As you know, Nintendo’s seen a lot of leaks in recent weeks. Indeed, from Pokemon demos to console development info, Nintendo files have been leaking online left, right and centre at the moment, likely in part due to a Nintendo business partner seeing their servers compromised beforehand.

And the pattern is apaprently continuing today too. Why? Because as the title suggests, another round of info has been leaked online, complete with the source code for the 3DS Operating System and the Pokemon Diamond and Pearl games.

Check out the info on it via the ResetEra thread, as well as the discussions on 4chan itself.

So what’s included this time? What can the leaks tell us about the 3DS’ OS, or the development of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl?

Unfortunately, the answer is “surprisingly little”. For the most part, the Pokemon Diamond and Pearl code doesn’t have any Pokemon cut from the final game, at least not in the numbers present in the gen 1 or 2 demos. So if you were expecting a full blown breakdown for an alternate storyline/region that never came to be… you’re probably going to be a tad disappointed here.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t get at least one interesting bit of info here.

Oh no. As it turns out, a very well known Pokemon may have been intended to get an alternate evolution at one point in the game’s development.

Namely, Charmeleon. Yeah, we’re not making that up. Apparently there’s a reference to a cut Pokemon called ‘Rizaagan’ in the source code. This translates to Lizard + Gan, which is suspiciously close to Charizard’s Japanese name ‘Lizardon’, as well as the various ‘lizard’ inspired names sported by the Charmander family in general.

UPDATE 4 GEN LEAKS #3

✨In a Pokédex File there is a Never Released Pokémon with Dummied Out Stats and Entry!

All we know is:

✨Name: Rizaagan (リザーガン)
✨Category: Flame
✨No.503, between Magmortar & Porygon-Z, so it should be a scrapped Gen1 Evo!

Continue ⬇️ @eclipse_tt pic.twitter.com/3j0MDmnvjL

— Eclipse ⚔️ 𝙁𝘼𝙇𝙄𝙉𝙆𝙎 𝘼𝙎𝙎𝙀𝙈𝘽𝙇𝙀! (@eclipse_tt) May 23, 2020

And this, and some extra evidence that it was apparently an evolution for a generation 1 species, and it seems likely this may have been a planned alternate evolution for the Charmander family.

That’s huge for this series, for various reasons.

For one thing, it implies the starter evos may have had regional counterparts at one point in development. That’s something we’ve never seen in any Pokemon game since, and something that could have led to an endless array of possibilities. Imagine alternate Blastoise, or Venusaur! Or eventually, alternate Greninja or Incineroar.

Anything could have been on the table here.

Additionally, it also implies that branching evolutions were going to be more of a thing throughout the series to.

Which again, is a huge game changer for the franchise. Remember, with the exceptions of Bellosom and Politoed in gen 2, branching evolutions for past gen species were nearly non existent for years. In fact, Pokemon Sword and Shield may be the first generation since 2001 to have any of these at all.

So it’s interesting to see the pattern could have been continued before then.

Either way, enough about Pokemon for now. What does the 3DS leak reveal?

Again, not as much as you’d think. It doesn’t seem like any plans for unreleased games were left lying around here, and the actual documentation may not have been included in the leak either.

But we do get to see an old rumour confirmed none the less. Namely, that the 3DS was originally going to be powered by a NVIDIA processor. Here’s a dev log confirming it:

PROMへ書き込むROMイメージです。
MG20用は *_mg20_*.exo、IOP用は *_iop_*.exo というファイル名です。
Xilinx の書き込みツールでエラーが出た時にはツールを再起動して下さい。

変更履歴

2006/12/5
IOP: LCD-DACパラメータ修正

2006/12/1
IOP: LCD-DACパラメータ最適化

2006/11/30
IOP: LCD-DAC初期化&バックライトON
サウンドイネーブル
バス調停方式をラウンドロビンへ初期化

2006/11/29
MG20-NV: DDR設定の最適化

2006/11/23
MG20-NV: NVIDIA製PROMでDDRが使用可能になるもの

2006/11/17
IOP: MG20 からの初期化完了コマンド受信を待っていた箇所を一時的に削除

2006/11/16
MG20: JTAG は NV-ROM でイネーブルにしているので無限ループのみ

2006/11/14
IOP: LinkIF & PMIC初期化
JTAGイネーブル直前にキャッシュ&プロテクションユニットディセーブル

2006/11/13
IOP: JTAGイネーブルのみ

Since that’s the same company behind the Tegra processor used in the Nintendo Switch, it seems Nintendo had plans to work with the company in the last generation too.

So while there’s not as much to see here as in past leaks, there’s some interesting info nonetheless.

Either way, read more about the leak on the ResetEra forums here.

Then tell us your thoughts about it (and the reveals included within) in the comments below, on the Gaming Latest forums or on our Discord server today!

Source:

Nintendo leaks ultimate: 3DS OS source code has been leaked (and Pokémon D/P) – ResetEra