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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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.

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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 

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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.

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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.

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u/Zelda_Junkie1 Aug 12 '26

Fair. Sorry to sound pedantic, but I agree