Arbitrary Code Execution in Animal Crossing

To honor a lot of people who have been super welcoming and kind since I started this channel, I've included a special credits sequence at the end of this video. Perhaps there's something after as well... 🤔 ACE is a very complicated topic, and there was quite a lot to cover with some specifics I might have glossed over. If this video piqued your interest, there are a lot of extras in the description, including some minor corrections!

The funniest thing about ACE in Ocarina of Time will always be that people keep using it to do ACE in other games. Shoutouts to the Paper Mario speedrun of course.

The PAT tag is so funny. "Here's all the different tags they let us attach to a NES rom, and all the reasons it would be extremely challenging to achieve arbitrary memory modification with them.... oh wait, never mind, here's the 'make arbitrary memory modifications' one."

Using OOT to execute ACE in Animal Crossing is like trying to break into a car with a more broken, fucked up and stupid car... and I wouldn't have it any other way.

i love how oot has essentially turned into an ace bootloader for many different games

When you said 99% of the game is stored in RAM it made so much sense because I remember not owning the game as a kid and being able to play it for like a week by leaving my gamecube on after I booted up a friend's copy. He took it because he had to leave but I was stoked when it just kept working

13:51 YOOOOO THEY ADDED DEATH TO ANIMAL CROSSING

I feel like I just watched the season finale to my favorite show

Extremely funny to hear how Gamecube OOT can theoretically be used to set up Animal Crossing ACE. This concept isn't completely new, as Paper Mario 64 got ACE and for a while, it couldn't do anything meaningful. It was then realized that you could use OOT ACE to set up memory, and then do a Banjo-Kazooie-style Stop 'n' Swop to Paper Mario, and then execute the OOT memory you wrote as Paper Mario code to save your file on the "The End" map, so loading the file again would end the game. Really cool video, and I love how you acknowledged ACE as a serious security vulnerability on modern hardware.

funnily enough you don't even need to corrupt the instruction pointer in pokemon gen 1, there's just an item that executes code from WRAM directly

IDEs have become obsolete, all coding will now be done using Animal Crossing and Ocarina of Time GC ports

That's wild. It's like a turducken of ACE.

Resetti's sitting somewhere, a grim look on his face, loading a shotgun

finally, Animal Crossing Exploit

“Oh Hunter, we know you’re an ACE in the hole.” Hunter: “A what now?”

Holy, the animations in the credits are phenomenal, so fluid and so cute, especially Isabelle! Please thank Wyvarie for me! This is probably a long way off, but with how well understood this game is getting, I wonder if decomp progressing will allow for mods adding in features from later games into AC. A "Perfect" version with more options for paths, more pattern storage, easier access to the island without requiring a link cable, adding in a few characters, HD texture/font mod, more K.K. songs, more events, maybe fixing and adding in unused content or version/region-exclusive content, uncapping the 2030 limit, making the forbidden NES games appear in the shop, and more... If it was open source and made right, the community could create new little content drops every few months or so, so that the game feels magical again... Just thinking about something that nice makes me smile. I've always had a soft spot for the original and would love to see it get more of the little quality fixes that later games in the series got, but without the massive expanse in scope.

I love how depending on the context ACE is either extremely cool or extremely worrying

Using ocarina of time as an ace setup game has also been done to do a credits warp in Paper mario, so its cool to see the same strategy applied to animal crossing to execute arbitrary code c: At least in this case it didnt rely on hot swapping a cartridge into the console before the ram got wiped x3

Wake up guys new Hunter vid dropped. It's huntin time

early nintendo games do be having at least one ACE exploit... don't look at the original pokemon gen 1 games there's too many to keep track