But discovering the addresses was only half the problem. If you talk to a villager in Animal transitionThe game normally shows dialogue immediately. Calling an AI model via the internet takes a few seconds. Willison investigated the code and found the Fonseca solution: a function Watch_Dialogue () that gauges memory 10 times per second. When it starts a conversations, the immediately Placeholder writes text: three points with hidden breakcommasos between them, followed by a prompt “press a to doing”.
“So the user gets a button 'Press A to continue' and hopefully the LLM is completed by the time they press that button,” Willison noted in a Hacker News commentary. While players see dots appear and reach to the A -button, the mod racet to get a reaction from the AI model and translate it into the dialog format of the game.
Learn the secret language of the game
Just write text to memory froze the game. Animal transition Uses an encrypted format with control codes that manage everything, from text color to character emotions. A special prefix byte (0x7f) signals assignments instead of signs. Without the correct control code of the end of the conversation, the game awaits forever.
“See it as HTML,” Fonseca explains. “Your browser not only shows words; it interprets tags … to make text bold.” The Decompilation community had documented these codes, allowing Fonseca to build encoder and decodert tools that translate between a format readable by humans and the expected byte sequences of the Gamecube.
A screenshot of LLM-driven dialogue injected into Animal transition For the Gamecube.
Credit: Joshua Fonseca
Initially he tried to use a single AI model to be able to handle both creative writing and technical layout. “The results were a mess,” he notes. “At the same time, the AI tried to be a creative writer and a technical programmer and was bad in both.”
The solution: split the work between two models. A writer AI creates a dialogue with the help of character magazines scraped from the Animal transition Fan Wiki. A director AI then adds technical elements, including breaks, color changes, character expressions and sound effects.
The code is available on Github, although Fonseca warns that it contains well -known bugs and has only been tested on macOS. The mod requires Python 3.8+, API tests for Google Gemini or OpenAi and Dolphin Emulator. Have fun holding the man – or the raccoon, as the case.
