[cesarb]

> I love when people find unused features or weird implementation details in things.

I also like trying to guess what these unused features were originally meant for.

My guess is that the "directly giving an item", "directly giving a pokemon", "special map", and "special route" were meant to be used in real-life events sponsored by the game developer. For instance, all attendees to a convention who own that device could receive an item or a pokemon as a bonus; the convention booth would have a custom device which knows how to send the necessary commands.

The "direct memory write" was probably to allow the DS game a limited ability to "patch" the device in case a bug was found later, or a new feature had to be added.