Cool! I like the speeding up feature. I suggest making the UI indicate that you can press the keys `z` and `x` on the keyboard to trigger the A and B buttons respectively, I figured that out by pressing on my keyboard the A and B keys and then all the letter keys.
Btw, it seems there's a crash when you choose "Pokemon" in the "Fight/Bag/Pokemon/Run" menu:
Really exciting to see more games ported to WASM. For anyone interested, I just did a HN post detailing a port I spent the last 5 days on - Xonotic, an arena FPS. Includes a technical writeup too:
This is super cool. Do you have any code up in a public repo that I could peek at? I've been working on and off on a static recompiler for playstation games, wasm was kind of my end goal.
There should be 2 options for speed, regular and sped up. Then there should be a key to speed the game up. When I was a kid, it was the space key for GBA. You could have the normal game and skip the boring parts fast.
How long until this is DMCA'd? How has the project it's based on stuck around for so long? Do I perhaps misunderstand what this is? https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald
Copyright being as long as it is is a theft of our culture. I (and many of our generation) grew up with Pokemon, it's a common experience for many of us. A classic of our culture. Except we're not allowed to use it, remix it, build our own versions, etc. We still do, of course, but it's all illegal.
It didn't used to be this way.
I think 20-30 years of copyright should be plenty to extract whatever profits you deserve from the fruits of your labor. Anything beyond that is just holding culture hostage for the benefit of a few. It doesn't serve society in any meaningful way.
It's a port of a disassembly that requires you to provide your own ROM. The legality of such things is a tangled web that anyone producing them needs to navigate very, very carefully.
It's mostly argued around or against the application of fair use. I suggest consulting a lawyer if you're truly interested, as it quickly gets into legalese around what constitutes ownership, distribution, etc. Throw in a lack of extensive case law and you quickly get into opinions rather than legal bases.
I get the sense that these disassembly/decompilation projects believe that some types of IP-laden asset data can be shipped embedded into the project — not necessarily "legally", but in that they'll likely get away with doing so indefinitely — as long as:
1. those assets are stored in proprietary formats that only the game code itself understands, and
2. no tool exists in the project to extract the assets from these proprietary formats into open formats, unless that tool itself exists only in source-code form in the codebase, and requires the ROM as an input to compile it (even if in the case of such a tool, the ROM is doing nothing but serving as a "key" to unlock compilation.)
Basically, if you have to prove you have your own copy of the IP in order to make their embedded copy of the IP "legible", then it's very hard to construct an evidence-based DMCA takedown order that actually makes any coherent point about the project "distributing" said IP.
That being said, shipping assets like this at all, even if you "can get away with it", is ultimately just a kind of laziness / shortcut-taking. They do it because there's either no clear/simple/obvious way to automatically extract the given asset data from the ROM (e.g. because the relevant data is split up into various data planes + metadata bits that are stored "exploded" all over the ROM), so they just did it once by hand, committing the results; or because there's no clear/simple/obvious way to store the extracted asset data such that a regular compiler/assembler natively understands how to embed it into the binary in the particular form it was found in the original ROM. (Remember, re-assembling/compiling to the original ROM is always the test these projects use to ensure their disassembly/decompilation is preserving semantics. So they need to replicate every weird layout quirk the original dev tooling imposed upon the original ROM. And sometimes the original dev tooling included special-purpose domain-specific asset-codegen tools that aren't part of regular compiler toolchains.)
What these projects should actually be doing, is taking on the schlep: writing the extract tooling anyway, even if it's just "copy these bytes from here and these bytes from there, and spit them out as hex in an .asm file with this header"; and/or writing matching asset-codegen tooling to the tooling that likely existed in the platform SDK, to run before compile/assemble time, converting the extracted ROM asset files into a form (probably a bunch of little assembly files) that will land in the right places when linked back together to form the original ROM.
And, to be clear, they mostly do do this! These projects are very good at doing this!
But sometimes — especially on a larger project with many contributors — one or two things like this aren't audited properly, and fall through the cracks. Or they start out as temporary "bootstrap" approaches made during a private phase of development to get things working + compiling to a correct image; and then not all of those get cleaned up before the repo gets made public.
Perhaps I'm mistaken but the project doesn't need a copy of the original ROM at all right?
To be clear; I don't really understand the law around this - my own country is based on case law which means that even if I wanted to open source some of my reverse engineered games (I have a few private partial implementations of some old defunct game engines in-progress), the distinct lack of prior cases means, sadly, it's prudent not to release them at all while the companies are still active.
I’m of the opinion that projects like this should start hosting Forgejo instances in countries with favorable laws and just mirroring to Github for exposure.
I did a Pokémon Crystal playthrough several months ago, still great games!
I used an emulator on my laptop with increased speed so it made everything like walking and combat way faster which was really nice and I probably would have given up if it wasn't for that
Currently playing Pokémon Unbound, that is probably best ROM hack ever made. I grow up on 1st and 2nd GB and GBC games so Unbound feels a little bit bloated to me with 8 generations of monsters but man... This project is completely new experience, especially playing on retro hand-held like Trimui Brick Hammer.
Then I start to explore another Pokémon hacks and find out that those project has big fan community that are very enthusiastic about bringing new features to classical Pokémon formula. Documents/wiki on web are more detailed than original games has!
For example R.O.W.E mix all kind of modes that you can select, connect Johto and Kanto maps togather, gives you options to limit avalible generations of Pokémon's, so as veteran you can feel more like home.
Another hacks that I need to explore more - Pokémon Gaia and Pokémon Odyssey.
This is amazing. Are the left right up down controls a bit wonky? If I cycle through the letters in the name select menu it seem to buggily not actually go through it?
If anyone has emulator suggestions, I recently attempted a playthrough and found that midway through my copy of red, the game was corrupted? Oddest thing -- hadn't reading the point where you do the "Missingno trick" near cinnebar.
Anyways, I suspect the save got corrupted somehow but it made me swear off emulation and try a physical copy. (Which had the battery I replaced fail... it's been a comedy of errors).
Emerald is well regarded as the best of Generation 3, which is the final of the traditional 2D games and can trade with Fire Red/Leaf Green (remakes of the classic)
Maybe the internal battery died. I honestly recommend you look at GBC style handhelds or if you like the GBA style, Anbernic made one that looks insanely close to a GBA.
There also a craze of DS style emulators popping up. They all give you comfort knowing that your saves will be fine forever if you back them up, even if the device dies.
What are considered the best games in WASM? I recently got into playing around with WASM - it would've been great if this technology was prevalent during the Flash games era
Question to WASM and low level nerds: is this the sort of things LLMs are good at? Since the end verification is stable and conclusive and you can just "goal" this project into existence until this somewhat objective verification is met.
Thanks for the info, I will look into this! I got past that battle and further into the game in my testing, but I don't think I've tried using an item in battle yet.
Ok. So what’s interesting here, presumably, is that this isn’t a wasm GBA emulator (which also exist and work). This is the game itself compiled to wasm. Even though no official source code was ever published, there was a community based decompilation.
Alternatively, you could have downloaded an existing one. What you did is just a roundabout way of acquiring one of the many WASM Rust GB emulators in the training set. Except it probably now has several problems from reconstruction. You didn't learn anything new from the process. It's just wasteful in several ways.
bro, I learned a lot, I did it step by step and discussed everything with Claude, then used the knowledge to build an emulator at work for a rtos machine (WIP)
Btw, it seems there's a crash when you choose "Pokemon" in the "Fight/Bag/Pokemon/Run" menu:
https://i.ibb.co/tpVV8q83/poke-fight-menu.png
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48428133
It didn't used to be this way.
I think 20-30 years of copyright should be plenty to extract whatever profits you deserve from the fruits of your labor. Anything beyond that is just holding culture hostage for the benefit of a few. It doesn't serve society in any meaningful way.
1. those assets are stored in proprietary formats that only the game code itself understands, and
2. no tool exists in the project to extract the assets from these proprietary formats into open formats, unless that tool itself exists only in source-code form in the codebase, and requires the ROM as an input to compile it (even if in the case of such a tool, the ROM is doing nothing but serving as a "key" to unlock compilation.)
Basically, if you have to prove you have your own copy of the IP in order to make their embedded copy of the IP "legible", then it's very hard to construct an evidence-based DMCA takedown order that actually makes any coherent point about the project "distributing" said IP.
That being said, shipping assets like this at all, even if you "can get away with it", is ultimately just a kind of laziness / shortcut-taking. They do it because there's either no clear/simple/obvious way to automatically extract the given asset data from the ROM (e.g. because the relevant data is split up into various data planes + metadata bits that are stored "exploded" all over the ROM), so they just did it once by hand, committing the results; or because there's no clear/simple/obvious way to store the extracted asset data such that a regular compiler/assembler natively understands how to embed it into the binary in the particular form it was found in the original ROM. (Remember, re-assembling/compiling to the original ROM is always the test these projects use to ensure their disassembly/decompilation is preserving semantics. So they need to replicate every weird layout quirk the original dev tooling imposed upon the original ROM. And sometimes the original dev tooling included special-purpose domain-specific asset-codegen tools that aren't part of regular compiler toolchains.)
What these projects should actually be doing, is taking on the schlep: writing the extract tooling anyway, even if it's just "copy these bytes from here and these bytes from there, and spit them out as hex in an .asm file with this header"; and/or writing matching asset-codegen tooling to the tooling that likely existed in the platform SDK, to run before compile/assemble time, converting the extracted ROM asset files into a form (probably a bunch of little assembly files) that will land in the right places when linked back together to form the original ROM.
And, to be clear, they mostly do do this! These projects are very good at doing this!
But sometimes — especially on a larger project with many contributors — one or two things like this aren't audited properly, and fall through the cracks. Or they start out as temporary "bootstrap" approaches made during a private phase of development to get things working + compiling to a correct image; and then not all of those get cleaned up before the repo gets made public.
To be clear; I don't really understand the law around this - my own country is based on case law which means that even if I wanted to open source some of my reverse engineered games (I have a few private partial implementations of some old defunct game engines in-progress), the distinct lack of prior cases means, sadly, it's prudent not to release them at all while the companies are still active.
I used an emulator on my laptop with increased speed so it made everything like walking and combat way faster which was really nice and I probably would have given up if it wasn't for that
Then I start to explore another Pokémon hacks and find out that those project has big fan community that are very enthusiastic about bringing new features to classical Pokémon formula. Documents/wiki on web are more detailed than original games has!
For example R.O.W.E mix all kind of modes that you can select, connect Johto and Kanto maps togather, gives you options to limit avalible generations of Pokémon's, so as veteran you can feel more like home.
Another hacks that I need to explore more - Pokémon Gaia and Pokémon Odyssey.
I find it improves the game when I don't have to spend a bunch of time leveling up or earning gold for equipment.
If anyone has emulator suggestions, I recently attempted a playthrough and found that midway through my copy of red, the game was corrupted? Oddest thing -- hadn't reading the point where you do the "Missingno trick" near cinnebar.
Anyways, I suspect the save got corrupted somehow but it made me swear off emulation and try a physical copy. (Which had the battery I replaced fail... it's been a comedy of errors).
So you have available all of the original Pokémon
There also a craze of DS style emulators popping up. They all give you comfort knowing that your saves will be fine forever if you back them up, even if the device dies.
The one caveat is that a PWA needs an icon but the project doesn't currently have one, so you'd have to design, find, or LLM-generate one.
https://holy-lake-f6df.sdreyesg.workers.dev/
took me 3 hours with Opus. Opus knew the whole ISA, clock, bus quirks, etc. from their training without any external docs