Best ROM to hack?

[ScottNebula]

So personally I love the fire red romhacks I have played. So much, I'm starting my own. Do you guys have a preference of which one you like? Discuss pros and cons as well

 

[Blah]

Brace yourselves boys, someone made a thread for this.

For generation III, the difference is negligible enough for you to pick whichever has the coolest titlescreen.

 

[DizzyEgg]

XD
I'll just say, take a look at my signature.

 

[Bonnox]

At the moment, to me is Ruby. But I'm also valuating Emerald, who knows, there may be an overtake!

 

[ScottNebula]

I am using Fire Red but I don't know?!? Should I try EM

 

[0]

Firered is always a good choice. It is more straight forward to me, especially when reviewing scripts, but I guess that is just personal taste.

 

[Sloo]

I've heard Ruby is buggier than Fire Red, and after hacking both I can attest to that.

 

[Gamer2020]

I am a firm believer that everyone should be moving over to Emerald.

 

[BluRose]

personal opinions, don't roast me horribly pls

Spoiler:

entry-level:
probably fire red or ruby, maybe even ruby over fire red! not concerned with coding or anything, solely features and tool support. acro bike yo

can repoint things with a hex editor, maybe insert assembly and can script:
probably any one of them. still lacking the relative ability to manage free space effectively. better code base, more (recent) research. heavily reliant on tools. quick resource thread holds a LOT of little gems which are beautiful.

interested in assembly hacking:
fire red or emerald. asm/ability resource thread holds many examples of how to do this applicable to fire red (god bless fbi agent). idb available which covers expansively, granted this is for emerald as well, possibly to a greater extent. general readability of code increases over ruby. more free space in fire red tho
also: NAVENATOX'S DYNAMIC PALETTES IS PROBABLY THE BEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED GUYS COME ON

can do assembly hacking to a certain extent, spends a lot of time in hex editors, hasn't really done much in c hacking:
emerald. code is highly optimized, readable, etc. over ruby/fire red. kds/kleenexfeu(?)/dizzyegg's resources are total bull**** present and effectively implement the features they say they do, easily editable and all that great stuff.
let's be real, these probably exceed navenatox's dynamic palettes. honestly surprised that no port of addresses has been completed to get these on fire red.

there's a gap here that i'm not accounting for i know

certain advanced point, pretty much a mlg-professional programmer:
really, whatever you're comfortable with. like honestly, jambo51 is one of like the best people i've ever had the pleasure to meet in this area, currently (or was at least) trying to rewrite the whole fire red game in c. pannenkoek2012-level stuff happening here.
i'm not elevating myself to this level at all (just yesterday i messed up implementing andrea's gen vi exp share system, and that's only porting addresses), but i personally still hack fire red because i don't want to rememorize significant RAM/ROM offsets ;-; again, comfortability.

music hacking, no real assembly/c-hacking stuff (squeetz, i'm talking to you):
fire red. improved music engine publicly available, more space (this is actually a significant factor), etc. emerald loses here if you want better music <3

to be straightforward, i don't and likely never will understand why dizzy/hiraethe/jeesh promote "emerald master race" or the like, except for like contests, which were trivial and could have been done better imo anyways...

tl;dr: opinion, opinion

 

[Blah]

Hmm, if you're separating it to skills, I'd actually change a few things BlueRose has listed. I also want to make an actual list for each level, and also include things that are unique to each. For example, both bases have decap patches, so I will not be talking about it.

If you're a beginner (You know how to script/Map but have never touched an assembler or hex editor):
FireRed or Emerald, easily. Less buggy then Ruby. So the thing that stops Emerald from completely winning this matchup is that FireRed has most resources in the form of patches while some of the EM resources require to be compiled.

Fire red:
- MrDS's patch
- Navenatox's Palette patch
- Tile ROM bases
- 721 patches
- music patches
- JPAN's patch
- Expandable border blocks (Viridian forest border)
- Screen tinting (grey scale screen)
- Help menu (most don't use this)

Emerald:
- Kleenexfeu's attack patch
- Emerald 650
- Dive
- Bikes
- Contests
- Battle frontier
- Berries

There are some tools which are exclusive to FireRed, but modern tools have outpaced those and support both.


If you're an average hacker (You've added assembling ASM to your expertise, able to compile C code others have written, can follow tutorials on insertions and expansions). All the resources above are at your disposal, but now there's even more things which are quite tricky to measure in a quantitative manner. Most of the community is at this stage in hacking.

FireRed:
- All the things I've done in the ASM Resource thread
- https://github.com/EternalCode/ASM
- https://github.com/Touched/community-hack
- Side ways stairs
- Follow me
- Triple tile layer hack
- Repel system (ok this is easy to port)
- Pokemon Gaia (it's open to public to use)

Emerald:
- Battle Engine Upgrade (Unique to EM)
- Pokemon Expansion (Automated, tutorial for both versions is available)
- Items/TMs/Tutors Expansion (Automation is unique)

First I should preface by saying the Emerald battle engine is the best tihng that's ever happened to Emerald. Dizzy and friends have done a lot of work in that department to get it working nicely. It's also worth noting that the Community hack repository has features like Dexnav, Pokepad, BW HP bars, Wondertrade, reworked Pokedex, Hiddenabilities generation/insertion, Multi battles (2v2, 2v1, 1v2), dynamic battle bg insertion all completed as well as some more features being planned right now. Take that into consideration as well :)

Finally we reach the big stage, hacking when you have learned ASM. At this point you could port most of these features yourself, with some effort. The biggest influences are the IDBs, and that's all this section will talk about. If Knizz's FR Idb is 20% complete, the Emerald idb is about 35% complete. So yeah, there's no real debate here, if you're an ASM hacker, the Emerald IDB has more detail as of now, and you'll find more stuff in there to make your day easier.

Now the real finally. You learn C, and can code on the GBA proficiently. At this point, the feature that shifts FireRed over Emerald is the fact that FireRed has a public header for C files which you can add as a submodule in your git projects to include. It's updated daily and contains a wide range of functions, declarations and data mapping which an IDB cannot compare to. Without a doubt, at this level, Emerald pales in comparison to FireRed. Both have the potential to utilize the common Python build system, which lacks speed, organization, reusable headers with documentation, support for scripting language, inplace ASM insertion/compiling and easy access to function docstrings. But the new build, which is currently supportive for FR, tackles all of these issues as well as makes the entire building process for large projects much faster.

--

So now you can make your own decisions on which ROM base you think is better. I should also add that subjective things like graphics/titlescreen/intro design were not included here. Nor did I include any shared features (see that Mega evolution is missing from these lists for example). I believe this is the complete, unbaised truth about the state of both ROM bases.

 

[megapokefan]

So personally I love the fire red romhacks I have played. So much, I'm starting my own. Do you guys have a preference of which one you like? Discuss pros and cons as well

i like pokemon light platinum

 

[Takako Rune]

I have only hacked Fire Red myself. But some of my favourite hacks are Emerald.

It really depends what you are going for.

 

[Itz Skybound]

Pokemon Emerald is always a good choice. Never do one of these though -

POKEMON SAPPHIRE
POKEMON LEAF GREEN

They are a mess of code, and a waste of time. The whole thing is screwed up. Fire Red, (maybe Ruby but I'm not sure) and Emerald were obviously coded with more thought.

 

[Itz Skybound]

Brace yourselves boys, someone made a thread for this.

For generation III, the difference is negligible enough for you to pick whichever has the coolest titlescreen.

Lol that's the funniest thing I've ever heard. Try hacking Leaf Green and Sapphire buddy. Then say that, I dare you!

 

[Blah]

Lol that's the funniest thing I've ever heard. Try hacking Leaf Green and Sapphire buddy. Then say that, I dare you!

It's implied R/S and LG aren't in contention by the fact posts leading to this one didn't even mention them. However, in regards to your last post, it's uninformed to say that Ruby is coded better than Sapphire or LG is coded worse than FR. This is not true. Community made resources and popularity is mainly what created the gap here.

If you're talking purely engine based, a good measure in gen 3 is the date of release.

 

[bluhacks263]

Firered or Emerald, mostly Firered because it's the easiest and the most researched one.

 

[Inner Rhymes]

If you ask me, the best ROM to hack would be Fire Red, especially since it seems to be the most researched and dominating ROM bases in Rom hacking. The most polished of hacks often use Fire Red as a base such as Gaia. Most emeralds hacks end up in the side showcase for being difficulty mods.