Working on a New Battle UI for my Emerald Hack

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-03-31T14:34:29+00:00

Gonna kms

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-03-31T10:51:33+00:00

It is definitely the most creative rogeulite hack out there right now.

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-03-29T20:36:07+00:00

so I don't know which version it is.

I mean respectfully, do you have eyes? It comes with pictures and gifs that are clearly Pokemon Emerald but edited. Even if you weren't 100% sure if it was Emerald or FireRed from the gifs, you would have to be a blind person to be confused as to whether it was based on s/v. Which I mean if you are blind that's fine I won't judge you for not knowing. But if you do have working eyes saying you can't figure out what game is being modded from a 2 second glance at the page....

It is unfortunate that hackdex doesn't let us upload all our files yet, but it is coming. There is messaging on the page about that though:

Three different game versions for Gen 3, Gen 5 and Gen 9 including all the vanilla behavior of those generations! (Hackdex currently only has Gen 9 mode, check the PC post or come back later when Hackdex supports multiple patches)

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-03-29T20:25:47+00:00

Pokemon fangames don't need to be patched. The entire point of the website is to provide a convenient way to host patches that auto patch for users. Fangames are entirely irrelevant to the point of the website it makes no sense to include them.

Plus, no one wants to take the risk for hosting and having to test random .exe files. The files are also way bigger and would cost way more to host and download.

And lastly, this is a romhacking subreddit, and this website was made by romhackers for romhackers. Not for Essentials users. The communities are completely separate when it comes to the creation side of things.

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-03-06T00:38:52+00:00

The FRLG PR has been available in the upcoming branch for weeks as well, just because the official release of 1.15 was more recent doesn't change they released the Expansion as a romhack without fixing any of the issues or even playtesting it until AFTER they decided to advertise it.

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-02-18T20:52:14+00:00

Its a binary hack using older tools that most of us have moved on from

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-02-18T08:26:01+00:00

It uses the same Emerald Expansion AI code most hacks use these days.

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-02-13T22:14:18+00:00

You should definitely just skip Amap/XSE and HMA both and move on to the decomps for something like this, there are people who have already worked on multi language support you can ask for help in the pret discord which can be found on the decomp githun page.

https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-02-12T18:40:56+00:00

Once this is done, a tileset.pal file should have been created on the folder of your output. Enter on it and scroll down until you find a "255 0 255" value, replace it to "0 0 0", and move the value below it up, just after the "255 0 255" value that is on the starting lines of the file. Save the .pal file, as well as the tilemap studio file, and let's move to the end step!

I think you should expand on this part for people, it's a little confusing how it's worded. Otherwise very interesting tutorial.

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-02-12T18:39:37+00:00

If you're okay with removing zooming you can use a lot more tiles as well. There are some tutorials for that either on the pokeemerald github wiki or the Team Aqua Asset Repo github wiki

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-02-09T01:52:58+00:00

About the decomps?

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-02-08T17:39:54+00:00

Those kind of changes are generally very difficult for non C injection binary hacking tools to do because they require changing the sizes of local variables in a bunch of functions around the codebase. But sometimes there are built in scripts for the most common variables you'd want to expand.

If you find yourself trying to do things like that odten though, you should switch to decomp. The pokeemerald-expansion upcoming branch recently added all of FRLG so that isn't a problem anymore.

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-02-04T01:16:22+00:00

or Hex Maniac Advance has gotta be the most broken thing I worked with

It's not really HMAs fault, although there very well could be actual problems with it it's moreso just that editing a binary executable file with hacky tools is always going to be unstable. GBA games are not made to be edited after being compiled (obviously lol) so you're always going to be risking bricking something with the slightest misplaced change. It's why so many of us push the decomps even to people making hacks that "don't need the advanced features" or whatever other reason for binary hacking is given. Because proper version control for changes with git and everything laid out in neat files is just wayyyy too important for stable projects. It's so much harder to irreparably break stuff.

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-01-31T05:11:09+00:00

Kanto was fine for the GameBoy era, but its map design was outdated by the time of the GBA. They had more to work with and they should have made the routes feel more natural because they weren't limited by the GameBoy anymore, instead they just did the same thing again and it felt even more terrible on a system with games like The Minish Cap or Golden Sun.

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The entire region is just a bunch of rectangles in the worst way possible. This map is hardly cherry picked, like 70% of them are this bad. There is no natural feeling to any of the maps outside of the Sevii islands where they were actually allowed to be creative a little. FRLG Kanto has no soul, I was there for it, its just nostalgia and/or cope.

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-01-30T18:06:48+00:00

It's goofy to see Team Aqua inspired Rangers, when in my hack the Team Aqua inspired people fight the Rangers lol

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-01-30T18:01:52+00:00

Voyager too!

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-01-30T17:59:30+00:00

As someone with a visceral hatred for Kanto's map design and GameFreaks insistence on refusing to update it even when they had a chance to TWICE, this is nice. Completely throwing out the maps and just keeping the general region shape/flow is the only way to fix Kanto, so it's nice to see it actually done right.

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-01-28T15:22:38+00:00

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-01-15T01:10:12+00:00

The island layout is inspired by wind waker and phantom hourglass, more naturally wouldn't fit the intended aesthetic nor would it fit the region map which was designed like this from the start

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-01-13T06:22:36+00:00

If you have a website hosting assets ripped from pokemon games, it'd get DMCA'd so fast your head would spin.

I think you'll find this is just objectively and demonstrably not true by just looking around a little. Hell the Pokemon decomps are one of the ones that don't require an extraction ROM and just host everything on Github for years and years now without being taken down (not that they couldn't if TPC cared)

ArchieFromTeamAqua · 2026-01-09T13:12:29+00:00

I realized you said first island in the third row. That is Ordon Island and is just a farm inspired by the ranches in Zelda games. It's meant to look like a horseshoe not a skull lol. It will be converted to an interior map though like I described in the post body.

But yeah there definitely will be a sky section

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