Talk:Card Pop!

"A player cannot Card Pop! with the same person twice."

That contradicts information from the Versus Books Perfect Guide for the game, which states:

The game then records the ID number of that cartridge, so you won't be able to Card Pop! with them again until you've Card Popped with so many other people that their ID number is written over (when you do Card Pop! with them again, you'll get the same card).

Now, I know this is a third-party guide and is thus infamously prone to error (although I remember Versus Books in general being wrong much less frequently than most other commerical walkthrough book companies), but this is a piece of information I've held as true for more than a decade. Does anyone have any more solid information on this? Is this guide's information reasonable enough to include despite its vagueness about how many other people? Pumpkinking0192 (talk) 18:31, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Glitches between games?

Hi. I own a few copies of Pokémon Trading Card Game and Pokémon Card 2: Invasion of Team GR!, and I tried to Card Pop! between each other, even though I figured it should not be compatible at all. What I wanted to try is to replicate any of the so-called "glitches such as a game freeze or a loss of save data in Pokémon Trading Card Game". But both games just did not communicate at all, as if they are both waiting for a valid signal. The next explanations are finding from the poketcg disassembly along with my own research. The question is at the end of the post.

After recently investigating the Card Pop! mechanism on both games, I noticed that the communication protocols are the same, that is, they could understand each other; but I also noticed every time one game some bytes of data on a infrared transmission, it also sends a particular byte (say, 165) in order to acknowledge the success of transmission. Conversely, the receiver Game Boy should expect that exact value 165, and send another specific value (say, 53) in return, and the sender will expect that exact value 53 as well. This is commonly known as a "handshake", to make sure the sender is sending data to a compatible listening device. This is done many times during a normal Card Pop! transmission, and if any fails, the transmission will abort with the message "The Pop! wasn't successful". The two games (TCG1 and TCG2) they send and receive different handshake signals: (170, 51) in TCG1, and (165, 53) in TCG2). So in theory these two games should not get past the first handshake step.

Having that theoretical aspect in mind, I could not even once get past the stage of recognizing each other as compatible games because of the first handshake signal. Every time I pressed the A button on both Gameboys to start a transmission, as neither got the required correct handshake signal, they both went back to listening mode, until I pressed A again. I know because you can also cancel the Card Pop! at any time by pressing B. So neither game got any freeze or unintended effect. It makes total sense that the game designers took account of this and changed the handshake signal instead of designing a whole different communication protocol. Of course, if you hack or trick the game in order to skip the handshake stage all together, I would expect some glitches.

So here comes the obvious question, is there evidence of the forementioned "glitches" in Pokémon Trading Card Game, when trying Card Pop! with a Pokémon Trading Card Game 2? Because I could not get any. Thank you. Rarecandybar (talk) 17:44, 3 September 2024 (UTC)