[Discussion] So what's the deal with Emerald? Which, in your opinion, is truly better?

Time to start some drama. :/

I've seen a lot of people here adamantly defend Emerald version as the best ROM to hack because it "has more features" but no one actually says what those features are. I would love it if people elaborated on this, because from what I've seen those "additional features" things like contest selection screens that no one uses anyways, or can easily be emulated in FR.

What I am most curious to learn is how the benefits of these so-called "features" outweigh the overwhelming support for FR in terms of found offsets, tools, asm/hex routines (for example, this decryption of a pokémon's data doesn't have an emerald alternative), rom bases (JPAN's engine comes to mind), and general ability to fine-tune almost everything about your FR hack while most people struggle to do tasks as simple as removing the effing truck at the beginning of Emerald.

You can obviously tell which side I'm biased to, but I'm looking forward to see the argument for both sides. Why did you personally choose either ROM? Are you feeling boxed in working with either ROM?

hjk321 said:

Time to start some drama. :/

I've seen a lot of people here adamantly defend Emerald version as the best ROM to hack because it "has more features" but no one actually says what those features are. I would love it if people elaborated on this, because from what I've seen those "additional features" things like contest selection screens that no one uses anyways, or can easily be emulated in FR.

What I am most curious to learn is how the benefits of these so-called "features" outweigh the overwhelming support for FR in terms of found offsets, tools, asm/hex routines (for example, this decryption of a pokémon's data doesn't have an emerald alternative), rom bases (JPAN's engine comes to mind), and general ability to fine-tune almost everything about your FR hack while most people struggle to do tasks as simple as removing the effing truck at the beginning of Emerald.

You can obviously tell which side I'm biased to, but I'm looking forward to see the argument for both sides. Why did you personally choose either ROM? Are you feeling boxed in working with either ROM?

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I personally like Fire Red, as you can import any music, moves, or sprites from Emerald into it anyway, without free space being an issue, so you can maintain Emerald events that can be possibly more polished if commitment is put into it, and still have free space. As well as this, there can be a ton more done in Fire Red if it is expanded to 32 MB if more new trainers, ideas, events, and scripts are added. I'm only new however, so I don't know much about Emerald data storage... I can see where people come from with Emerald, as I hack Ruby, but as stated before, it can be done in Fire Red, without an issue of storage. I've heard that Emerald free space without an expansion is very little... :D

Removing the truck is super easy using diegoisawesome's tool GBA Intro Manager.

In regards to features I don't really know although I made almost an entire hack in Emerald.
It did come to me much easier than FR though, can't explain why.

Well Emerald has abilities with field effects such as Compound Eyes increasing the chances of a wild Pokemon holding a rare item. I haven't seen anybody port those abilities into FireRed besides azurile13 in his "Nameless FireRed" hack. FireRed is defnitely more convenient to modify due to all of the resources given. I think anybody can modify Emerald just as easily, though it requires research of your own and will take more time due it to having less resources than FireRed.

Then there's also the personal preference in the art styles between them... I mean you can port graphics from one to another, but that also is time-consuming.

Personally, I really enjoy the animations in Emerald. There's also the Hoenn region, which, unless you're fully reworking the entire map, is very different from Kanto and some people prefer its design and story.

Honestly, to me, Fire Red just feels too easy and too overdone. There are rom bases that are practically full QoL hacks already. Everything feels like it's been done for you and almost every Fire Red hack feels like it has the same features. Emerald really stands out as a game you have to work for to hack. You have to hunt down lone comments explaining how to port a feature, you have to search forums for hours sometimes learning about its unique byte locations, you have to really push to make an Emerald hack special. But when you do, it really does end up special because so few of them exist and, odds are, the features you worked to get in wont be in someone else's hack.

You're right that most, if not all, of the useful extra features in the Emerald ROM have been ported over to Fire Red by now. However, in my opinion all of the projects Dizzy Egg and Chacha Dinosaur/KDS have made for Emerald put it well above Fire Red. That includes the Battle Engine upgrade, Dizzy's Hacked Engine, and their item/bag expansion code. The battle engine in particular doesn't have anything close to a Fire Red equivalent, and even though it's on hiatus, most of it is still perfectly usable right now. Unless the battle engine gets ported to Fire Red once the decompilations are done (or something similar gets made for it), Emerald will be the better choice if you want modern battle mechanics.

Also, once the decompilations are done, which ROM has the most tools and research done on useful memory addresses won't matter at all (provided you know/are willing to learn C).

struedelmuffin1 said:

You have to hunt down lone comments explaining how to port a feature, you have to search forums for hours sometimes learning about its unique byte locations, you have to really push to make an Emerald hack special.

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I've had to do the same with plenty of things for FireRed as well.

(respectively, those links, which each took hours to find the first time, are making Mew obedient, making evolutions w/o the national dex work, and changing the *freaking* shiny chance PROPERLY, something no one had asked or answered until I asked)

It amazes me people STILL are pushing for Fire Red even though it has been completely outclassed by Emerald in terms of features and documentation. At this point, with pokeruby being almost complete, even Ruby beats Fire Red by a mile.

DizzyEgg said:

It amazes me people STILL are pushing for Fire Red even though it has been completely outclassed by Emerald in terms of features and documentation.

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Objectively wrong - I've seen much more tools and such that are exclusively for FR, which clearly shows that FR has mroe documentation. Also, features are irrelevant since ASM/scripts/hex edits can copy almost all of it over anyway.

DizzyEgg said:

At this point, with pokeruby being almost complete, even Ruby beats Fire Red by a mile.

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a) see the first part

b) wtf is pokeruby???????

BirdstarCat13 said:

Objectively wrong - I've seen much more tools and such that are exclusively for FR, which clearly shows that FR has mroe documentation. Also, features are irrelevant since ASM/scripts/hex edits can copy almost all of it over anyway.



a) see the first part

b) wtf is pokeruby???????

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1) DizzyEgg has written some of the most impressive gen 3 engine upgrades that exist. Just his Battle Engine upgrade alone is miles ahead of anything Fire Red has. There is also no Fire Red equivalent to many of his features in that engine

2) pokeruby is the same thing as pokecrystal i?m assuming, which would be a disassembly project.

Does one have to be better? Both have their merits and any capable hacker with a decent amount of skill can make a quality hack for either of them.

struedelmuffin1 said:

1) DizzyEgg has written some of the most impressive gen 3 engine upgrades that exist. Just his Battle Engine upgrade alone is miles ahead of anything Fire Red has. There is also no Fire Red equivalent to many of his features in that engine

2) pokeruby is the same thing as pokecrystal i?m assuming, which would be a disassembly project.

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So that's ONE thing that's unique to Emerald. Cool Not like MrDS's hack has megas or anything -__-

also IDK what pokecrystal is either. Als these "poke[game]" things are gibberish to me and just look like dumb ways to spell the original names TBH - TLDR telling me "it's like pokecrystal" doesn't help since I don't know what that is (which should be an easy inference since I clearly don't know what the other are)

BirdstarCat13 said:

So that's ONE thing that's unique to Emerald. Cool Not like MrDS's hack has megas or anything -__-

also IDK what pokecrystal is either. Als these "poke[game]" things are gibberish to me and just look like dumb ways to spell the original names TBH - TLDR telling me "it's like pokecrystal" doesn't help since I don't know what that is (which should be an easy inference since I clearly don't know what the other are)

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Well it's one thing in the sense that it's one engine upgrade. But like... It's an engine upgrade. It comes with many, many, many things like updated abilities, moves, a lot of good features really. As far as I know there is not a Fire Red equivalent.

And I did just say what both pokecrystal and pokeruby are. They are disassembly projects. Pokeemerald (look I don't name them) is also pretty far into development and you can basically do anything you want to in both of those games using the disassembly so neither game is going to have features the other game can't have as long as you're willing to learn C or know someone who is.

Now I skipped alot of the discussion except the first post and for me the variety of tracks and voicetables makes Emerald my go to for music hacking

struedelmuffin1 said:

As far as I know there is not a Fire Red equivalent.

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Again, MrDS's base.

BirdstarCat13 said:

Again, MrDS's base.

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I've been told it's not on par with the Emerald battle engine upgrade

struedelmuffin1 said:

I've been told it's not on par with the Emerald battle engine upgrade

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It does almost everything else DizzyEgg mentioned about the Emerald patches.

BirdstarCat13 said:

It does almost everything else DizzyEgg mentioned about the Emerald patches.

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Trust me, it doesn't. Basically to sum this up, Fire Red is easier to hack. There are more tools, scripts, and rom bases that do A LOT of the work for you. Emerald is harder to work with but the payoff is better. You are working with a better engine capable of more features (there is no argument to be made here, Emerald just has more options in its base engine than Fire Red) but there is less easily accessible information.

FireRed at least has the benefit of being new-hacker friendly. There's not as much work you have to do if you're just trying to make a simple hack, and there's enough documentation, bases, patches, etc. to either help you add new things in or patch them in for you.

Emerald has a lot more versatility and a stronger engine without needing a functional-yet-buggy ROM base like the MrDS base, but it's definitely not user friendly and requires a lot of dedication to learning new hacking styles like coding in C. However, the things you can accomplish in it are much, much better.

In the hands of any semi-capable hacker with at least 14 functional brain cells, a decent hack can be made from either. At this point, it just narrows down to how much work the hacker is willing to do to make the hack and the level of skill they have with either the hacking tools or the disassemblies.

What Emerald has is more GameFreak developed code to handle R/S specific features like the Pokenav, Battle Frontier, Bikes and the addition of a few minor quality of life changes (abilities outside battle as mentioned prior). It is the later released game afterall. As a game developer who plans to make a gen III hack, you have your work cut out for you as it is. Upgrading the battle engine, graphics, game data tables, adding mechanics, making scripts, maps, audio hacking, are all pretty much essential to please your audience and it's a lot of work as it is. So people who are looking for some of those RS features EM has, it makes sense to hack EM. People who don't need them however, are working on a ROM with poor aesthetics (imo, truely 2d buildings and npcs), larger code base, and with the absence of a lot of the nice tools we have for FR as seen in the vast ASM resource thread & projects like Navetrox's palette hack.

I cannot get behind the misinformation about the engine either. How can Emerald have a stronger engine? GF literally took FireRed and just added code and resources to it to make Emerald. The base engine is all the same. FR's map engine is actually better than EM, as FR's cross map and block header functions were removed/edited out.

The reason why I currently would hack FR is because of the larger saveblock available, smaller and therefore easier to learn code base, R/S feature recycling is hack specific, nostalgia and because it looks prettier in literally every aspect :3