Pokemon ROM Hacking

Hey guys, I’ve been playing Pokemon Clover a lot lately, and was curious about how difficult it is to edit Pokemon Fire Red. Turns out editing maps is pretty straightforward – there’s some robust tools for that, and the game seems to handle the changes quite well without crashing. It’s a bit more complicated if you want to add your own graphics, but I was happy enough just making my own version of Pallet Town with the existing tiles. The grass is populated with Weedles and Caterpies and Missingnos.

Changing Pokemon graphics was tricky though. You need to learn a bit about how to change pointers and use empty space in the ROM, so that you don’t end up overwriting any essential stuff while adding your new content. It also took me many attempts to get the color pallet right. Some of the tools used are very primitive, and just installing the text editing tool was a huge pain. What you see in the screenshot below took me 3 hours! Meanwhile the whole town took less than an hour.

Anyway, I’m probably done with this stuff now. It’s cool to mess around with for one evening, but no longer than that. I have respect for people who can devote years to this stuff without getting paid.

7 thoughts on “Pokemon ROM Hacking

  1. Water Melon

    if by any chances in the future where you want to make another spin-off of the EBF series, would you try ROM hacks? I’m curious

    Reply
    1. Matt Roszak Post author

      No, because I like being paid. And also Nintendo could shut it down at any time. ):

      Reply
  2. Gliga Alin

    Matt, if i want now to play EBF on my phone, i need to install something to save my progress?

    Reply
      1. Dutczar

        I think he’s talking about how every game you are selling is also online for free, just without the premium content.

        Even if they can’t directly sell it because of Nintendo, people making romhacks can make Patreons and make money that way. Putting a clear price tag is probably safer though. I think Nintendo even went after a few Patreons, too, like the creator of Super Mario Bros. Z if I recall right.

        Reply

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