Est. 2012
The Lab · Game Boy Research

The Lab

The Game Boy side of GardenFlouer. It starts at the Glitchhouse, a field guide to the glitch Pokemon of Red and Blue decoded straight out of the ROM, and carries on into the tools that research turned into: a rebuilt battle engine, a cry synthesizer, a sprite breaker and a few more toys besides.

Start Here · The Glitchhouse

The Glitchhouse

Pokemon Red and Blue contain 70 creatures nobody ever designed: 'M, MissingNo. and its three special forms, and 65 hybrids living past the end of the species table. The Glitchhouse is a field guide to every one of them, decoded from the ROM byte by byte, each with its cry rebuilt from the cartridge and a spot in the battle engine below.

Enter the Glitchhouse

Read first

The Workbench · 6 tools

The Game Boy Tools

Everything the Glitchhouse decoded, turned into something you can poke at. Each tool runs in your browser with no signup, and every tool stamped Tested had to match a known answer (the game’s own code, a published table, or both) before it was allowed into the Lab. The challenge run generator is the one exception: a random run has no answer key, so its card is stamped Sourced and says where its rules come from.

GB 01 · Game Boy

The Battler

Fight with any of the 151, or a glitch Pokemon, on a rebuilt Red and Blue battle screen, then link up with a friend using a six-letter code.

Tested: all 151 base stat lines match the pokered disassembly.

GB 02 · Game Boy

Stadium Cup Lab

Every Pokemon Stadium cup rule from Pika to Prime in one place, plus a Prime Cup you can play with the real rental Pokemon.

Tested: 534 rental and trainer stat lines recomputed with the Gen 1 formula.

GB 03 · Game Boy

Old Man Glitch Name Calculator

Type a trainer name and see which Pokemon, at which levels, the old man glitch summons on the Cinnabar coast. It works backwards too.

Tested: agrees key by key with Bulbapedia’s custom-name table.

GB 04 · Game Boy

Gen 1 Cry Synth

Rebuild any Red and Blue cry from the three bytes the game stores, push the pitch and length into glitch territory, and save a WAV.

Tested: all 151 cries match the ROM’s cry table and pokered’s cries.asm.

GB 05 · Game Boy

Corrupt-a-Mon

Break any of the 151 front sprites with the Game Boy’s real decompressor: flipped bits, bad size bytes and wrong pointers.

Tested: unbroken, all 151 sprites match the game’s master art pixel for pixel.

GB 06 · Game Boy

Challenge Run Generator

Seven core rulesets, ten modifiers and a few Glitchhouse house rules. Spin up a fresh challenge run for your next playthrough and share the link.

Sourced: the community rulesets are credited on the page, and the house rules are marked as ours.

The Colophon

What Is the Lab, Exactly?

It is the Game Boy side of the site. It starts at the Glitchhouse, where the research lives, and ends at the tools, where the research stops being a table and starts being a toy. I am Christopher Robert Fox, GardenFlouer since 2012, and I have spent a copious amount of time reading Pokemon Red and Blue at the byte level, so the tools here share one rule: nothing is made up. The battle engine uses the real damage formula, the real stat stages, even the 1-in-256 miss. The name glitch calculator reads your trainer name the way the game reads wild encounter data, letter by letter, and tells you which species falls out. The challenge run generator is the lighter one, built for the next playthrough with friends. Everything runs in your browser, and if something looks wrong I want to hear about it, because a wrong byte on this site bugs me more than it bugs you.

How Does a Tool Get Into the Lab?

Here is how a tool earns its spot.

  1. Built by hand, from the source. No templates and no widgets. The Game Boy tools read the same data the cartridge does, straight from the pokered disassembly and the ROM, so the numbers on your screen are the numbers in the game.
  2. Tested against known answers. Before a tool joins the Lab, an automated test runs it against answers somebody else already published, or against the game’s own code. The Battler’s 151 base stat lines have to match the pokered disassembly. The name glitch calculator has to agree key by key with Bulbapedia’s table, the cry synth has to rebuild all 151 cries from the ROM’s own cry table, and Corrupt-a-Mon has to draw all 151 sprites exactly like the game’s master art before it is allowed to break a single one. The challenge run generator has no answer key to test against, which is why it is stamped Sourced instead. If a test and a tool disagree, the tool is wrong until proven otherwise.
  3. No signups, no email, nothing to install. There is no account to make and no unlock code waiting in your inbox. Every tool works the moment the page loads, and most of them can copy a result or a share link, so you can hand a glitch to a friend.
  4. Your inputs stay on your device. The math runs in your browser, not on a server. The site also counts which buttons get pressed, through Google Analytics (the privacy page explains what it records), which is how I know which tools deserve the next round of polish. There is one exception. A link battle in the Battler, whether you pair up with a friend’s code or a random opponent, passes moves between the two of you through this site’s own server, because that is the whole point of a link cable!

Can I Ask for a Tool?

Absolutely! If you found a glitch that deserves a toy, tell me on the contact page. New tools land here the moment they pass their tests, not a minute before, and there is more of the backstory on the about page. And between us, curious visitors who poke around this site have been known to find a door or two that is not on any list.