Be Excellent To Each Other

Rather than clog up the Animal Crossing thread - I'll put this stuff here

Amiibo's are normally small plastic statues made by Nintendo and designed around their characters , however they also have an NFC (near field communication) chip inside of them which can be used to unlock things in certain games based around that character

As these are fairly basic people worked out how to extract the codes for these and write them to blank cards so they could get the special things without paying for and storing all the big bits of plastic.

The blank cards need to be a specific size and the most common ones you can buy on ebay or the like are small stickers which typically cost around £5 for 10 - example listing

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/10-38mm-Whit ... SwB4NWuMFL

Reddit thread on how to make your own Amiibo's

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amiibomb/comme ... wn_amiibo/

And the reddit community on this is here : https://www.reddit.com/r/Amiibomb

When Breath of the Wild came out a lot of people made their own cards with artwork for the game on them to use and these sold on places like Etsy and Ebay for very little more than the cost of the materials to make them although with Animal Crossing it seems people are charging quite a bit more

A few examples of what people are doing with these for Animal Crossing :

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amiibomb/comme ... the_cards/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amiibomb/comme ... cards_pvc/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amiibomb/comme ... ibo_coins/

I was interested in this a while ago and also wanted a cheap second phone for Pokemon so bought this one :

https://www.geekbuying.com/item/product-374424/

and it was about £100 all in (on offer i assume) and nowadays its slow and has plenty of marks on it but its still my spare pokemon phone :-)

At the time the program you used to write them (Tagmo) was only supported on a limited number of phones and chipsets but that was a listed compatible one so i grabbed it.

I've not looked at this stuff in quite a while but will have a play around with it to see if i can still get it going and how complex it all is now.

I think the homemade cards are really pretty and actually something to enjoy, but I’d happily buy just the plain stickers with ‘Molly’ etc written on in biro to get my old faves in the game!

Okay not that bad to do - the NFC bank page has all the amibo files

https://nfc-bank.com/bins.php?categoryid=9

Followed the instructions on the reddit page - and wrote molly (Amibo 99) to the card
I cant invite her to my island yet as I dont have a campsite but i could scan the card and the amibo loads up in Harv's photo studio so should be fine.

Whooo! Do they take long? Do they have Blanca? Who are you going to invite to live with you?

They only take a few seconds to write and yes Bianca is number 164



I've only just got my first 3 other houses in place and those are full - I now have Cube , Freckles and Bettina on my island.

Sorry, I meant Blanca. She was a cat in some of the earlier games that used to wander town to town looking for her face. You could draw her one on and then she’d bet the train elsewhere with her scribbled make up...

Ah - sorry - i misread - and yes she is number 114 - although I'm not sure if she will be a special one like KK Slider or Blathers

Yeah, probably. She was never a villager as such.

Hmm.

Is this piracy?

No, they’re back ups. For travelling.

Obviously I have no issue with it, I'm just curious as to whether it is.

I doubt it fits the legal description, but morally I guess it's the same?

I know next to nothing about piracy, but I’d have thought that the digital files were as prone to copyright and piracy laws as any other digital creation, but that would be 100% supposition, 0% actual knowledge.

Basically yes

You can argue all you like about it but its piracy -

They have gotten slightly better at it but Nintendo also made the Amibo's in limited quantities and for some of the rare ones they were going for crazy money a few years ago - and the actual amibo's are :

Bulky / heavy / breakable / small and easily lost - not really the type of thing you want to carry around and use on your handheld game system

I think i read something about it and what drove someone to 'amibo piracy' when Zelda was released - let me see if i can find it

This was not the one i remember but covers a lot of the points :

https://kotaku.com/the-bootleg-amiibo-b ... 1795302254

And this is the one i remember reading at the time :

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/1522 ... ing-ethics

Is it not possible for a device (like a phone) to have an NFC chip, and for it to change what that NFC chip has on it "on the fly"?

I'd (perhaps naively) assumed that was how Apple Pay worked, i.e. each of the cards in my wallet has a different "token" and it just gives that to the NFC chip so that the reader gets the correct token.

If that *is* how it works, can't some enterprising dev (for Android, I guess) write an app that sets the NFC chip on the device to the chosen Amiibo or whatever, rather than having to buy cards?

I was thinking this same thing last night (if I understand you correctly). As in, can’t the phone ‘broadcast’ an nfc chip so that you can just have a store of the files in a ‘bank’ on your phone so you could summon/scan them at will.

That would be although it does not look like anyone has been able to do it

Short thread about it on GBAtemp :

https://gbatemp.net/threads/anybody-int ... pp.519395/

At the moment it looks like you can write your own NFC stickers / cards and they will present to the system as a real Amiibo but that means you need to get the NFC stickers / write them / and once written they cant be wiped so its that Amiibo 'forever'

Datel (who always work out some of this weird stuff) - have a NFC 'action replay' device which can read and write info to these but again i think thats a way of writing data to NFC cards rather than emulate them (this was also much cheaper at launch its at a high price due to rarity)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amiibo-Action- ... B00WTDI2OM

Okay watching a video and reading some of the reviews on them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSLHUBNwka0



https://www.amazon.com/PowerSaves-POWER ... 34abc5b55c

It looks like that is the answer - they come witha 'powertag' that lets you write amiibo data to it - use it and then wipe and reuse it.

The Boy has just asked me about Amiibo for Super Mario Odyssey. Does this method still work?

Yes it does - you just need an android phone with an NFC reader/writer , the software to write it (free on the internet) , the 'ROMS' of the AMIBO you want to write (downloaded from the internet) and a sticker to write it to (I can see the link in the first post is still pointing to a valid ebay seller who has them at £6 for 10 stickers)

Main things to remember are you need the right type of sticker , and that these things are write once so once you've written it you cant then decide you wanted a different one

I used this quite a bit playing Zelda to get your pet wolf and Epona , once to test that it worked to get someone to invite to the island on Animal Crossing and that was about it

Brilliant, ta. I've got the stickers on order and all the software lined up and ready to go.

He asked about the Amiibo and then I looked at what they did and then at the price of them. Hence why I'm yarring them

Some of them are crazy expensive - for me I'd also worry if I got one or two and liked them then I'd end up with shelves full :-)

e.g. the Zelda wolf Amibo is about £40 on ebay and some of the others go for way more than that.

We wrote one the other day because Darwin wanted to invite Bob to our AC island. It’s really simple once you have it working.

We also bought a different type of tag that was compatible with the LEGO Dimensions game so we could access the Goonies level. Again, as simple as yarring the files, and using TagMo to write it to the NFC sticker.

Thanks for your help, excellent folks. The Boy now has a Wedding Bowser suit on. With more to come I expect!