What are the 'go-to' toosl for a GBA ROM hack of Firered?

[DaleFails]

Hi all,

I have been away for about 9 years. I made a hack when I was around 16 called Pokémon: Adventure to Empire Isle. After seeing it actually gained quite a lot of online popularity over the years (to little old me anyway!) I have decided that I want to get back into the game. I got as far as the 4th gym and would love to either finish the game or make a new one.

I gave up on the hack as the tools for hacking back then were not very good, they were buggy and would corrupt ROMs easily etc etc. 9 years later and after seeing and playing some of the incredible ROM hacks from over the years I would have thought the tools etc have gotten a lot more accessible and are much more reliable.

My question is - what are the go-to Tools for those have made full successful games?

I remember using AdvanceMap 1.92 back in the day (which was pretty good tbf). The tools for scripting, editing trainers, Pokémon stats and evolutions, TMs/HMs etc etc were always an issue.

What's the general consensus? I would love to revisit my old games and make something we can all enjoy, I just need a little guidance re-integrating and getting to grips with the best tools to use.

Hopefully people can use this thread in the future too. Thanks, and sorry for the essay!

Edit: I am aware of the resource threads but when they are years old I worry I missed something!

 

[kalarie]

@DaleH771

Concerning mapping, AdvanceMap is still the only serious option in binary hacking.

For scripting, XSE is perceived is the most stable.

For editing Pokemon etc. there is no general consensus, all have their pro's and cons. Choose between Gen III Hacking Suite (G3HS), Pokemon Game Editor (PGE) or Gen3Tools (G3T). In my experience especially PGE can mess up your hack. There is a new tool in development (Hex Maniac Advance), which is very good/promising apparently. I'm not sure whether it can make all edits that those editors can do though. So someone could elaborate on that. Some good binary ROM hacks tell what tools they used in the main post of their hacks' thread. So you can also check those to get an idea on what tools to use as well.

Either way, tools are still created by hobbyists so there is always a chance they could mess up your ROM (although one more than the other). So it's still a good idea to create regular back-ups. If you don't want to worry about all that, you could switch to decomp hacking. In that case you're working with the source code, instead of already compiled code.

 

[DaleFails]

Thanks for taking the time to respond, really appreciate that.

I will check out some of the more successful complete hacks and see what they used. My only gripe with hacking was corruption and things breaking down on me. Looks like things haven't changed too much but if other people have made successful hacks then I've no excuse!

 

[Hexx17]

seems like most of the top tier stuff is coming from people using decomps these days, or atleast theres a pretty decent push to get people to start doing that instead of using tools.

 

[kalarie]

@Hexx17

The top tier stuff at the moment is not yet coming from decomp hacks, at least not for remotely complete hacks. In the future that will probably be the case, but not yet.

Unbound is probably top tier at the moment in terms of mechanics and that is done in binary hacking Fire Red.