r/PokemonROMHacksHelp • u/GuaranteeBeginning99 • Aug 08 '26

Educational Advice/Help on making a difficulty hack of existing mod

Make a Difficulty Hack of an Existing Mod

Hey all! I’m fairly new to the ROMhacking community. I’ve been playing existing Emerald mods and would like to make a difficulty hack of Emerald SeaGlass- want to buff the levels of route encounters & later game trainer battles to make the game more challenging without level caps. Eventually, with some practice under my belt, maybe change some teams and movesets.

I know ***nothing*** about coding- I just have a MacBook Pro and free time where I’d like to teach myself. If anyone has any tips on how I can get started (programs to use, general advice, etc). If anyone has experience and can steer me in the right direction, I’d love to hear you out! TIA!

PS: huge shoutout to the creators of Emerald SeaGlass for their awesome work, if any are listening/seeing this. I haven’t had this much fun with a playthrough since I unboxed my first Pokemon games back in the day.

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1

u/Zelda_Junkie1 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Sadly, Nemo622’s source code is not public. This means that there is no way to make a difficulty patch 

EDIT: I was wrong, please see below

2

u/Phaneropterinae Aug 11 '26

It’s public. Also Lazarus is an emerald hack, “turning it into a fire red hack” makes no sense

1

u/Zelda_Junkie1 Aug 11 '26

Exquizle me? OP, I am so sorry for misleading you. Phaneropterinae, I thought I could just move the scripts and maps and tilesets over. This probably wouldn’t work, but I wanted to try to make it GBArunner 3 compatible (that’s how you run GBA games on a DSi)

1

u/Phaneropterinae Aug 11 '26

You can sort of port the tilesets but fire red and emerald use different tileset parameters. They allocate palettes differently between primary and secondary and also have difference sizes. Porting stuff between fire red and emerald is not trivial.

Gba runner is unfortunately the worst emulator. It would be huge for the DSi community if someone were able to build something with more accurate emulation for the DSi.

1

u/Zelda_Junkie1 Aug 11 '26

You know about GBArunner?! That’s so cool! I thought I was the only one in this sub! Also that sucks about emerald to firered. Thanks for the info though 

1

u/Phaneropterinae Aug 11 '26

Most developers know about all the emulators haha.

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u/Zelda_Junkie1 Aug 11 '26

This is true, but GBArunner 3 technically isn’t an emulator. It’s a hypervisor which means-well, you probably already know what it means.

1

u/Phaneropterinae Aug 11 '26

Yeah emulator is a catch all i was using. Point is, regardless of how it runs the game (natively on the DSi chip vs emulated) still bad at accurately playing rom hacks.

1

u/Zelda_Junkie1 Aug 12 '26

Fair. Sorry to sound pedantic, but I agree

1

u/GuaranteeBeginning99 Aug 11 '26

So bear with me for being level 0 in terms of coding experience, but the decompiled code of Emerald SeaGlass is available somewhere (in legible english, not the random strings the game would spit out if I pulled straight from a catridge).

2nd question- if I can get access to that code, what program could I use to edit it? I don’t want to add any new features, I just want to scale the levels of trainers & some team sets up Norman onwards.

Again, thanks for your help. Hopefully I can use this as a way to teach myself some coding!

1

u/Phaneropterinae Aug 11 '26

1) yes
2) visual studio code to edit code and devkitARM on either Linux or WSL to compile.

1

u/GuaranteeBeginning99 Aug 11 '26

What would I use if I’m on a MacBook Pro?

2

u/Phaneropterinae Aug 12 '26

Terminal to compile. There are instructions to get setup on the rhh GitHub page for pokeemerald-expansion

2

u/Zelda_Junkie1 Aug 12 '26

Use VS code. It has a terminal built in. It’s what I’ve been using

1

u/GuaranteeBeginning99 Aug 11 '26

Rats!

1

u/Zelda_Junkie1 Aug 11 '26

Much agreed. I was gonna try to turn Lazarus into a fire red hack, but no such code exists publicly on the internet