The Game Corner has been a staple of every Pokemon game up to Generation IV. Here you can buy coins, test your luck, and win fabulous prizes, including new Pokemon and TMs you won't get anywhere else.
The Basics
You'll need a Coin Case, to be found in the restauraunt from the guy with the glasses along the main strip of buildings below where the Rocket Game Corner is. At the main desk in Game Corner (in the top left corner) you can buy 50 coins for 1000P. Unlike more recent titles, there is no 500 coins for 10000P option: you're stuck mashing the A-button unless you decide to play a few games. Make sure you look around everywhere on the ground in the Game Corner: there are plenty of free coins other people have dropped, to be found as you would with any other hidden item. Your Itemfinder won't pick them up, though.
Slots and Games
I don't cheat, If I did the game would be totally boring. But I might try ryupower's suggestion about using the battle any pokemon code, since that feels more legit. I guess that would be legit as the pokemon would be legit and what difference does it make, I'll even stand on rt. 201 just to make it feel more 'legit'.
The only game in the casino is a slot machine-style game. Insert however many coins you want (1, 2 or 3, which add more rows on the slots where you can win prizes) and try and line up the same picture. A triple 7 yields 300 coins, three BAR yield 100 coins, three Poliwag, Diglett, or Jigglypuff win 15 coins, and three cherries earn 8 coins. Go hog wild.
Prizes
TMs
TM23 Dragon Rage: 3300 Coins A decent move and the only Dragon-type one in the game. Will always deal 40HP damage to anything regardless of type, stats, or weakness. Can be learned by the Dragons and dragonesque Pokemon including Charizard and Aerodactyl. You can probably figure out better options for these Pokemon later in the game but if you have some money to blow after the fourth badge it can be helpful to have a set damage attack.
TM15 Hyper Beam: 5500 Coins A very powerful Normal-type move. 150 Base Power, but forces you to recharge after using if you don't faint the enemy. Attach it to a strong and fast Pokemon with great Attack power (like Gyarados) and go hog wild.
TM50 Substitute: 7700 Coins A support move which creates a miniature doll of your Pokemon using a bit of its health to absorb stat-drops, conditions, and damage until its threshold is reached and it breaks. Not as useful as in later generations but can still be used for a good strategy or two.
Pokemon#030 Nidorina/ #033 Nidorino: 1200 Coins If you didn't catch one of the Poison-type Nidorans earlier in the game you can get their evolved forms here. Both save you a bit of time training and are pretty good when you evolve them. If you forgot to get a Moon Stone, there's one in the Rocket Hideout in the basement or one at Cinnabar Island.
#035 Clefairy: 500 Coins (Red) 750 Coins (Blue) Again, this can make up for not getting one of these rare little buggers in Mt. Moon. It too evolves with a Moon Stone and learns a few good Special moves. Normal-type.
#063 Abra: 120 Coins (Blue) 180 Coins (Red) Makes catching this little Psychic-type a heck of a lot easier now that he can't escape with Teleport. Evolves into a Pokemon with one of the best Special stats in the game (albeit reaching his last form via trade).
#123 Scyther: 5500 Coins (Red) A formidable Bug/Flying-type Pokemon with great Speed and Attack. Only found in the Red Version and in the Safari Zone, he's much easier to get with slots than randomly tossing balls at him and hoping for the best.
#127 Pinsir: 2500 Coins (Blue) Another Bug-type Pokemon with a killer stat set version exclusive, this time Pokemon Blue. Again, only found in the Safari Zone for the rest of the game.
#139 Porygon: 6500 Coins (Blue) 9999 Coins (Red) Exclusive to the slots, Porygon is very expensive in both versions. If you're looking for a strong battler, it's not going to be Porygon, though it has a fun novelty to it you could try and make work with its strong movepool. Normal-type.
#147 Dratini: 2800 Coins (Red) 4600 Coins (Blue) The only Dragon-type family in the game is found in its genesis only here and at the Safari Zone. Extremely rare and learns a myriad of great attacks, Dratini would make a smooth addition to any team.
Amazing Man(Red and Blue only) | Cable Club escape glitch | Celadon looping map trick | Champion Blue music muting glitch | Coastal Flooding | Confusion and Substitute glitch | Cooltrainer move | Cycling based glitch maps | Escape sprite handling glitch | Evolve without an evolutionary stone(Red and Blue only) | Evolving Raichu(Red and Blue only) | Expanded item pack | Expanded Pokédex | Focus Energy glitch | Get stuck in a wall | Ghost Bicycle glitch | Glitch encounter system | Glitch City RAM Manipulation |Infinite Blaine Door | Introduction Nidorino glitch(Red and Blue only) | Invisible PCs(Red and Blue only) | Invisible tree glitch | Item stack duplication glitch | Mute the music in the Pokémon League | Partial trapping move link battle glitch | Pokémon Tower Pokédex glitch | PP underflow glitches | Recovery move glitch | Rival's effect | See a Ghost without a Silph Scope | Selfdestruct and Substitute glitch | Silph Co. PC Glitch | Slot machine glitch | Stand on a tree | Statue behavior glitch(Red and Blue only) | Super effective move AI flaw(Red and Blue only) | Super Glitch | Surf down glitch | Swift miss glitch | Transform assumption glitch | Transform Empty Move Glitch |Trick Zone | Vending machine purchase glitch |Walk around with only fainted Pokémon(Red and Blue only) | Walking lag glitch | Walk on water through Surf | Walking Pikachu happiness glitch(Yellow only) | Wild appeared! | ZZAZZ Glitch
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In Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow, there are playable slot machines in the Celadon Game Corner. The rules are apparently simple: The player needs to line up the same symbols on horizontal or diagonal lines (the set of available lines depends on the number of coins betted), and the player can stop the reels, one at a time, using the A button. In reality, the game may cause the reels to 'slip' after the A button press either to hinder or to help the player, and the rules for doing so are actually complicated, with many oddities that may or may not be glitches. (Together with the separate building for prize claims, this is comparable to how real life Japanese pachi-slots are played.)
Thanks to the disassembly, the actual behaviors of the slot machines in Generation I are completely understood, although at some places it may still be unclear whether they match the intended behaviors.
Overview
For each individual spin, the slot machine can be in one of three modes:Mode bad, which guarantees that the player cannot get any match in the available lines.Mode good, which allows the player to get matches of symbols other than sevens or bars.Mode super, which allows and actively helps the player to get matches of sevens and bars. Mode super is the only mode of the three that will persist between spins. It will only end when the player wins a reward of 100 coins (bars) or 300 coins (sevens), and in the latter case only with a probability of 50% (i.e. it still have a 50% chance to persist).In general, for each spin, the mode is set to mode good or mode super with probability 45/256 (~17.6%), with the probability of mode super further depending on which slot machine the player is playing on (see below). It is set to mode bad with probability 210/256 (~82.0%). There is also a chance of 1/256 (~0.4%) to enter a lucky streak which allows the player to play on mode good (but never mode super) for all the spins after this one, until the player wins 60 times.The function to set the mode, called before each spinThe lucky slot machine
Whenever the player enters the Game Corner, a random number between 0 ~ 31 is generated, and if it is 0, it has a 7/8 chance of becoming 1.More precisely, a random number between 0 ~ 255 is generated, it becomes 8 if it is less than 7, then it is divided by 8, discarding the remainder. See the function to generate the index of the lucky slot machine in the disassembly. Then, whenever the player plays on a slot machine, the number is compared with the index of that slot machine (0 ~ 35) plus one. If it matches, the chance of playing in mode super is set to 5/256 (~2.0%), and otherwise it is set to 2/256 (~0.8%).The function to set the chance of mode superEffectively, this means that every time the player enters the game corner, there is usually a 'lucky slot machine' among the machines with index 0 ~ 30. The lucky slot machine is most likely (15/256, ~5.9%) to be the one with index 0 (the rightmost, bottommost one), and cannot be the ones with index 31 ~ 35 (the bottom five in the leftmost column). The other ones all have a probability of 1/32 (~3.1%) to be lucky, including the ones occupied by an NPC, or otherwise unplayable ('Out of order', 'Out to lunch', or 'Someone's keys'). Finally, there is a tiny chance (1/256, ~0.4%) that the lucky slot machine is the nonexistent slot machine -1.
Reel stopping
The mode of the slot machine comes into play when the player presses the A button to stop a reel, as the reel may 'slip' after the A press depending on its position. The exact logic for stopping the reel also depends on which reel the player is stopping. Internally, the first two reels are programmed to slip 4 times unless a condition is met earlier, while the third reel can either slip up to 4 times to help the player get a match, or slip any number of times to prevent a match.First reel
In mode bad or mode good, the condition for the first reel to stop early is that the middle symbol is not a cherry. Since there are no two consecutive cherry symbols (in fact, there are no consecutive same symbols on any reel), that means the first reel will slip at most once.In mode super, the condition for the first reel to stop early is that any of the three symbols showing is a symbol with an internal value less than that of the seven symbol. Since the seven symbol has the lowest internal value of all symbols, this condition is in fact never satisfied, and the first reel will always slip by 4 positions.The condition for the first reel to stop early
Second reel
In mode bad or mode good, the condition for the second reel to stop early is that there must be a 'potential match' on the first two reels, i.e. two of the same symbols that may form a line if the third reel stops in a good position. The player's bet is not considered; for example, a diagonal potential match counts even if the player only betted 1 or 2 coins.
In mode super, the condition for the second reel to stop early is that the potential match found is of either sevens or bars, or that there is no potential match and the bottom symbol on the second reel is seven or bar.The condition for the second reel to stop earlyThird reel
In mode bad or mode good, the third reel will always slip to prevent a disallowed match, i.e. any match in mode bad, or a match of sevens or bars in mode good. There is no upper limit for the distance the reel has to advance this way; as an extreme example, hacking the game so that the reels contain all sevens will likely cause the game to softlock.The piece of code run after finding a matchPokemon Yellow Slot Machine
In addition, in mode good or mode super, the reel will slip up to 4 times if no match is found. This is not counting the number of slips done to skip disallowed seven or bar matches in mode good, so the total number of slips may exceed 4.The piece of code run after not finding a matchNotice that, due to the design of the reels, there can never be more than one match at any time.
Oddities
On the spin where the player enters the lucky streak, the actual mode stays as it is on the previous spin, which can be either mode bad or mode good (the mode is initialized to mode bad at the beginning of a sessionAll the memory addresses from $CD3D (wStoppingWhichSlotMachineWheel) to $CD50 (wSlotMachineBet) are zeroed, which included the mode flag at $CD4C.). If the mode happens to be mode good and the player wins, it will still count towards the 60 wins to end the lucky streak. There is a line of code to immediately end the lucky streak if the player wins a reward of 300 coins, but this seems to be impossible, because the lucky streak is mutually exclusive with mode super, and mode good doesn't allow matches of sevens. The probability distribution of the lucky slot machine is weird in multiple aspects. The fact that one machine is more likely to be lucky and some others have no chance might be intended, but the fact that it can be the nonexistent slot machine -1 seems certainly an off-by-one error. The fact that the first reel's early stop condition in mode super is never satisfied is most likely a bug. Presumably, the intention is that the reel should stop if a seven symbol is showing, but the developers mistakenly wrotejr c instead of jr z. The second reel's early stop condition in mode super is weird in two aspects. The 'bottom symbol on the second reel' condition seems like an accidental use of leftover variable, although it may also be intended since there are two instructions specifically making it the bottom symbolThese two dec de instructions make de point to the bottom symbol of the second reel instead of the top symbol, and they seem to serve no other purpose.
. The 'sevens or bars' check is only for the first potential match found, in the order of 'bottom-bottom, bottom-middle, middle-middle, top-middle, top-top' (i.e. from bottom to top), which means a potential match of bars may be rerolled if it appears above a potential match of another symbol.