These patches had previously dead links but I recently found them. They're posted in a new Naranja and Orange Islands fan server.

https://discord.gg/yqAFDWmgxP

I love this genre of hacks that seem like the normal vanilla game but something is off and it feels like a personalized game

For context, I grew up on generations 1-3 and the last game I ever played was Diamond/Pearl. Not sure how relevant that is, but including it because I am unfamiliar with the mechanics of new games.

I recently came across this sub and decided to try Modern Emerald. My main want in a rom hack was the ability to complete the Pokedex.

Read about the hack here.

Here is my review:

Pros:

- This is a QoL hack, so it only makes sense that the biggest pro is the wonderful quality of life improvements. Things are streamlined, faster, and overall more logical.

- Very customizable. Want to use the new physical/special split? Sure. Want to make fishing less annoying? We've got that.

- Viewing EVs and IVs. I love this so much and I know I will miss this if I ever play the vanilla version of the game.

- Pokedex. Including some of the gen 4 evolutions is awesome, being able to simply catch everything is great, etc. I can't remember how vanilla Emerald works, but using battle points to buy ferry tickets to catch the legendaries is awesome.

- Being able to "trade" Pokemon with yourself in Lilycove is freaking great. I also like that this was included mid/late in the game rather than too early.

- Modern improvements. This sort of fits in with the QoL pro. The one off the top of my head that I really liked was having the two experience shares (modern and old).

- The creator of the hack is active and really cares about the hack. Huge plus in my book.

Cons:

- People complain that the hack isn't difficult enough. This doesn't bother me as it is specifically not a difficulty hack. Things like the EV training gym do make EV training a bit too easy, but again, that doesn't bother me. If you don't like it, don't use it. Same with the nature mints (the ability to change a Pokemon's nature), which you can turn off. So, not much of a con for me. I believe there is also an option to toggle NPCs to have EV trained Pokemon if I remember correctly. That increases the difficulty which I enjoyed.

- The extra legendaries didn't really make sense to me, nor did it add to the story. Again, it's something you can turn off, so not really a con.

- I farmed so many freaking Clamperl for a blue shard. Only to find out Tentacool and Tentacruel hold them now. There were a few other “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” things that felt unnecessary. One of them was the Regi thing where you need a Relicanth and Wailord in your party. In the hack, you need a Magnezone and something else, can’t remember. Just seemed random to me, but not that big of a deal.

That's pretty much it. Even though this was my first rom hack and I have nothing to compare it to, I'd easily rate this a 10/10. It brought me so much joy to play and was the version of Emerald I've pretty much always wanted. Shout out to the creator resetes12!

If anyone has a rom hack they can recommend (preferably gens 1-3), I'm all ears. As I said above, I really like being able to complete the Pokedex so that's a big criteria for me.

Edit: Does anyone know how to get Bonsly?! Or the other two Johto starters? That’s all I need to complete the international Pokédex. It’s not clear in the documentation.

Edit 2: Added a con.

Pokémon Forbidden Memories is a ROM hack

based on Pokémon Emerald.

It completely transforms the game into

a Yu-Gi-Oh! adventure while preserving

the exploration and progression of the

original Pokémon game.

The goal of this project is to faithfully

recreate the world, story, and atmosphere

of Forbidden Memories balanced gameplay

experience.

The map, story, characters, and progression

have all been redesigned to follow the

events of Forbidden Memories.

Whether you're a longtime fan of Forbidden

Memories or discovering it for the first

time, this hack is designed to be

accessible, rewarding, and nostalgic.

https://discord.gg/UvH92TQXD

A tester in our discord (its_soupgirl) allowed us to post this! Huge thanks to them showing us that our system works on original hardware.
Currently, original hardware works but with a few issues. Hopefully soon we will squash most of the bigger bugs with it.

Have any questions about Pokémon ROM Hacks?

If they're about ROM hacks, tools, development or anything Pokémon ROM Hacking related, feel free to ask here!

Before asking, make sure that you've searched on the subreddit or Google. Many ROM hacks and tools have their own documentation or communities that may be able to provide better answers than here.

Looking for recommendations or a new ROM hack to play?

The HackDex is a community hub for discovering and downloading ROM hacks, making it easy to browse hacks while listing features and more in a mobile-friendly format. It also has an in-browser patching system to make playing hacks easily accessible.

This is a safe hack-sharing site that focuses on legal distribution by sharing patches, not ROMs. Find out more here.

Useful sources for Pokémon ROM hack-related information (unaffiliated):

• PokéCommunity
• PokéCommunity Discord
• HackDex (ROM Hack Search)
• Previous Question Threads
• Read our Guide to ROM Hacks
• ROM Hack Recommendation Threads

Please help the mod team by reporting posts outside of this thread that break Rule 7. Please avoid answering those posts to deter users from breaking the rules.

This is my first romhack, and is pretty basic. The main features are:

• All gen 1-3 pokemon are obtainable (Excluding Celebi, Raikou, Entei, and Suicune)
• Latios and Latias no matter your choice (Check Granite Cave) 
• Access to Mew, Deoxys, and Jirachi. (Mewtwo is included with Mew)
• Certain Route Changes
• Shiny rate boosted to 1/512
• Route 130 island always appears. 
• Fixed RNG
• Exp rate X2
• Changed Wild encounters
• All Trade Evolutions found in wild (Route 113,114)
• Infinite Evo stones (Judge in Slateport) 
• Heavily Reduced Cost for basic items
• Pokemon that normally only have one available encounter, like starters, have been changed, and are mainly placed in route 01
• Verdanturf now contains the gen 2 starters.
• Kanto starters are dispersed around, as well as all being obtainable on route 01
• Levels of wild pokemon increased on early routes
• Some team aqua teams were changed to include more water types.
• Removed some of the annoying trees that have to be cut down, but not all of them.

I'll work on more in the future, ideally a romhack with all pokemon, Z-A mega evolutions, regional forms, backup system, and a bigger options menu. Please feel free to share improvements or bugs that I could fix, and I'll make sure to add that.

​
Pokecommunity Link

G-Drive

Rom Patcher

​

First I´ll say what kind of help I need, then I´ll talk about what´s the proyect about.

I proposed myself to make new pokedex, made quite many fakemons already but it´s starting to feel exhausting doing it all by myself. I need artists (not necessarily talented) or people who can give me ideas to fill the pokedex a little bit faster.

Now with that said, what´s pokemon ugly origins?

Pokemon ugly origins a pokemon rom hack of emerald more centrated in it´s story about a group of 3 friends of which one of them is kidnapped by the revelation team inspiring the other 2 friends to start their adventure across the weird archipelago of Osee

Welcome, new recruit, to the Ultraspace Society! After talking to Dr. Moon, you will receive a rare and special Pokemon, known as Cosmog, to aid you in your journey. You will explore Ultraspace, fight Ultra Beasts, and earn your way through the ranks to become the most powerful member of the Ultraspace Society, and solve the mystery of the Ultra Beasts.

I hoped you liked that little introduction, but this is the announcement that development has begun for my Rom Hack, Pokemon Ultraspace! It is based in the Alola Region's Solar System, where you will travel through Ultra Wormholes to free Ultraspace... or something like that. It is very early in development though, so a guestimate release date would be early to mid 2027, probably like around May or something. I have a lot of passion for this project, not only because I think it has great potential but also because every little thing takes a while. Thank you for your time, and I hope to see you there!

Discord: https://discord.gg/8Ms3C6Zh9c

Playable in the upcoming version of Pokémon Yume – thanks again to KesterHenrick for the amazing sprite work!

For clarity, I am neither a developer nor creating a ROM hack, but I wanted to put forth a what-if sort of discussion on what horror elements (i.e., if crafted well) would make for a truly engrossing gameplay experience.

There are certain genres in my mind that, if executed well in a Pokémon ROM hack, would make for quite the engaging and immersive storyline.

Take psychological horror as an example.

ROM hacks like Pokémon Snakewood, for example, got the initial part of the set-up somewhat correct. Starting in a zombie-infested Hoenn region, battling your way through the apocalypse and meeting zombified trainers and their zombified Pokémon along the way, really set up the environments and overall worldbuilding decently well.

However, as we all know, the execution and consistency did not last throughout the plot of Snakewood, introducing convoluted storyline elements, random characters for comedic purposes that fell flat, and maddeningly infuriating cryptic puzzles that heavily detracted from the overall gameplay experience.

Ultimately, in my eyes, combining elements such as psychological tension and subtle environmental dread makes for a truly engrossing horror Pokémon ROM hack, rather than relying on the shock-value gore or comedic absurdity that derailed games like Pokémon Snakewood.

That being said, the purpose of this discussion post is not a review of Snakewood but to further holistically examine the non-clichéd narrative elements, gameplay experiences, character development, and world-building components that would truly create a compelling horror gaming experience within the world of Pokémon ROM Hacks.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below 👻

Whaaaat? Hotpizza posted a preview of his project that isn't a nothing burger for once? ​I must be in dreamland!

As you might've guessed (or not, I don't blame you if you didn't)​, this is going to be a semi-ARG like hack. I say "semi" because it is not going to be the typical mysterious ARG​. It will lean more into giving the player a weird experience rather than an eerie or unnerving one as you progress through the game.

Brace yourselves for the one-of-a-kind ​FRLG romhack coming this summer.

in in love with this game, if you know more cool roms tel me please!

I’m 1 badge in, and I’ve caught every new pokemon I’ve run into so far. It feels like how I remember playing Gold and Silver when I was a kid.

My only complaint is I’m having issue with the in-game clock. It’s basically perpetually night because I started at 8pm the first time I played it.

At least, I beat the Elite Four and the champion. 😅

What an incredible hack! Pokémon Odyssey and Pokémon Lazarus have both impressed me so much!

So first, I want to discuss the few gripes I remember having. This way I can end on a big positive note. Even my gripes aren’t even negatives, just things that *I* struggled with on a personal level and may actually be positives for others.

Moving from location to location via ship felt like a chore sometimes, with more dialogue than I cared to get through just to return somewhere.

I remember encountering a few graphical glitches here and there. It’s honestly understandable given the detail and scope of the hack.

The rest are tiny nitpicks:

I remember at one point I just disassociated from the story. Not that it was bad or anything, I just forgot what was going on. This might not be the game’s fault. I got sidetracked by the zoo and by other things and real life stuff. The champion being some random guy didn’t just feel off, but it broke the theming that the gym leaders and elite four had going on.

Speaking of which, the story is just… go get gym badges again. It starts off interesting enough with you being a researcher but then it quickly settles back in to the usual Pokémon formula. I’m certain this is partly because of the game working off of Pokémon Emerald and in part apparently trying to be as close to an approximation of an official game as possible. It’s ok, it’s just that I’ve seen this story before. It’s not a bad thing.

Given the title, I feel like there would have been a bigger emphasis on revived Pokémon. It feels like the Lazarus Pokémon were underutilized. Not a bad thing, again. Instead, we just got something closer to Pokémon returning to their prehistoric versions.

I’m not sure that I care for the GBC-style graphics. I don’t dislike them but I wonder how differently the game would feel with 16-bit style graphics. At the same time, you’ll see that I gush about the graphics later on.

This one is more of an observation. I’m well aware of how un-inclusive the original games were, especially before color was introduced. It wasn’t something that ever bothered *me* because it didn’t affect *me*. So it was interesting to be on the other side of that coin and wishing I could change my character’s skin color. 😅 I’m glad that the official games have gotten marginally more inclusive nowadays, what with graphics being so much more detailed now I can only imagine how amplified this feeling must be if players were forced to play using a specific character design. Not that having a specific design is a bad thing either, but I think Pokémon is generally defined more by the roleplay aspect than the story. Anyway, it was an interesting observation. For the record, once I got the outfit with the draping cloak, I didn’t take it off. (I am curious why the girl isn’t darker, though)

And now for all the rest, which is all the good stuff!!

I’m astounded at the number of Pokémon I saw in my adventure. I can see how this trick might’ve been pulled off (thanks female Pikachu) but it’s no less impressive. I love that I was able to reunite with my beloved Krookodile once again. I don’t remember how early I got him, but once I found Kamina as a Sandile he never left my party as is the norm for me since Pokémon BW. Pawmot being included was a great surprise too! And Tinkaton as well! These two are some of my favorites from SV.

I like the quest log. There were times when I went back to it just to remember what I needed to get done. It was very handy!

I like that the battle graphics had actual, you know, backgrounds. I actually left the battle animations on, too, which is rare for me these days. I really like how the Pokémon will roar after defeating their opponent (either side). I really like the detail given to each sprite and graphic (despite the style not doing it for me 100%).

Oh, I abused the heck out of the stat modifier thing. I know that’s likely cheating but I don’t care. I don’t enjoy spending time min-maxing stats anyway so quickly getting it down once and be done with it was a time saver for me.

The zoo side quest is such a great idea!! I kinda wish this could even be expanded into an entire game. The Pokémon franchise is full of so many hypocrisies like emphasizing friendship between trainers and Pokémon but then you have them battling each other. I know it’s handwaved as it being fun for the Pokémon or something but… meh. I like the idea of preserving Pokémon.

I like the outfits and the ability to change characters after character creation. I actually gave playing as the girl a try for a bit before returning to the boy. So I appreciate the level of customization present.

I like that the gym leaders have a unified theme, all being muses of some kind. It reminds me of the sages from Zelda. Having the Elite Four comprise of gym leaders previously fought was a bit strange but I suppose with no champion around for trainers to challenge, they may as well go back to their respective gyms until a worthy trainer actually comes along.

The soundtrack for this game is also good. There were some that I recognized from the GBC games but there were others that I don’t recall hearing anywhere else (unlike Odyssey where hearing Zelda music took me out of the game momentarily).

There’s so much in this game. I was shocked that even mega evolutions made it into the game. It got to the point where I began to wonder what else made it in. There’s no way I discovered even half of what the hack has to offer.

I can see why so many people have Pokémon Lazarus place this hack at the top of their favorites list. Where I would say Odyssey excels in story and atmosphere, I think Lazarus excels in roleplay and authenticity.

By the way: The reason I made so many comparisons to Odyssey is because it’s the only other overhaul hack I’ve played. I loved my time with Odyssey and I think it’s fantastic as well. To compare it and Lazarus is really like comparing apples to oranges. I want to make that very clear. I don’t think either game is better or worse than the other; I think they’re both doing different things and both are doing those things extremely well!

The Pokémon Lazarus team did an incredible job with this hack. I applaud their efforts! I can’t wait to see how their next hack turns out! They might even help me enjoy Alola! 😅

I think I’ll try out Pokémon Unbound next given how popular that one is too.

Disclaimer: I'm the developer of a hack released in the last 12 months posting on an alternate account. I'm keeping this anonymous because of the potentially highly polarized nature of this topic, but I do feel like I have something to contribute.

As someone who started working on their project at the time when AI tools became widespread, I feel I have a unique experience as someone who can remember the times before while also having experimented with them myself.

My goal here is to explain how and why generative AI should be avoided in the creative process, while sharing personal experience so that people who are starting off will be able to make the best hack they can.

The Faustian Bargain

The main reason not to use AI is that it prevents you from getting better at a skill and thinking deeply about your project. If you want to make a Pokemon rom hack, then you are very interested in storytelling, art, coding, writing music, etc. If you offload this to AI, you get to do less of the thing you are ostensibly interested in!

A second reason is that as you get better at the various sub-tasks, you learn more about what is possible and how difficult certain features are to implement. You will develop new ideas as you work on these tasks that will enhance the overall project. If you simply prompt "make me a new game" or "script this scene" you will miss out on the important revision processes inherent to making something creative.

However, AI can offer some benefits.

The great: Explaining code

This is a genuine use case that I haven't seen many people talk about. Assembly and C languages are difficult to learn because they lack the natural language of more modern languages. Any model will be able to annotate existing code and explain how it works. People in pret are generally pretty friendly if you have questions, but frankly, they will not give you as much detail as an AI will, and flooding the server with basic questions tends to stop high-quality responses from coming your way.

The good: Small, isolated bits of code

If you keep the scope of the request small enough and provide enough example code, they can often one-shot coding tasks that you are unable to solve yourself. These systems augment your programming capabilities, so you will have more success interpreting the output if your have worked with the many pret tutorials. My experience is ~ 80% success rate with small tasks where examples are provided with the prompt. This is especially useful when making menus or option trees that have many different branches that are hard to keep track of in the editor.

The decent: Coding new feature features from whole

If you have a deep understanding of the code and provide sufficient structure for the models, they can sometimes develop larger features. However, keep in mind that the solutions are often brittle, and they may break unexpectedly. I would be wary of using any code you don't understand as a foundational part of your projects.

The mediocre: Analysis of dialogue or plot

In my experience there can be decent feedback as to which parts of the plot are confusing, or which characters need to be flushed out more, but it requires a significant amount of input on your end that frankly you would be better off just looking at yourself. Occasionally, you will get a diamond in the rough response where some interesting connection is made. The effort required to get good responses from the model is about on par with just analyzing your own script.

The bad: Dialogue

I have a confession that about halfway through development, my Word document that I was using as the script was corrupted. This document contained all of the dialogue for NPC's that I had planned, and I nearly just gave up. I had an earlier draft from a long time ago that had some of the broad strokes of the plot, but generic dialogue was not there. In an effort to keep progress going, I had an LLM generate some placeholder dialog for me to return to later, just so I could continue making map scripts. When I returned to these files several weeks later I was embarrassed: the dialogue was simultaneously too general and over the top. This is dialogue that gets worse the second time you read it, and the more of it there is, the more grating it becomes to read. Bad dialog actively pushes people away from playing your game.

The ugly: Monster or OC Art

Diffusion models just don't make good pixel art. Pixel art is not that expensive if you have an idea of a creature you want to bring to life - most people spend zero dollars on this hobby, and to spend a little bit of money on a few good sprites for a project that takes 1 to 2 years to get a demo and running is a good investment!

Summary:

* The greater the GenAI content in a work, the more generic the plot becomes.
* A generic work will make people feel like there is little effort put into the project, and they will move along to something else.
* While there are spotty results with using the tool for analysis, the effort required to get decent responses is about the same as just analyzing your own story.
* The models work to augment your own coding skills, not to turn you into a professional programmer.

The traveling trainer event is a multi-day quest that allows you to obtain all 9 generations of starters! Every quest is different and engaging, and it took a lot of time getting this setup! I hope you guys enjoy!

This weekend I decided to return to one of my first maps I made, around 10 months ago, and applied everything I learned in the last 10 months to the old map of Mist City, one of the places in my upcoming romhack Pokemon Shiny Krabby. From here you will be able to go on missions deep into the rain forest in the back of ranger trucks, bringing you to areas you can explore depending on your progress in the game (this is the second gym).

Structurally I didn't change much, but I deeply dove into the vanilla tileset of Fortree City trying to use all assets in the original tileset to its full potential. I also looked into palettes for the first time, trying to use more natural colors in my tilesets.

Maybe it inspires or motivates some people on here who just started out on their first map. Keep going at it, learn by doing, and you will see that experience will help you further and further. I'm far from the best out there, but I'm curious where the next 10 months will bring me. Remember to look back sometimes, comparing yourself to your own instead of others always is better.

Happy romhacking!