If anyone has emulator suggestions, I recently attempted a playthrough and found that midway through my copy of red, the game was corrupted? Oddest thing -- hadn't reading the point where you do the "Missingno trick" near cinnebar.
Anyways, I suspect the save got corrupted somehow but it made me swear off emulation and try a physical copy. (Which had the battery I replaced fail... it's been a comedy of errors).
So you have available all of the original Pokémon
I have a copy of red, but even with a new battery the save function keeps failing. I suspect I didn't seat the battery well and I need to solder it, but I am not trained in that and reluctant to have my first project involve an expensive retro cart.
There also a craze of DS style emulators popping up. They all give you comfort knowing that your saves will be fine forever if you back them up, even if the device dies.
Anyways, I just want a "known good" emulator for the game boy. It could be a GBA emulator since that's backwards compatible, but I just want something simple to play Pokémon.
To be clear I was weirded out because an emulated copy glitched out, not the physical one. Physical one just had a battery issue.
It didn't used to be this way.
I think 20-30 years of copyright should be plenty to extract whatever profits you deserve from the fruits of your labor. Anything beyond that is just holding culture hostage for the benefit of a few. It doesn't serve society in any meaningful way.
This browser based version on the other hand, is in far murkier territory. The fact you don't need a ROM means the assets are definitely included by default on this site, and Nintendo would have a way better case for getting it taken down.
It's basically equivalent to those ROM sites that let you play GBA ROMs in the browser through an emulator written in JavaScript or WebAssembly.
But Nintendo's lawyers pay a lot less attention to anything prior to the Switch generation, and the same presumably goes for the Pokemon Company ones. If this project gets a lot of media coverage it's probably toast, but if it's mostly discussed on the odd programming forum like this one, it could survive a very long time.
https://holy-lake-f6df.sdreyesg.workers.dev/
took me 3 hours with Opus. Opus knew the whole ISA, clock, bus quirks, etc. from their training without any external docs
Btw, it seems there's a crash when you choose "Pokemon" in the "Fight/Bag/Pokemon/Run" menu:
X link: https://x.com/AlexStLouis10
I used an emulator on my laptop with increased speed so it made everything like walking and combat way faster which was really nice and I probably would have given up if it wasn't for that
Then I start to explore another Pokémon hacks and find out that those project has big fan community that are very enthusiastic about bringing new features to classical Pokémon formula. Documents/wiki on web are more detailed than original games has!
For example R.O.W.E mix all kind of modes that you can select, connect Johto and Kanto maps togather, gives you options to limit avalible generations of Pokémon's, so as veteran you can feel more like home.
Another hacks that I need to explore more - Pokémon Gaia and Pokémon Odyssey.
I find it improves the game when I don't have to spend a bunch of time leveling up or earning gold for equipment.
Enter is off by itself, so you have to move a hand to press start. Switching to space would solve that.
(I prefer wasd for arrows, and h/j for b/a with y/u or u/I for start/select, but I think most b̵r̵a̵i̵n̵ ̵d̵a̵m̵a̵g̵e̵d̵ right handed people prefer arrows.)
...Why is the D-pad always on the left on all of the controllers/handhelds anyhow, and the buttons on the right? After all, they're aimed mainly at the right-handed people, right?
Another reason I prefer wasd is I mainly use laptops, they always have tiny arrow keys.
(Not original creator of the port!)
The one caveat is that a PWA needs an icon but the project doesn't currently have one, so you'd have to design, find, or LLM-generate one.
If there's already C code (for pokemon emerald there already was a decompiled C/ASM codebase), you usually just compile it and it works, or swap a few native dependencies with portable ones. If you have some ASM code already for some old architecture, then it's a pretty straight forward translation to WASM (not really, but iterable enough with LLMs). So yeah, you can have the first target for your thing to compile, then take a screenshot of first few frames for you to check visually and some framebuffer hashes for automatic verification and use those as an oracle for if it also works correctly. Then iterate a little more, maybe implement saving/loading and load a few checkpoints and register a few deterministic inputs and see some more framebuffer hashes, crashes, state checksums and you're good.
I had a project 'discord plays pokemon' written in TypeScript that allowed users to play Pokemon together.
The architecture was a GPU accelerated Docker container running a full browser and desktop environment.
With this it can all be done in-process. I threw Claude at the problem and it worked!
https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package...
AND - I didn’t have to blow air on the cartridge connector for it to work?
Is this the future?
https://github.com/rh-hideout/pokeemerald-expansion/blob/mas...
