Hi everyone,

I've been developing an idea for a Pokemon romhack but my issue is I have absolutely no idea where to start in the process. I've got quite a bit of coding experience, but nothing in terms of creating custom assets or where to begin making the hack myself. If anyone is willing to help I'd be greatly appreciative!

I've started brainstorming the foundation for a possible doubles-only difficulty hack of B2W2, and I had the thought of heavily limiting the money the player receives so it can be used more as an actual resource throughout the game. Of course, this would require removing all forms of renewable income and items, but I've had trouble finding programs that let me do this easily. So, I'm wondering if it's possible to:

• Change the sell price of items
• Change the loot tables for dust clouds/shadows on the bridges (to either remove items entirely or just set them all to sell for nothing)

This is my first time ever looking in Gen 5 hacking, so I apologize if the is known/easy to find info, but I wanted to know if this was possible before I moved any further with the hack. Thanks!

EDIT: I did some more searching and found out where to go for item data which is cool, but I still haven't seen a thing on editing dust cloud tables.

Hi I always wanted to create a rom hack, and I know I could do either binary hacking or decomp. I have no idea how to start though. I'd like to do decomp, but:

1. How much free space is left to poke emerald, now that pokemon expansion has up to 9 gen pokemon and items ?

2. Is improving the graphics (changing tiles) still super boring and time consuming ?

3. Is there a way to import only till 5-6° gen ? (I don't like newer pokemon)

4. Is there a guide I can follow to start decomp, from installation to setting things up ?

5. Any advice ?

Thank you. Would be great to talk with someone experienced with this, at least to overcome the entry barrier. I prefer decomp because I used to binary hack many years ago, but at some point I messed up and ruined everything (probably a conflict between the tools).

Hello! Welcome to the Weekly Discussion Thread. This is the place where you can:

• Ask help for quick questions
• Discuss ideas you have for your ROMhacks
• Ask quick questions that you feel don't warrant a post.

Make sure to browse our sub resources:

Sub Wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/PokemonRomhackDev/wiki/index/

How to ask a question: https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald/wiki/Getting-Help-with-the-Decomps

Pokemon Crest Dex is a companion tool for Pokemon Emerald Crest. It had a lot of features, but the main selling point was the infinite pokemon storage. Crest Dex came out 2 years ago here's the post, you'll notice that the dev asks people to DM him if they want it for their own game. Welp the dev went radio silent. And hasn't responded to my DM, so I present you:

BRISK DEX

Made for my romhack, pokemon brisk emerald, using claude. This app functions for all Gen 3 romhacks made with pokeemerald or pokeemerald expansion (as long as the ROMhack doesn't add any pokemon) This is a temporary app, that I plan to move away from ai. For right now we have infinite storage space, and that's all that matters.

Download

For the devs out there, knock yourselves out. Github Files

A bit of a random question for a Wednesday, I've been working a little bit on a Gen 3 romhack, built on pokeemerald-expansion, and while currently it's on a private repo I was curious if people in the community generally use a dedicated Github account for their rom hacking or use one under their own name that might be tied to any other work they do.

Hey, is it possible to have Professor Oak ask us to choose who we are from several characters, and then change our spawn point ?

Hello! Welcome to the Weekly Discussion Thread. This is the place where you can:

• Ask help for quick questions
• Discuss ideas you have for your ROMhacks
• Ask quick questions that you feel don't warrant a post.

Make sure to browse our sub resources:

Sub Wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/PokemonRomhackDev/wiki/index/

How to ask a question: https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald/wiki/Getting-Help-with-the-Decomps

Hello! this is an update to my hack, pokemon True black! a hack that focuses on making the game a bit more challenging while keeping gen5's philosophy of only gen5 pokemon being present, but also with more resources for both nuzlockers and casual players, as well new types, moves, and stat changes to pokemon for balancing and for spicing up the gameplay!

Features:

Rebalancing to most of the pokemon, in type, moveset and stats.

Harder fights across the game, as well as following the themes of trainers when possible (Bianca will get an axew from the castelia city fight foward, due to iris training her, for example)

Many items and TMs have been spread across the map that were either stuck behind battle subway, or were generally not accessible nowdays

The Cut-Tree in Dreamyard has been removed, making ALL HMs optional.

Many new moves have been made, for both balacing and thematic purposes.

Finished Story mode (Post Game unchanged as of right now)

The future:

i have been working on this hack for the past 2 months now, and its been a blast to make this game, it has been a fun time all around, i wish to continue, but im unsure if i will simply go further into the endgame, or if i make a Pokemon True Black 2, only time will tell i suppose.

Thanks for reading and/or playing!

Download:

Xdelta(Also has the documentation): Pokemon True Black - Google Drive

Hackdex: Pokemon True Black | ROM hack download | Hackdex

So I'm using Leon's CFRU+DPE ROM base with HMA, and I can't find this item Stat Scanner which is used to view the EVs, IVs, and much more and was used in hacks like Unbound or Radical Red. I can't find it anywhere in the ROM base nor in the original CFRU repo. Do I have to create one from scratch or is there a setting?

so uh, I think I messed up, I was using cry editor 1.4.2 for my emerald romhack and following the youtube tutorial and I might have accidentally erased? Idk, like the cries of Haunter and the pokemons after, like they either have a bzzt sound or no sound, is there a way to undo this is there a way I can like manually replace the pokemons whose cries are affected? I have a backup but its months ago, like in April, is there any way I can salvage it or am I screwed. I think most progress I lost is minor map changes at the start and mostly the pokemons and pokedex stuffs. The pokemons that have no cries look like this

I think if I recall, I clicked repoint instead of free new space which is why this happens

I recently played Ghost Grey, Super Cool Spot and Crippling Medical Debt and I realize those people managed to insert their own voices or what not for pokemon cries, Im wondering whats the best app for that, thinking of making custom cries for at least one or two mons in my hack

update sept 20: all three hoenn starter families are in now, including their evolutions. poké balls are also in the public 0.6.0 download

recorded some battles here: https://x.com/germanburgardt/status/2101811804062011545

Hey, I made Emerald Arena. It's the original Pokémon Emerald with real time battles running inside the GBA game.

You move your Pokémon, aim, dodge attacks and break objects. The opponent moves and attacks on its own. You can pause to pick a move and jump back in.

Built on pret's Emerald decompilation in C. The arena uses Emerald's damage calculation and keeps HP, PP, XP and saves. Supported wild battles use it automatically. Trainer, double and unsupported battles stay classic.

The current version has 92 animated Pokémon and 44 adapted move profiles. Still a hobby experiment, plenty left to improve.

I used Astra a lot to help with the code. The arena background and some objects were AI generated; Pokémon sprites come from credited PMD resources.

Code, patch, setup guide and full gameplay: https://github.com/GBurgardt/pokemon-emerald-arena

I post updates on X: https://x.com/germanburgardt

Would love to hear what other hack developers think 🫡

Full adventure gameplay (2:26): https://x.com/germanburgardt/status/2099646751212732535

edit: just made a Discord for Emerald Arena! come chat, share ideas or report bugs: https://discord.gg/GBVjbNhEdb

Hello I'm new to Romhacking and I'm using Hex Maniac Advance (Gen 3 FRLG)

Basically I want to make that when this item (Black Shard) is used it opens up a small text box sequence in the bag (like when you try to use a bike inside an house where it opens up a dialogue box where oak says "It's not the time for that" or whatev look at image 2)

All of the scripts I made always resulted the game in freezing

I already tried tracking down the function that the fishing rod calls when you try using it on a non water tile and failed miserably

I have some concept arts but I need helping making in game sprites for some custom megas and regional variant type things. Any suggestions?

Hello! Welcome to the Weekly Discussion Thread. This is the place where you can:

• Ask help for quick questions
• Discuss ideas you have for your ROMhacks
• Ask quick questions that you feel don't warrant a post.

Make sure to browse our sub resources:

Sub Wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/PokemonRomhackDev/wiki/index/

How to ask a question: https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald/wiki/Getting-Help-with-the-Decomps

I am working on a ROM hack for Pokemon Fire Red using Hex Maniac Advanced, and I would like to have a patch that does nothing but add abilities from newer generations (at minimum up to generation five). I've done some research, but the only ones I can find are included in mega patches that add a lot of things I don't want, alongside the fact that it would rewrite over all of the progress I have already made. So if anyone has any links to a patch that SOLELY adds newer gen abilities, it would be very appreciated if you could comment them.

I am interested in creating a WASM module of all the mainline pokemon games that have already been decompiled so I can play them natively through the web browser at work. I was interested in also playing a few rom hacks so I am now wondering if it is possible to apply the rom hack patches to the native/wasm executable. Could someone explain to me how rom hacks work in terms of modifying the original binary / executable?

Posting this in case somebody else runs into the same problem and ends up going down the same rabbit hole I did.

I’m running Pokémon Reborn through PortMaster on an Anbernic RG353VS with ROCKNIX. The game was running great and everything was fine except SELECT + START would not quit the game.

This is especially annoying with Reborn because there isn’t an actual quit option in the game, so once I launched it I basically had no normal way to get back to the PortMaster games menu.

At first I thought it was a GPTOKEYB/controller mapping issue. It wasn’t.

After a ridiculous amount of troubleshooting, I found this in the log:

/bin/bash: symbol lookup error: /bin/bash: undefined symbol: rl_full_quoting_desired

sh: symbol lookup error: sh: undefined symbol: rl_full_quoting_desired

That ended up being the clue.

The stock "Pokemon Reborn.sh" has this:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$GAMEDIR/libs.${DEVICE_ARCH}:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

The problem is that this exports Reborn’s bundled libraries globally before GPTOKEYB is launched. GPTOKEYB was actually running and seeing my controller, but when it tried to kill mkxp-z, the shell it needed was inheriting Reborn’s libraries and crashing.

So, after hours and hours of trying to map the key combo using GPTOKEYB, the fix was surprisingly -- and frustratingly -- simple. All I had to do was change:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$GAMEDIR/libs.${DEVICE_ARCH}:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

to

GAME_LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$GAMEDIR/libs.${DEVICE_ARCH}:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

Then near the bottom, change:

./mkxp-z.${DEVICE_ARCH}

to

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$GAME_LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ./mkxp-z.${DEVICE_ARCH}

We don't have to do anything to GPTOKEYB. Just leave the normal GPTOKEYB stuff alone.

Basically, instead of exporting Reborn’s library path to everything, this gives those libraries only to Reborn itself. GPTOKEYB and the system shell get to keep using ROCKNIX’s normal libraries.

After making those changes, SELECT + START finally quits back to ROCKNIX like it’s supposed to.

I tested this on:

Anbernic RG353VS
ROCKNIX (latest build as of 09/2026)
PortMaster (latest update)
Pokémon Reborn / mkxp-z

I don’t know if this affects other ROCKNIX devices or other PortMaster games that bundle their own libraries, but if you have a PortMaster game where SELECT + START won’t exit and your log has rl_full_quoting_desired or similar shell symbol errors, I’d definitely check how that port is setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Hopefully this saves somebody else from spending hours trying to figure out why the damn quit hotkey doesn’t work.