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I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

(joshfonseca.com)
868 points vuciv | 2 comments | 10 Sep 25 02:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.009s | source
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simonw ◴[10 Sep 25 09:33 UTC] No.45195311[source]▶
Here's the code: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod

I was intrigued as to how it would intercept a conversation and then pause the game for long enough for the LLM to return a response, so I used https://gitingest.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod to dump the 40,000 tokens into Claude Opus 4.1 and asked it: https://claude.ai/share/66c52dc8-9ebd-4db7-8159-8f694e06b381

The trick is the watch_dialogue() function which polls every 0.1 seconds and then answers with placeholder text: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...

  loading_text = ".<Pause [0A]>.<Pause [0A]>.<Pause [0A]><Press A><Clear Text>"
  write_dialogue_to_address(loading_text, addr)
So the user gets a "press A to continue" button and hopefully the LLM has finished by the time they press that button.
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1. kkukshtel ◴[10 Sep 25 19:58 UTC] No.45202779[source]▶
I think it's funny how goblin mode this whole hack is. The memory scanner itself was clearly written by an LLM (using python??) and the way this person goes about hacking the game is very non-reverse engineer but instead someone equipped with very capable tools. No shade to the dude to be clear, I think it's sort of incredibly how possible this stuff is now due to LLMs and doesn't require someone to know how to use Ghidra.

AND ALSO - the Gamecube did actually have networking through a barely used peripheral (though I knew and loved it through Phantasy Star Online Episode 1&2): https://gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Broadband_Adapte...

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2. jdboyd ◴[12 Sep 25 03:30 UTC] No.45218406[source]▶
The author addresses the BBA and says he didn't use it because the game was built without networking sorry, so having that in would have been harder.