Pokemon ROM Hacks Brought To The Real World

If you were a kid in the past 30 years, it was nearly impossible to avoid at least some exposure to the Pokemon franchise. Whether it's through games like Red and Blue to Scarlet and Violet, the brief summer everyone played Pokemon Go, or other media like trading card game or anime, it seems to have transcended generations and cultures quite completely. And, if you've consumed everything there is from the official Pokemon video game, you might be surprised to learn that there are a number of slightly modified games that can be translated to game carts, all like their official counterparts.

[imablisy] played a lot of these ROM hack games, but always in something like a virtual console or emulator, so he wanted something physical that would run on the original hardware of the time. For this, it makes physical copies of Flora Sky and Vega, which are based on Pokemon Emerald and Fire Red originally for the Game Boy Advance. To get the cart, he found a bunch of Mother 3 cartridges to use as a donor. From there, he backed up his Emerald and Fire Red cartridges, modified the ROMs with the changes, then sent those new ROMs to overwrite the data on the Mother 3 cartridges.

A playable cartridge is only half of the construction, however. He wants these to look like real Pokemon games, so he added an appropriately colored translucent case and also printed custom holographic labels for each. It may sound simple, but from the style of [imablisy]'s video, it's clear that he's very familiar with processes like these, from the illustration to the hardware and software side. We're also glad that no classic hardware was harmed in this build, as was this version of Doom on an NES cart that used common gameplay so the donor would disturb collectors as little as possible.