Pokémon XD joins the Colosseum PC port launcher, with online battles across both games

The native PC port of Pokémon Colosseum has picked up a sibling. Chase Myers (chasem-dev), who makes the Colosseum Launcher, has added Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness to it, so one app now sets up and starts both of Genius Sonority's GameCube Pokémon games on Windows, macOS and Linux. XD is in the launcher's Beta channel for now, and the stable channel is at version 0.4.0.

Neither game is emulated. The launcher compiles each one on your computer from a fan decompilation: pkmn-colosseum by dougchansan, which reports every tracked function and data byte of the North American release matched, and pokemon-xd-decomp by imyourhuckleberryponcho, which was about 84% matched at its last update on 11 November. Colosseum came out in 2003 in Japan and 2004 in the West; XD, its follow-up, arrived in 2005.

What the port adds

Colosseum gets the most extras: 60 fps, a picture as wide as your window, up to 4× resolution with anti-aliasing and filtering, and an optional pack of all 7,498 textures upscaled 4×. The game's fonts are drawn sharp at any size, holding L and R fast-forwards (2× to 8×), and cutscenes and battle animations can be skipped. A randomizer shuffles starters, Shadow Pokémon, trainers and gifts, with the seed kept in your save so a friend can play the same run. Saves move to and from Dolphin as .gci files, and the launcher keeps dated backups. On Apple Silicon Macs the Beta build runs natively with Metal, and an Add to Steam button suits the Steam Deck.

XD is earlier in its life. For now it has the renderer, display and controller settings, widescreen, sharp text, fast-forward, movie skipping and online play, while Colosseum's other extras stay switched off.

Online and cross-game battles

The Online tab has a team builder in the style of Pokémon Showdown, with moves, items, natures, EVs and IVs, and it reads and writes Showdown's team text. Rooms offer the old competitive formats (Orre Colosseum doubles, Hoenn Stadium singles, Gen 3 OU) or casual rules, in best-of-3 or best-of-5 sets with team preview. A room can be opened to both games, so a Colosseum player and an XD player meet in the same battle. There's also an optional Generation 4 ruleset with the 107 Diamond and Pearl Pokémon, whose models and cries the launcher can build from your own Pokémon Battle Revolution disc.

The GBA link, without a cable

Colosseum's Game Boy Advance features work too: point the launcher at a save file from Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, FireRed or LeafGreen to trade, register a Colosseum Battle team or spend Poké Coupons. If that isn't enough, the port can run the GBA game itself through mGBA, which also handles e-Reader cards.

What you need

The launcher ships no game data. You need a disc image made from your own North American copy: Pokémon Colosseum (GC6E01, revision 0), plus Pokémon XD (GXXE01) for XD. The XD side also reads Pokémon from the Colosseum disc for its online teams. To try it, follow the setup steps on the Colosseum Launcher page and switch the launcher to Beta in its settings for XD.