Frame 476
FireRed crashed eight seconds after boot. Every time. Frame 476. Not a hang, not a glitch — the CPU branched to garbage in palette RAM and stopped executing real instructions. The crash was 100% deterministic. Same frame, same instruction, same corrupted address. That kind of determinism means there is a root cause, and it is findable. The symptom Pokemon FireRed uses a sound engine called m4a (MusicPlayer2000). It runs in IWRAM — the GBA’s fast 32KB internal RAM — and mixes audio samples into a buffer every VBlank. A register called R5 tracks the write position in the buffer. Normally, R5 stays within the buffer boundaries: a 1,584-byte region starting at 0x030061B0. ...