Emerald Enhanced has been a pet project of mine for a very long time. I started this project many years ago, right here on PokeCommunity. Now, I've made meaningful progress and am ready for the public to test, and help me squash bugs. Currently I'm flying solo on the project.

Credits where credits are due:
The guys at pret for the original decompilation of Pokemon Emerald.
DizzyEggg: For his battle engine v2. This includes gen4+ abilities, attacks, and types.
MrDollSteak For his sprites. I'm using them in the game to add gen4+ evos of gen3- pokemon.
Special thanks to Zavytar for his work on some custom trainer sprites for the game.

Now that I've credited everyone, here's the skinny on what my hack can do for you.

It should be noted that this is an extremely difficult variant of Pokemon Emerald. There are also some suggestive themes. I recommend pg13+

My hack assumes you know exactly what you're doing and does not hold your hand throughout the game. As a result, if you skip some story events, consecutive story events may not work for you. I can't fix this without removing them completely or putting the training wheels back on.

• Select one of four modes to play at the beginning!
• ALL opposing pokemon in the game are increased in level by 5 - 35 levels.
• Gen4+ evolutions of Gen3- pokemon. See below for the full list.
• Thanks to Egg's engine; gen 4, 5, 6, and some gen 7 attacks, abilities and types.
• Physical/Special split is fully implemented.
• Fly has been fully replaced with the Waystone. This item also includes a submenu for Frontier locations.
• Most instances of ALL CAPS replaced with Title Case and lower case where applicable.
• Divergent Storylines! You can now choose to work for Aqua instead of devon, getting early access to groudon and other gifts. (Vanilla story still exists!)
• Gym leaders now scale to the number of badges you have.
• Rechallenge gym leaders as much as you want. They scale to the total number of badges you have.
• Much more freedom of exploration- The player uses HM moves without having to have the HM, a badge, OR a pokemon with the move.*¹
• Trainers give a LOT more money for defeating them, thanks to the super spike in difficulty.
• The good TMs are available in the Lilycove market.
• New starter choices: Beldum, Ralts, Gastly. These represent a fairly large move pool and allow pretty good diversification. This is subject to change based on input.
• Customized Elite Four parties. They've been made to be much more challenging besides just hiking up level.
• Customized trainer class names, for added flavor.
• Rival and other npcs now part of the Relationship system. You can be friends, or sleep over to recover, and get gifts when they really like you!
• Legendary birds and dogs are available throughout Hoenn. Look for Triangle shaped stones in the overworld.
• Deoxys encounter achievable ingame. Steven used to leave a beldum for you in his house. Beldum is now a starter, so you can instead get the Aurora Ticket in his house, which lets you go to Deoxys' home.
• Jirachi available in Granite Cave after beating the Elite Four.
• Mew available as a reward for... something
  Spoiler:

  Fully progressed relationship with Dawn as male main trainer
• Par for the course... Most of the 386 pokemon are available ingame (still needs testing) besides legendaries, which I'm doing custom encounters for.
• New and improved battle UI. Some people will like it, others won't. I like it so it stays.
• General text box has been reskinned
• Common interfaces have all been facelifted! (Party screen, Inventory screen, Start Menu, Pokemon summary screen, Battle screen, Marts, and some other misc interfaces)
• Wild encounters have been more evenly spread out.
• Trade evos have been changed to Level or Happiness so you don't have to do any trading.
• Gen 4+ battle hold items are in the game, but I'm working on adding graphics for them and ways to obtain them.
• Premier and Luxury balls now have a reason to exist! Premier balls fall between great ball and ultra ball in performance, and Luxury balls are better than Ultra balls!
• Explore music has all been shifted around, and unused tracks implemented... Better music variance in the overworld!
• Training Center! Go to the Lilycove Training Center to supercharge your pokemon! EV reduce/add items for sale, groups of pokemon that award 3 EVs in specific stats, EV/IV checker!
• New route between Fallarbor and Fortree for easier access to the rest of the game.
• Buffed some weaker pokemon. While this makes the game no longer canon, the buffed pokemon are balanced and should see some more use.
• Mirage tower is permanently visible, and all the fossil pokemon can be found there.
• Level cap has been increased to 125
• Jukebox ingame to change the default BGM you hear, including a Mute all BGM option.
• TMs are permanent and re-usable
• Poison no longer faints your pokemon when walking around in the field.

The new pokemon I've added to the game are as follows: (more in progress!)

• Gallade
• Roserade
• Mismagius
• Glaceon
• Leafeon
• Weavile (one of my personal favorites!)
• Froslass
• Dusknoir
• Rhyperior
• Yanmega
• Sylveon
• Togekiss

Nuzlocke mode SHOULD be fixed now. Your pokemon will actually die when they faint. See below for full nuzlocke rules list.

Current Bugs:

• Using HM moves still shows your pokemon as if they were using the move. They're not, this is a visual bug.
• If you use the jukebox key commands, and then use the dpad to go behind the message box on the screen, the text will get a little scrambled. It's a visual bug only, and the menu options below it still work. This is due to the tilemap
  limitations of the GBA's rendering engine. I may not be able to fix this. It is totally harmless, anyway. closing and reopening the start menu fixes it 100% of the time.
• Battle text shows damage as if the attack hit, even if abilities like Levitate activate. HP is unaffected, so this is extremely minor.

Nuzlocke Mode Rules:

• Marts cannot be used.
• Pokecenters can only be used three times each.
• Pokemon that faint will actually disappear from your party.
• If you have an empty party, you fail the challenge. You're given a Nuzleaf and the game is switched to Normal mode.
• Base experience is doubled, to offset the challenge of my game in nuzlocke mode.
• You are given items and healed for free when you defeat a Gym leader.

About Emulation Compatibility:
As mentioned below, my game is not a romhack. It's a custom compiled version of emerald with major core code and codebase changes. As a result, there are some routines in my game not fully supported by interpreter emulators. My game will only work properly on emulators that are accurate to real GBA hardware, as well as, you know, Real GBA Hardware. (flashcarts on gba, NDS, 3DS, Virtual Console) The only emulators I can confirm work with my game are listed here:

• mGBA (Windows PC, Mac, Linux)
• VisualBoyAdvance (Classic. VBA-M will NOT work)
• RetroArch (Various homebrew, Android, iOS WITH THE mGBA CORE!!
  Non-Emulation, native run:
• Real GBA, GBA SP. (Flashcart. Must have support for SRAM, flash 1mbit save file)
• Real NDS/DS Lite (Flashcart. See above)
• 3DS (Virtual Console, mGBA port, special flash carts)

Other emulators can work, but with limited compatibility. The most common issue is black screen freezes when transitioning to and from battle, and between maps.

These are not issues I can fix. It's up to individual emulator devs to support heavily modified ROMS, or custom native ROMS. I can't change anything in my game to make it more compatible, and maintain my sanity. The options above should provide you with plenty ways of playing the game. You can ask me about specifics on discord on via a post here.


About modes of play:

• Hard mode is how my game was before this update. It's vanilla experience gain.
• Normal mode scales your EXP to the number of gyms you have beaten. It goes up by 12.5% per badge.
• Easy mode is 4x base experience, for people who want to get through the game quickly to play at the battle frontier. Eventually, I will add a Frontier mode, where you start in Battle frontier and can use
  rentals. I'm not sure yet how complicated this will be, but I will look into it after I finish writing my alternate story lines.
• Nuzlocke mode is an even harder variant of my game, with enforced nuzlocke rules. See above for details.

Some screenshots:

Party Menu:


New Inventory UI:


New Summary UI:


Epic multi battles:
and

Different modes of play!


New jukebox, Read the patch notes in my GDrive folder to learn how to use!


Waystone teleporting! Fly is an archaic thing of the past. Teleportation is the future!
https://i.imgur.com/E76BxUN.gif


Discuss here!
Discord One of my bots will whisper you, I recommend reading that information. If you can't be bothered, use /join role EEBeta

Please keep in mind that I only update this pokecommunity post with information when I make major changes and release major revisions of the game. If you want access to the bleeding-edge builds, you can join the discord and be informed every time I upload a new patch. I also discuss reasonings behind my decisions, as well as take feedback there. I do watch this post to reply to anyone that might have commented, but I prefer if people join the discord. Thanks for reading about my game!

Get the game here:

BPS Patch- You need Beat to apply this: Emerald Enhanced.bps (Or you can get Beat from me directly if the website isn't working, just ask.)

GitHub Repo- You need to know how to compile source: Ryuhouji/pokeemerald


HELP WANTEDI am currently looking for people to perform the following functions:
I'm looking for an overworld spriter to improve the main character and possibly add some new trainers into my hack.
I'm looking for a writer to help flesh out the alternate storylines, and relationship system.

This looks great hope it gets completed soon good luck

Thanks. I'ts an ongoing project, I don't think there will be a point I can call it done. As new games come out, so do new features that I might want to add to my hack, you know?

Hello!

First of all, I have to say that this hack looks very promising and I love both the design and the added features.

It appealed to me so much that I downloaded the game and began to document myself playing through in Nuzlocke mode. Everything went fine until I went up to 102 and began to battle the trainers. The game freezes in every single one of them, usually midway through the first turn.

At first I thought it might just be a minor bug with one or two trainers, but after avoiding all of them and proceeding to route 104, I encountered the exact same problem.

I had been looking forward to playing this game and am very bummed out that my hours of training have gone to waste.

If there is any way to fix this bug, I would much appreciate you let me know. (I am playing the game on a Macbook Air using mGBA v0.6.3)

Thank you in advance.

Could you give us an early option to max out our IVs and methods to EV train our Pokémon? It would be nice to have this in more improvement hacks as a quality of life change.

There are several emulators that have trouble with my hack, and like to freeze. I only officially support the original version of VBA, and mGBA 0.7-b1. I have been having a little trouble tracing this issue, but I suspect that it's a result of the idle loop optimization I included. The Optimization fixes a lot of animation hitches, and vastly improves maximum emulation speed (using the speed up function of emulators) This optimization i made seems to make the game sync on RTC instead of vBlank, which can break compatibility of emulators that sync on vBlank. You can try turning off your RTC in your emulator, it may help, or may not. I just tested the game with my latest patch by fighting every trainer up to and including Roxanne. I had no issues. I don't own a mac so I have no way to test or optimize for Mac versions of emulators. I advise you to join my discord and check out the discussion there. I'm not allowed to provide direct downloads of binary files (emulators, ROMs), but I can tell you how to obtain the old version of VBA.

When you download the new patch, your save file should still be compatible. I'd also not recommend a nuzlocke. I admire your bravery, but I haven't even been able to progress through the game without getting wiped out a few times normally, let alone with the added challenge of a nuzlocke. The general point of my hack is to provide an augmented, more challenging vanilla experience, which is also what the nuzlocke challenge started out as, doing both may provide a tad... infuriating.

Generally, IV's are just luck of the draw. I wanted to include a way to view EVs/IVs but my knowledge of the underlying C code is not such that I would be able to easily implement this. For now, all I can recommend is saving and softresetting to get a good starter, and catching a few of the pokemon you want to use, to find the best one you can.

This does look very interesting. Will yiubbe adding More side quests?

Probably. I'll be adding things as ideas hit me or are requested/suggested. I do have the ev/iv checker and training center added now, which was mentioned or asked for by people here. Feel free to join my discord if you'd like up to date patch notes and to make suggestions for the hack.

How do I patch with Beat? I tried patching Emerald with it and I keep getting an error.

You have to patch a version 1.0 ROM of the game with my patch for it to work. How you get a version 1.0 rom is up to you, unfortunately.

Hello. Is there anyway to download this game? Would like to try playing this game. Thanks .

You have to have a version 1.0 Pokemon Emerald ROM. Patch your ROM with the Emerald Enhanced.bps file found in the downloads section, and play it that way. I would love to just give a direct ROM download, but nintendo and PokeCommunity don't like that, so I can't.

Do the new Pokemon have their correct cries?

No, and, jusdging by you asking that specific question, I'm guessing you either tried it yourself, or have heard talks of it. The only way to put the original cries in requires a much more in depth series of hacks to make it work out, and I'm not an expert. Sorry.

Just out of curiosity why does this use a .bps patch and not a traditional .ups or .ips? I also still can't seem to find a 1.0 emerald rom...which I'm guessing isn't the TrashMan version?

I don't recall the full technical reason why the ips/ups patches don't work, but the issue with those, generally speaking, is that they work on comparing differences between roms with the same codebase.

My romhack is not so much a rom hack as it is a fully compiled custom rom, so there is no longer a common codebase between my ROM and the original Emerald Version rom. BPS Patches work on any files of the same size, regardless of codebase.

Well, I started playing your hack and i do like what you've done so far but my biggest concern would have to be the color of the foe's HP bar. It's very hard for me to actually figure out how much He it has after a battle because the purple (or dark blue) blends into the custom health bar you made. Also, while picking my starter, I could walk into grass without picking my starter while Birch was being chased.

Yeah, it's because I removed the ledge that was normally there to block you and force you to walk into the grass. I took a lot of these out. Most people know to go to the bag, anyways. and if they don't, well, you get sent back home anyway. xD
If you're using a dark or night mode on your display, try reducing the strength of it, The Contrast for the HP bar isn't huge, but it's been fine for me. I'll look into adjusting it, anyways, since you pointed it out.
I recommend joining my discord to catch my latest features and planned features. I usually talk about them there. It's also a good place to post feedback.

How do you choose which difficulty mode to play at the start? The screenshot doesnt really show and I tried interacting with all things in the van

Just by walking out of it, the menu should pop up.

This game looks incredible. Only reason I haven’t picked it up is because there isn’t a way to control the IVs your Pokemon receive. I’m not saying you have to add a perfector, even though that is the preferred method, but updated breeding mechanics work as well. Maybe give the player the option to have an IV perfector? The challenge is deciding which Pokémon you want to use, including their movesets, not grinding for hours trying to get lucky with a system that spits out IVs randomly.

Sorry to barge in but does your ROM not work with the Cry Editor tool? It seem fairly simple to use, there's even a video tutorial on it on Anthroyd's channel (can't post links yet)

I mean, this is kinda how pokemon games have always been. I do have ways of instantly maxing out IV's, but that's incredibly unbalanced. Also, most attempts at influencing ivs results in a bad checksum on the pokemon, turning it into a bad egg regardless of what it is. Only programmatically setting them to 31 has worked for me so far.

Honestly, iv's only give you 30 or so points total to a stat give or take 10 depending on base values
You can accomplish more with EV's and nature, which can be influenced via Synchronize.

It would probably be a good option. If I was Binary hacking. I'm not, I'm using the decompilation project, which means each time i make changes, I compile a brand new ROM. Editors like this are not an option, cause I'd have to re-apply the changes every time I compiled, which is dozens to hundreds of times a night, when adding or testing features. Additionally, the reason cries can't readily be edited is because I'm using slots that were reserved for old unowns from gold and silver, but were never implemented since they didn't make them forwards compatible. These slots are all hard codedto have the same cry, and that's the cry they currently have.