land..." message. It's a bit strange, but it actually appears to be related to the island of all things. I renamed my town, but didn't update the data for the island in the save file. As a result the island was essentially initiated from my town and ended up with the acres for the island even missing! Kapp'n just sailed me into two acres of complete blankness haha.

Though when I just happened to check the Wishing Well, it was actually giving me status messages again! I thought this was fixed due to some other changes I made, and eventually restored my island from a backup save and updating the town name for the island data. Sure enough with the island back, I'm getting the "I sense a great sadness about the land" message again.

There's still some experimenting to do, but certainly seems like the island is a culprit to this ordeal. I also updated the acres, which may or may not be related to this behavior. The acre data is all separate from the other island data (mixed in with the other acres actually) so it's possible there's something with the acre data too, especially since the Wishing Well must check what acre is what to look for special ones like the dump, the pond, or it's own acre to avoid tree penalties where appropriate.

Anyway, sorry for the huge tangent there. Sort of another brain dump, but just wanted to share in case anyone you or anyone else was interested or had some clues.

Looking for info on Action Replay stuff, huh? Well... do I have news for YOU! It took me a while, but I managed to dig up this old book for you. If passwords are your thing, you might take a look at this guide. I don't know much about the password system myself... but it seemed like there were some bread crumbs to follow in the introduction. As to whether any of those users are still online... that remains to be seen. Some more tips for you: the password generator was initially cracked by MooglyGuy aka Ryan Holtz in December of 2003 as noted in this post. Also, you've probably seen all this, but DrMugendai's videos are always fun.

Now... as someone who is equally obsessed with the inner workings of the game (and somewhat of a chronicler, having written various guides and lurked on the Nookipedia wiki for... longer than I care to admit)… I have been working for some time to determine the game's inner workings in two areas. The first, is feng shui. The second, is Wisp. I believe the thread about the former has been lost to time, but I believe I do have my spreadsheets with lots of data where I was painstakingly testing a variety of variables each day in my AC town to determine each color's effects. My current research on Wisp can be found here and here. The only problem is... I have no idea how to access or interpret the 'game code' so to speak, and so this is why I have spent so long testing different things in-game and just collecting information on what happens (or doesn't). Now, I don't know the extent to which you are able to 'look into this' for me but... I would be forever in your debt if you knew anything about this, or could give me any helpful info here!

Lastly, I don't have any e-Cards, but have been thinking about getting into collecting them. Not a good time for it, I know... with them being... 17 years old? But hey. Also, it seems you have just about every item in the catalog, but I'm always looking for someone to trade with. Feel free to set something up with my town Le Passe, if you'd like.

Thanks for all the information sunmarsh! Awesome you found the guide from bowsersenemy. It's what actually started me down this path and I have a copy on my drive just in case haha. I did see the password system was cracked, and actually was able to find the source for it too. Which is great, because I definitely have a great new use for it. Sure it will be clunky since typing 28 character passwords isn't exactly fluid, but it'll still be cool to give a new form of life to the game and add yet another extra way to interact with it. That's what I love about the GameCube one, it has so many extra ways to interact with the game - e-Reader, GBA to GameCube, or even the password system in its intended form. So many interesting ways to do stuff with the game.

And very cool you're delving into the internal workings too. Feng Shui and Whisp are also aspects I'm pretty interested too. I wasn't really ever too into Feng Shui when I first played, but lately I been thanks to clearing my catalog and starting fresh. Very interested to see what you find, and maybe I'll get around to checking out the disassembly and trying to piece it together. If you are familiar with the debug functions of the Dolphin emulator, I can provide an assembly map of the functions and you could possibly look through it too. Dolphin provides real time breakpoints so it makes it really nice when trying to figure out how the game works with the code.

Also there is a REL Editorso you can look at the disassembly of the game, provided you have the map an the REL of Animal Crossing.

And wow, those are some very detailed docs you have on Wisp! They're amazing! I gave them a quick look over but loved the details already. I'll have to give them a much more in depth reading soon.

But cool! I started collecting cards myself when the game first came out, but didn't get that many. Recently I been super into them and want to document some stuff about them that are unknown, specifically about the skills the villagers have in the mini games. Who's better at what and such. Though I have dumps of the e-Reader cards and it might be easier just comparing the data and seeing from there. Coincidentally, I am about half way through decoding the pattern e-Reader cards so I can make custom ones people could print and scan into the game - something I'd like to roll into this website idea I have cooking.

But anyway, I need to get to bed! Thanks for the awesome post and looking forward to reading up more on your findings!

Well, it seems like you have everything you need lol. I know there were some users on GBAtemp.net I think it was that were looking into the dot codes. I don't know if it's still an issue (or ever was), but I thought that the limiting factor was that not all printers could print at the proper resolution to create scannable dot codes. Or maybe the issue was that there wasn't public access to high quality scans, since (at least closer to when they were released), Nintendo didn't want you scanning/uploading them at all, and so all the extant scans were low resolution scans not appropriate for printing.

I always thought that the password system was really underutilized. I don't completely understand it, but I thought that it could be used for contests, which would have been fun to organize around the time of the game's release. That and the ability to generate custom code messages would have been great for giveaways here on the boards.

I appreciate you linking the REL Editor. Unfortunately I'm such a noob I don't even know where to start lol. I've tried to get into this before, and have watched a youtube video or two about it, but I couldn't understand what it was I was supposed to do. My understanding is that you are essentially comparing game states to reveal the location of changes in the game memory that are associated with whatever it is you are interested in. But I don't really understand the process or how you are supposed to interpret these results.

My Wisp hunts are ongoing, and if you follow The Witching Hour thread you will see my daily progress reports. It seems Wisp appears about every 4 days... with some exceptions that I'm still trying to figure out. If you're really interested in the Feng Shui info let me know and I'll dig up my spreadsheets, but if I recall correctly, I only managed to get data for one or two of the colors since it took a month or two to research each one. I had a statistician here on ACC interpret the results and he said they were statistically significant. But basically, red feng shui affects the types of items sold at Nook's store. Your town has a group of items (or if my theory is correct, a group for each type of item-- furniture, carpets, wallpaper and clothing) that more commonly appears at Nook's. Increasing the number of red feng shui items correctly placed in the home will increase the amount of items from other groups that appear, effectively making it easier/faster to complete your catalog. I may go back to researching this when I'm satisfied with my Wisp research.

If I end up getting any e-Cards I will let you know! This may be taking things a bit too far... but I know that people would be interested in being able to print out their own cards for the last of the Forbidden Four. It would be exciting to see a Kickstarter or something of the like to have these cards professionally printed, along with maybe some new e-cards of your own creation, like custom patterns, or maybe alternate versions of characters that have passwords for special items printed on them.

Also, I do have one more question for you... how did you end up getting the Piggy Bank? Other than playing casually for a decade or two, I don't see how it's feasible to get this item in a relatively short period of time... even the item duplication glitch using the Autumn Medal is still pretty time consuming.

Oh yeah, there was a lot of work on dot codes! Someone had actually managed to reverse the storage formats and created programs to enycrypt and decrypt them. Thanks to those tools, I was able to get at the real data. I started with the pattern cards, figuring they would be easiest since I knew the pattern data format already and could compare it to scanned in data quickly. The pattern cards have too "packs", as I'm sure all the AC cards do. One 'pack' is the application that runs on the e-Reader when you scan it in, the one where it shows you the pattern and Mable makes a comment about it. Strangely, they have the pattern stored in there in a slightly different format. It seems that the pattern shown on the e-Reader may use a true palette of 5,6,6 bit colors - which I believe is a common palette format Nintendo uses (I'm suspecting red has the lower bit depth but haven't confirmed yet). Even stranger is the pixel mappings don't line up with the actual pattern that gets sent to the GameCube, it's mapped a little differently, though obviously in a similar order in order to show the same image the pattern is. And then finally, the second 'pack' is more or less a raw 544 byte pattern with a two byte magic cookie of some sort before it.

Phew, hopefully my e-Reader gushing wasn't too much.

Oh yes, I'd love doing that with the password system! Wish there were more uses of the contest - especially since there appears to be multiple versions of contest password types! Though I came up with an even more interactive way to utilize the password system. I wanted to keep this a surprise till I finished a working proof of concept, but I'm planning to make an online store of a sort. You'd send a bag of bells via a password to the website, and it would add these funds to your account. From there you could purchase randomly selected furniture just like it was another Tom Nook store. And of course, it would generate a password specifically for you so you can get the item back in the game. Right now I have a plain website where you can login, and separate from it is a password generator and decoder. It'll be just a matter of merging them a little more together at this point.

And no problem not understanding it, I'm only pretty recently getting more familiar with this stuff. I'm really glad too, because there are plenty of secrets we can uncover through the code - such as the broken wishing well, or even detailing the exact mechanics of Wisp and Feng Shui. But that'll be much later for me, it'll be a lot going through the disassembly like that, and I'm already distracted with this website idea as is haha.

But very awesome you were able to get so much uncovered just from the game alone! Very astute insights. I'll definitely be jumping into The Witching Hour thread!

And keep me up to date if you get some e-Reader cards - I just snagged 10 more up last night off eBay lol. Oh and I forgot to say, printing the dot code used to be a problem back when they were released. But printers have come a long way since then and I'm pretty sure most household printers are now capable of printing them on high quality settings. Though a professional print would always look better of course.

I have dumps of the two NES cards, so I'm hoping to be able to compare them and get them deciphered so I can create two cards for Super Mario Bros and Zelda. I'm pretty much have a general mapping of the pattern card so I should be able to do the same wit the NES card - especially since I suspect it's actually formatted like an animal villager card, containing a  letter to be scanned and just opting for no 'character stats' for the mini game cards. I'd also love to come up with a new mini game card, but that's a pie in the sky deal at the moment.

Haha and as for the piggy bank, I cheated. I had an Action Replay, and gave myself 100% catalog and maxed out bank account. But that's also the reason I now have a 'broken' wishing well. It always states the "I sense a great sadness about the land.,," message no matter the condition of the town. Interestingly I noticed when people visit my town or I go to another town and come back, the well is temporarily fixed and gives me a real message about the town status! But that's for another day.

Just recently, I've actually been "reverse cheating". I altered the save data to zero out my bank account, catalog, and fish/insect log. So it technically don't have the bank rewards anymore and need to update my catalog on this site to show I have nothing again. Gives a nice fresh start, without being a fresh start. I wonder if I'll get a second set of the golden tools now?

Phew okay, this post is long enough. Sorry for the wall of text haha.

While I can't say I fully comprehend all of it, no worries about long asides, I'm always eager to learn new things about different facets of this game. Whatever you end up doing, I do encourage you to make some sort of write-up about it when you're done/have time, so that others can follow after you if they're interested. I'm a bit biased as a Nookipedia editor, but I'm sure there is a page or two there that might benefit from your expertise. Best of luck fully sorting out the dot codes, it seems you're well on your way.

The website idea sounds really cool, but I thought you couldn't generate passwords for bells via Nook? Maybe I'm not remembering correctly. Even if that's the case, I can still imagine a lot of opportunity for a virtual marketplace of sorts. You could sell goods to the virtual store (instead of providing codes for bells directly), which would net you funds you could use to get different items. Maybe certain items can be traded in for extra bells on a given day or within a given time frame. I could also imagine some sort of bulletin board where animals are looking for certain items and if you fill their requests they will reward you with something in return. It could get really interesting if people could 'host' items online in a sort of virtual trading post, where they would put up items on the site by sending them to say 'Lloid' in 'T-Post' and inputting the code on the site, and then tell Lloid the item(s) they are looking to trade for. Others visiting the site could see these items up for trade and could input codes for the item that user is requesting. The site checks the codes to make sure they are appropriate for the destination user/town and completes the trade, generating and providing the code to the second user for the item hosted on the site. Hopefully that made sense. But I'm sure you have a lot of ideas and don't need anymore form me lol!

I looked at the cards again on eBay... and I don't know if I will buy any after all. Not that they're super expensive, but to be honest they are kind of ugly. Maybe I would just get the animals I really like and some of the mini-game cards.

Keep us updated on your efforts with the Super Mario Bros. and Zelda cards, I know it's quiet here... but I can't be the only one who would be super HYPED to finally get my hands on those.

Aha! I knew there was no way you could have gotten it legit. I'm still at 57mil bells lol... I think I gave up after several weeks of going heavy on the turnip market and realizing it just wasn't worth it. It's interesting that you mention the well goes back to normal when someone visits or you travel... maybe it has something to do with villager data? I thought that every time you left town that a villager would leave with you/come back with you.

Fix your catalog so we can trade! Although I have almost everything so it might be difficult to find something I need that you have lol.

Thanks! I definitely plan to share this information in some form or another, likely through a wiki. I love when wikis for games give detailed structures of the data like that. Bulbapedia for Pokemon has a lot of that information for the earlier generation games, and I eat it up lol.

And thanks for the ideas on the website! I couldn't remember if you could turn bags of bells to passwords, but I also thought about doing an item selling idea like you mentioned as a backup plan (and as just a feature in general). I believe the generator code would allow me to make bags of bells to send back to the game, so that could open up neat ways to make extra bells for the game.

Actually I love the ideas you were saying, because they confirm the ideas I had were good ones haha. I was planning to add a market place too, and ways to trade. The first feature I was going to make was the simplest - storage. It'd be great being able to store your items on the site so you can bring them back later. Sure it'd be a bit clunky doing that with mass amounts of items, but things like holiday furniture and such would probably work out pretty great for this. Particularly I'd love it to store gyroids myself, I want to have them all but have nowhere to really store them lol.

But the idea of quest furniture for villagers is a neat one! I didn't even think of something like that. I also plan on using the e-Reader cards with the site too, via the passwords. You can register has having the card by entering the password on it. I was thinking of doing mini games or something with them. Maybe they can be used to get  quests too.

The one tricky thing though, is that I don't want to add too much to the site and take away from the actual game. I want it to be just a supplement experience to it, like the GBA or e-Reader features. So I might just stick with storage, a shop, and market place. But we'll see. I guess it depends on much effort it'd be to maintain too, as I really should be working on my own game project. Though I doubt there would be THAT many people using it for a roughly 20 year old game lol. Maybe I could hand it off to the site admins here if it got too much for me. Maybe they'd even host it! Right now it's just hosted on my Raspberry Pi lol.

Yeah the e-Reader cards aren't the most beautiful, but I love them for their uniqueness. But don't worry, I plan to get those two NES cards made at some point. I do want to enable a "semi official" way to get them, and what could be closer than using Nintendo's own e-Reader cards just tweaked to give a different NES game? After all, they must have intended for it to be revived that way in the US - otherwise they'd have removed the two games like they did to the removed furniture; all the dummied furniture.

Haha okay, I'll get on it! I do own every NES game to start (sans DK3 amazingly enough) - and been slowly racking up my catalog again as I systematically go through my e-Reader collection and get items from the villagers.

I love Bulbapedia, it's what inspired me to start editing over at Nookipedia. I don't play as much Pokémon as I used to... although I must say I do have my eye on Sword/Shield... if just for the curry.

Storage sounds like a neat idea! But I think that most (all?) of the unorderable items (including gyroids) cannot be turned into passwords via Nook. You can store items in letters at the Post Office, and your letters remain intact even when you start a new town, so there's already good in-game functionality there. You know, it might be fun to do some sort of seasonal trades or events. Maybe some of the special characters appear during a time of the year they wouldn't otherwise appear and offer you event-exclusive items in exchange for certain items? And maybe some of the more common visitors like Saharah, Wendell, Gracie, K.K. and Gulliver can also appear every other day or something. It would be great to have more opportunities to get rare items. For example... maybe Gracie will turn three regular shirts into a Gracie original design? And maybe Gulliver wants to trade Paintings for items from far-off lands?

Ah! Another idea... maybe you can find a way to convert patterns here on ACC into e-cards that could put them into your game? The patterns here have a print-friendly version that looks to have a bunch of cells with numbers in them, which I imagine could be converted to an e-card pattern? I'll stop now lol...

This is going to sound like a weird question... but is it possible to generate an e-card that will give you one (or more) of Wisp's spirits as a gift? I don't think that spirits can normally be attached to presents, and a password for a spirit isn't super helpful because Nook isn't open when Wisp is out. But if you could force the mail delivery and get a spirit in a letter that would be really helpful, as I've had issues finding the fifth spirit on several occasions.

Also... if you were interested in getting more visitors to the site when it's made, I would suggest using the cards as a form of advertisement for it. Kotaku wrote an article about this dude who has been maintaining his ACGC town for 17yrs. I feel like this e-card project is the type of thing they would be interested in posting about. I don't know how crazy you want to get with it, but I would totally support a kickstarter for professionally produced cards. Maybe it's a pipe dream... but I'm here for it lol. Also something that could get included in their article. I don't know anyone at Kotaku or anything... but it's something to think about. I wouldn't want all your hard work to remain in obscurity.

Right? Cheers to Bulbapedia lol

Oh man, I should really double check the password system and see what exactly can be turned into passwords. Because yeah, I was really looking forward to having the storage space and not relying on the post office lol. I've recently turned my island hut into a mass storage place for rare items, so it might have to stay that way if the passwords are more limited than I thought they were. Though I think I can still generate passwords that are player specific that contain items you normally can't convert into a password. I'll have to double check.

I'm pretty sure we could do the ACC patterns to e-Card format! I might actually just eventually contact the devs here on ACC and maybe make these things I'm working on features of the site. After all, they already have a town/character system, a whole community, and plenty of patterns that could be converted too. Plus it'd save me from having to create a whole website to basically duplicate features they already have here.

So far I don't think there is any specific limits on what items the e-Reader cards can give you, especially if they can provide the forbidden NES games. I imagine we could make a Wisp inspired e-Reader card that provides a spirit! Or if the password generation works right, maybe we can make them float around on the website when it's night. ;P

But thanks for the tips and wanting to save my work from obscurity too! Means a lot! Though it might still be some time before I can get it decently along. Between work and a game I've been developing on the side, my poor time is being pinched to death!

"I might actually just eventually contact the devs here on ACC and maybe make these things I'm working on features of the site."

Someone called?

You might be interested to know that one of the things we're working on as part of the ongoing site redesign is an API for all the data we're currently holding. So before too long it should be possible for you to get things like pattern data in a machine-readable format, if that would be helpful for your project.

And of course, if you'd rather be working from the inside, applications are always open. Seriously... we have like five people at the moment.

Oh wow! Don't mind the delay here from me, but that's really cool you guys are looking into that! I actually had a bit of a break from AC dev stuff over the last year or so, but I've been looking back into it lately.

The pattern thing would be really cool, particularly when I can get back to the eReader cards and getting that to work. That way you could actually bring them into the game without manually copying or some more involved work of grabbing a save off a memory card to inject the pattern in.

I might have to check into that!