Red hack: Pokemon Red and Blue Deluxe

So, in my last post, I had a specific section detailing some of the color reworks I did with some Gen 1 sprites.

"And it'd be no good for me to leave Gen 1 sprites without any love, either."

Perhaps I got a little too carried away...

It's always been a curiosity of mine to see how Gen 1 sprites looked if they used two colors (aside from black and white = a total of four colors), like Gen 2 sprites did. I messed around a little with that in 1.08, but over the past 48 hours I decided to tackle all of the sprites that did not use two colors effectively. The result...

Version 1.09

Download here.

Changelog:


Honestly, not even I saw this coming, and it was a spur of the moment thing. I'm not even sure how I touched up on so many sprites in the span of about two days, seeing as I did all of them...

I am 100% confident that I'll be easing up on the updates now, as the game's sprite work monster-wise has been pushed to the limit. Granted, a lot of the Generation 1 devamps actually aren't that great in quality with the sprites themselves (plus, some of my own recoloring work might be a miss here and there), but even the Internet can't provide a solution to everything - they should be serviceable enough. You can be the judge of that.

I would prefer 1.10 to be a modestly sizable update with some notable changes as I touched up on briefly in my previous post, so unless any major bugs pop up (which, any bugfix patches would probably be labeled 1.09a, 1.09b etc.) it'll be a bit before the next update.

Now, let's get to those screenshots.



As for replies...

Ziko577 said:

Just got the new patch and boy, it was awesome rematching the Gyms and E4 again and won't ruin it for others here but the true final boss is kinda tough but wasn't nothing I couldn't handle. I can say this is one of the best hacks out there now with certainty.

Click to expand...

Thank you!

Unown Lord said:

I waited for the Gen 2 sprite patch to resume my playthrough, and I ended up restarting since the combination of H3 difficulty and Inverse Mode proved to be a bit too much. But without Inverse Mode, the game is quite fun.

What I want to know is if I will be able to activate Inverse Mode for the Battle Factory (I know it can be done for link battles). If not, adding this to the next patch would be greatly appreciated.

There are some changes from subsequent generations you might want to implement:

1. Adding Earthquake to the TM compatibility lists of several Pokemon (such as the fully evolved starters).

2. Increasing Fly's power to 90 and Giga Drain's to 75.

By the way, you forgot to list Kingdra in the evolution document.

Click to expand...

Inverse Mode in the Factory is now implemented! Thanks for that.

As for your other points - I'm trying to keep a Gen 1 feel with this hack, so I won't be adding any additional TM compatibility if I can avoid such. Same with move buffs. As for Kingdra being missing from the document, that is now fixed!

Linnie said:

I started playing myself, H1 difficulty with Inverse on, and have a couple glitches/oddities to note.

If you white out in the overworld from poison in an area that plays the same music as your last checkpoint (I whited out in the route before Cerulean and got back outside the Mt. Moon PC), no music plays at all when you spawn, and it stays silent until you change areas to cause new music to play. I'm not sure if this is a glitch in vanilla RB, but either way I'd look at it.

On Nugget Bridge, Blue has a Lv. 15 Abra that
seems to know only Teleport. I'm not sure if this is intentional for it to be this week, but it seems like an odd choice for a major battle.

Click to expand...

I do believe that is a glitch from the original games. I tried taking a look at it... I might address it later on, but it's a relatively minor thing.

Abra knowing only Teleport is intentional.

If I may ask how do you edit Items in Red an Blue?
As I haven't found one Item editor nor Gen 1 Item data structure at all....
Shoot I can't even find anything that describes a basic way to edit items....
Any advice would be much appreciated as I would like to make an item editor for the gen 1 games with PyQt4 (if I even can).

Mateo said:

Honestly, almost nobody uses oldschool editors like that for Gen 1 anymore these days. We just edit it as source code and recompile a new rom with our changes. However, to see the structure of, well, just about everything, you can look here.

EDIT: Not saying it's a bad idea to want to learn how things work, just saying that I don't think there is much demand for tools like that these days.

Click to expand...

I understand...
But the only editor Gen 1 don't have is an Item editor or any documentation (that don't take an asm magician) on item data structures for Gen 1....

Also editing source code and recompiling for those of us who can't even understand asm is not very helpful...
I am trying to learn but its rather very hard at the moment to grasp, it just makes me sweat and get more an more aggravated... For instance I have been trying to get Pokemontools 1.6.0 to run under python3 but to no avail I just can't do it...
To be honest I got so aggravated I just uninstalled python all together.... It pissed me off that much -_-

An with no one to really ask for advice on a human level, learning to program in any language is just so dam hard =(

I was just trying to practice Python by making a simple item editor for red blue and yellow, but I don't even know where to start at this point... nothing is more motivational to me then making a tool shit any kind of tool for rom hacking an all the tutorials are no where near that, its all "2+2=4" or "hello world" those haven't taught me anything which makes me lose motivation.... ehh I don't know sorry to rant I'm just frustrated that I can't code or program in any way or form at the moment an I am tired of not being able to Fly like those of you who can....

Been playing the game for a week now it's amazing! I've seen all 252 pokemon however do I need do capture all 252 in order to get the diploma and get jirachi

Celoman said:

Been playing the game for a week now it's amazing! I've seen all 252 pokemon however do I need do capture all 252 in order to get the diploma and get jirachi

Click to expand...

You need at least 252 to get Jirachi and that little guy can be found by examining the meteor fragment at the Pewter City museum. I found him by accident myself while roaming around.

so to be clear seeing all 252 is not enough I need to go out and capture every single one?

Celoman said:

so to be clear seeing all 252 is not enough I need to go out and capture every single one?

Click to expand...

I did just that and got it. Not sure if you have to.

Stopping by to bring awareness to this, so that I can survey if I need to balance Challenge Mode a bit or not, as nobody likes unwarranted grinding.

For those who have completed Challenge Mode: this poll may be of interest to you.​

Celoman said:

so to be clear seeing all 252 is not enough I need to go out and capture every single one?

Click to expand...

You need to catch all 252 Pokemon, yes. You need 254 if you want to access the extra boss of the game.

I played it at challenge mode highest difficulty. I made sure to pick fairly strong pokemon such as alakazam, dugtrio, jolteon etc. when forming my team. The biggest challenge was probably not having the ability to use items during battle. The second half of the game I did have to use the rare candy cheat in order to beat some of the boss battles, that being said I did keep my trainer encounters to a minimum that might have been the reason I fell short on the leveling side. But I think it's fair given that it is the hardest level.

TheScarletSword said:

Stopping by to bring awareness to this, so that I can survey if I need to balance Challenge Mode a bit or not, as nobody likes unwarranted grinding.

Click to expand...

what grinding? this is single player, people will just use rare candy cheat anyway, like the poster above lol.

in seriousness the level curve is just a tad too high, would be nice if theres a "moderate" difficulty patch that just slightly raises the difficulty without an insane level curve that tempts people to cheat.
imo difficulty should be based on competitve mons/movesets and restrictions, not high level curve.

Murkrow said:

what grinding? this is single player, people will just use rare candy cheat anyway, like the poster above lol.

in seriousness the level curve is just a tad too high, would be nice if theres a "moderate" difficulty patch that just slightly raises the difficulty without an insane level curve that tempts people to cheat.
imo difficulty should be based on competitve mons/movesets and restrictions, not high level curve.

Click to expand...

Having another patch probably wouldn't be a move I'd prefer to make - that said, I've got a decent enough idea of where your levels cap off at, so I'm probably going to re-balance Challenge Mode so that the player isn't that behind for 1.1.0. That in tandem with competitive sets and scaling levels is a hurdle. Thanks for the input!

I beat the challenge mode twice without grinding or cheating. I didn't think the difficulty was too high, but I only battled with Pokemon that were going into my final team and I only used the best ones. Maybe make it even harder?

If you were going to change something, it would be nice to have more post-game stuff to beat, but I understand if you're done with that. Also, I would still appreciate it if you gave Iron Head to Excadrill.

Thanks again for making this hack.

First of all, I LOVE this hack. I'm having an absolute blast playing this between classes, before I go to bed at night, sitting in the library waiting for the bus, etc. It's freaking great. I'm especially loving the added Pokemon, types, moves, and items. It's hard to find any mistakes, bugs, or oddities in this hack. I can tell you've put a lot of thought into it and done very good beta testing on it. However, I have found this oddity...



I don't recall Fly ever being part of a Raichu's repertoire, but I suppose I could be wrong. Is this Raichu supposed to be able to use Fly against my Venasaur? It definitely took me by surprise when it had a super effective move against my Venasaur...

Pikachu got Fly even in original games via event, so Raichu also can use it.

Drewko said:

Pikachu got Fly even in original games via event, so Raichu also can use it.

Click to expand...

Are you sure you're not thinking of Surf? There was an event that gave Pikachu Surf, but I'm not aware of Pikachu/Raichu ever having the capability to use Fly.

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_Japanese_event_Pok%C3%A9mon_distributions_in_Generation_I#Flying_Pikachu

Nope, there was a flying Pikachu :V

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/w...eration_VI#Pok.C3.A9mon_Center_Online_Pikachu

It was even re-released few times, like this one.

TheScarletSword said:

Having another patch probably wouldn't be a move I'd prefer to make - that said, I've got a decent enough idea of where your levels cap off at, so I'm probably going to re-balance Challenge Mode so that the player isn't that behind for 1.1.0. That in tandem with competitive sets and scaling levels is a hurdle. Thanks for the input!

Click to expand...

Just wanted to say I'm happy to help I feel like I was the grease to get the ball rolling again reminding you about those later gen sprites. It isnt a common thing to find when I found them I was like wow holy grail of sprites. Good luck I'll be playing your mod on a real gameboy!

this is a great hack. is their one like this for gold/silver ?

So, I spend two hours trying to get this to work... I can get the basic rom working (no sound)/ Don't think I got past getting my starter. But, I cannot do the git stuff at all... It said it was missing the 'yellow' file so I just gave up. Can someone just put up the completed ROM download instead of having to just manually make it yourself.

When I go to choose my starter, after the pokedex entry shows I'm greeted with a white screen until after the name is selected and since I don't nickname my pokemon I end up giving the name of A because I can't see the option to say no when it comes to nicknaming which this needs fixing pretty quickly. This is for the normal patch for Red with the 2nd gen sprites. I use vba as well which is the only emulator that works on my pc.