Pokémon CrystalDust

What it is

CrystalDust imagines what a Game Freak remake of Pokémon Crystal could have looked like on the Game Boy Advance. It rebuilds Johto with GBA-era graphics, music and mechanics, in the same spirit as FireRed and LeafGreen did for Kanto.

The current version, the 3.0.0 alpha series, was rebuilt from scratch on top of the pokeemerald decompilation project. It is an early build: you can play through the opening part of Johto, roughly up to the Sudowoodo roadblock. Alpha 0.5, from January 5, 2021, fixed item storage in the PC, a crash with Mimic, a Game Corner machine, several map and collision spots and some duplicated TMs. An older version 2 beta from 2013 goes further into the story but is rougher.

Playing it

The hack is applied to your own copy of Pokémon Emerald (USA/Europe), following the instructions in the GitHub repository and its releases. On an emulator, set the save type to Flash 128K and turn on the real-time clock, or the game will complain about its save chip or clock.