with neverhappy's training complete, i decided i was going to do the battle tower ribbons first since they are by far the hardest part of gen 4's ribbons and i wanted to get them out of the way. to do that, though, i would obviously need teammates - neverhappy couldn't take on the battle tower alone! so i went through the arduous process of making a team based on information from smogon and the ribbon master discord. (thanks guys!)
during this whole process i will commonly be referring to the action of "RNGing." it is not hacking - other than backing up save files to move between emulator/my actual DS sometimes for convenience/comfort, no external devices were used during all of neverhappy's journey, nor do i ever use cheating devices. that would completely defeat the purpose of all of this. RNGing is essentially using complex calculators to figure out when exactly you have to press A to get an encounter you want (that you could, by chance, run into naturally just by playing casually), and then perfectly timing your A presses to hit that exact time.
i also use something called ACE (arbitrary code execution) briefly in emerald for my latias, but i'm gonna be real i do not remember where i learned how to do it since it was a while ago and you're just gonna have to google ASFDJAFSD
first up, i wanted a latias. however, my glitch egg was bugging out and not running my ACE code to respawn latias/latios at southern island, as you can see in the following video...
...so, i had to reach out for help from the Glitch City Research Institute discord server. names are scribbled out for privacy. the issue was so obscure that the people in blisy's RNG discord, another server i frequent, had no idea what was wrong lmao. however, as shown in the screenshot, everything worked out! aaand...
i was able to RNG and catch the latias with no issue! (well, unless you count those glitchy sprites after i removed the hatched glitch egg from my save as an "issue"...)
before i could transfer the latias up, it caught pokerus from one of my hatched glitch eggs, so uh, cool i guess! i didn't train it until it hit gen 4, the EVs are still blank here, etc.
next, i wanted a registeel. to get registeel in platinum, you first have to get a fateful encounter (aka event) regigigas. i moved my save to emulator because the place i am currently living in doesn't have access to WEP internet, which is what gen 4 has to use... but my emulator is compatible with my normal wifi. with this, i used the current DNS exploit to connect to wiimmfi and grab an event regigigas from back in the day. i actually got one of these as a kid, but lost it when i lost my diamond cartridge. rip. then i moved the save right back to my DS lmao
i rnged the registeel i wanted, not shiny, just good stats... (side note, took forever because my calculating software was bugging out and i ended up having to wing it a bit due to miscalculations on chatot cries. long story) and also a bagon which i eventually evolved into a salamence, of course! (huge shoutout to my friend who suggested the name bagel for a bagon, you know who you are, it's such a good name FSDJISDF)
i proceeded to go through the process of EV training all three of them in one sitting, which wasn't too bad at all with a full set of power items and pokerus. gen 4 can be a nightmare to EV train in without those things, though. extremely slow animations!
aand the final team. except for...
i actually didn't grab this suicune until after i did single battles at the battle tower, but i'm putting it here in this section anyways lmao. i realized that my gf's heartgold copy didn't have suicune caught on it, and she said i could rng suicune there since i already had one on my soulsilver, so that's exactly what i did! grinding its levels took eons but it was manageable with the outsider pokemon EXP boost, and i finally managed to get calm mind on it. i also used the GTS glitch with my childhood pokemon pearl file that hasn't been touched in a decade to clone it, thinking i could use two of them for something later... which i turned out to be wrong about, so uh, i did this for nothing! LMAO
just a small aside though, since the GTS is involved in this glitch and only doable with the original diamond/pearl, i was on emulator to connect to wifi... and i had already moved the files over before i remembered to trade the suicune over to my pearl, so i tried to trade them through two emulator windows. it refused to work, so i ended up just putting the suicune up on the GTS with a REALLY specific trade, went on the GTS with my pearl, and traded for it ASFJA
at the end of all of this (and a few changes to movesets after taking these pictures/videos) i had an extremely nice set of pokemon to take on the battle tower with. their sets are as follows:
