Building preposterously ambitious devices inside a game, using in-game tools that were built for anything but nerding out in that way, is nothing new, but one engineer has taken the challenge to an impressive new peak and created a full-on calculator within 2002’s Pokemon Sapphire.
YouTuber adef is no stranger to tackling absurd challenges in Pokemon. He previously explained the mathematics behind the series’ unluckiest moments and scientifically proved which Pokemon should be forced to learn the Fly move. But his latest endeavour to create a working computer inside a two-decade-old game is his most impressive feat yet.
“These days, the type of computer-building that really interests me are when people build working computers inside programs that are themselves already being computed,” adep explains in the video embedded below. The engineer did it all using “assets that already exist in the game,” because doing so with “a bunch of custom code and custom assets really wouldn’t be that hard.”
From there, adep travels to Pokemon Sapphire’s Mossdeep City to play with the seventh Gym’s sliding tiles – you remember, the one with the moving treadmills that change direction as you pull levers. The engineer plays with the tile’s positioning to essentially create logic gates, which are kinda like switches that perform basic functions, to make a working binary number calculator. The result is a fully operational system that can add up all the ones and zeroes you could ever need.
Adep calls its “the world’s first four-bit full adder performed completely inside a Generation 3 Pokemon game.”
Unfortunately, switches in the Generation 3 Pokemon games can only update tiles that appear on-screen because “tiles that are off-screen are unloaded.” But that also means “if you had an infinitely large map, or infinitely tall, whatever, you could theoretically create a system of logic gates that could compute anything, which feels like mission accomplished to me.”
