Crystal boots from a user-supplied ROM, imports a full cache and is playable:
copyright, the Crystal intro movie, the animated title, gender select, Oak,
and out into Johto. 122 of the cart's 169 script specials are implemented.
Import and data
- tools/make_crystal_manifest.py derives the manifest by importing
make_gold_manifest as a library, with three additive keyword seams. Gold and
Silver still regenerate byte-identical, which is the standing requirement for
touching that generator.
- crystal_symbol_deltas.py and crystal_movie_symbols.py carry the symbol delta:
Crystal renames the credits mons, splits the trainer card, Pokegear and
pack-pal blocks by gender, and replaces the intro and title outright.
- Crystal-only manifest keys: engineFlagOrder (162 flags to Gold's 93, so the
badge block sits one higher) and unownCharmap (the main charmap parser stops
at the first newcharmap so the two cannot contaminate each other).
Extractor
- RomExtractorGen2 becomes three-edition. Crystal corrections: PAL_MAP_BANK
0x13, a flat PICS_FIX pic bank, audio bank 0x5e, the mapSongs id-100 hole,
seven NPC trades, a TradeTexts stride of 8, the five Crystal tileset anim
steps with per-row degrade, and the column-major trainer card portraits.
- New: animated front sprites (frames, bitmasks, play and idle scripts), the
Battle Tower roster, Kris assets, Mobile System GB art, and the Crystal
intro and title via src/import/CrystalMovie.lua.
Engine
- GameVersion gains engine(id) and fixes(id). Gold and Silver keep their
original bugs where the bug is not hardware dependent; Crystal gets the fixes
Crystal shipped: Lucky Number boxes 10-14, surfing onto an NPC, and the
Reflect and Light Screen defence overflow.
- Crystal story: Suicune and Eusine, Celebi behind the GS Ball flag, the Ruins
of Alph chambers, Buena, the Move Tutor, the Poke Seer, and the Battle Tower
including the wInBattleTowerBattle badge-boost guard.
- Kris and the gender flag, animated fronts in battle and the summary screen,
and mon caught data.
Verification
- Every extracted asset is pixel-compared against pret's own source PNGs.
- Gold caches are byte-identical before and after, file for file.
- New Crystal suites plus a T2 Gen 2 tier; the full suite passes.
The save editor now routes Gold vs RBY through a generation adapter so boxes, items, events, and maps write the right fields. The launcher layout is shuffled a bit, and patch notes can come from the updater, a packed file, or the iOS sidecar.
The launcher spent ~9ms per frame building and drawing, and the Find Mods
tab could hang the window for minutes. Both had the same root cause: a
retained UI tree rebuilt every frame, and blocking curl calls made from the
draw path.
Replace the vendored FlexLove engine (28.5k lines) with src/ui/kit/ (Kit,
Theme, Layout, Loader). The kit caches Text objects and all measurement,
allocates nothing in the steady state, and draws flat. Build+draw is now
under 1ms at every window size and on every tab (POKEPORT_LAUNCHER_PROF).
Move every network call off the render thread onto a love.thread pool
(src/net/Fetch.lua): mod index fetches, per-mod release checks, find-tab
stats, thumbnails and mod installs. Mod indexes prewarm at boot so the
Find Mods tab is populated before it is opened.
Paginate every list -- mods, find, save slots, settings, release notes,
versions -- with the page size derived from the real viewport height, so a
500-mod index costs what a 10-mod one does. Scrolling is gone.
Anything that waits now raises a non-dismissable loader; per-row background
work shows an inline spinner instead. The in-app updater moves to the top
right beside the settings gear and pulses when an update is waiting.
Theme is black with white outlines, no gradients or glows, and solid
colour-coded embossed buttons with bold labels. The game tabs keep their
cartridge colours. Everything is 1.3x larger. The save editor shares the
theme, and adding an item there is now a searchable pop-up like adding a
Pokemon.
Also:
- Reset rebinds, in Settings and under Touch Controls. Rebinds are additive
(Input:applyBindings layers them over the defaults), so there was no
in-game way to undo one.
- Launch options: --game red [--slot N] / POKEPORT_GAME boots straight into
a game for shortcuts and frontends, falling back to that game's tab when
its ROM is not imported.
Fixes found while porting:
- Ellipsis and letterspacing truncated bytes, not codepoints, so a
multi-byte mod name crashed the first frame on a Japanese index.
Measurement no longer throws on malformed input either.
- The new font set missed UiFont's kana fallback, rendering translated
builds as tofu.
- Fetch workers idle in Channel:demand() and LOVE waits for live threads at
exit, so the process outlived the window; quitting mid-download also
waited on curl's 300s ceiling. Shut the pool down in love.quit and bound
its transfer timeouts.
- In one column the save-slot card drew below the fold, over the footer,
with no scrollbar left to reach it.
The two FlexLove engine tests guarded a scroll manager and an auto-height
propagation bug that no longer exist; replace them with a kit suite covering
page bounds, viewport sizing and UTF-8 truncation, and retarget the NX test
to assert the dependency is gone rather than that its perf guards are set.
bryanthaboi