[Gen III] [FR/LG] Pokémon Throwback: A Definitive Kanto Experience

[RichterSnipes]

ANNOUNCEMENT: Right now the hack is undergoing a complete overhaul. Various audio aspects, wardrobe sprite overlookings, extras features, custom text problems, and other things will be changed in it, as well as potentially bring a brand new perspective to the project as a whole. Until everything is done with it - not just one individual part of the hack - I'll only be releasing bug fixes.

There are tons of hacks out there that completely change up the Pokémon experience to make something new. But what if you just wanted something that attempts to improve upon the great game that is already there? Pokémon (FireRed) Throwback is my attempt at doing just that. This hack incorporates new features and fixes into the 1st Gen remake to try and create the best, most faithful version of the original Kanto story available.

...Oh, you wanted the game's story. You're a kid from Pallet Town who is sent off into the world Pokémon to capture monsters for sport. And battling! Be the best by becoming champion and...catching 'em all? Insert motivational sentence here.



Throwback contains a variety of patches that you can use at your own leisure: pick one or some things, or put all of them into the game! Fully read through the Extras section for a boatload of (minor) changes!

I plan to have as much support for both FireRed and LeafGreen as possible. It started as only a FireRed hack like so many other hacks do, but I feel that the latter version still needs some love. Look for the Venusaur icons to see what is currently working for LeafGreen.

GB Player
Home of the first full-featured set of 8-bit tunes for GBA Pokémon hacks. No relation to the GameCube accessory.

Offering both new and old versions of tracks for a game is never a bad thing, as both have their own charm. This patch incorporates the original 8-bit tunes into FireRed, based right off of the code from the original ROMs. Check it out!

Disclaimer: This video was from an earlier version of Throwback. Many tweaks have been made since then.

• A completely separate sound bank with the recreated 8-bit soundtrack from Pokémon Red/Green/Blue/Yellow (and a little bit from Gold/Silver/Crystal). They play off of the GB Synth instruments of the Game Boy Advance instead of DirectSound to ensure minimal loss of sound quality. As they are based off of the original code, they are incredibly accurate recreations.These put the songs played using the GB Sounds item in HeartGold/SoulSilver to shame!
• Optional stereo sound for all tracks. 1st-Gen tracks use similar panning to Yellow's"Earphone1" sound option, while 2nd-Gen tracks retain their original panning.
• A new key item, the GB Player, in your house in Pallet Town. With it you can choose which music you want to listen to throughout the game. The game saves which bank is chosen, so saving with the 8-bit tracks on will allow you to keep them on when booting the game.

Things to consider for minor sound differences:

Spoiler:

• Any quirk in an emulator's GB Synth implementation will cause some things to not sound quite right.
• The volume of the tracks is rather loud. It is the same level as it was in the original games. Lowering it would ruin the fade outs of songs, making them reach zero volume (or velocity, both are impacted similarly) earlier than they should.
• Duty shifting was an engine-specific feature in the GB(C) Pokémon games. The AGB sound engine used in many GBA games (including FireRed/LeafGreen) doesn't support this. Tunes using it have their sounds directly played back through DirectSound instead. Note that this will change from "tunes" to "tune" in the upcoming update.
• Note attacks/rises have been applied inaccurately. This will be fixed in the upcoming update.
• Modulation is implemented differently between actual GB hardware and GB Synth. Modulation adjusts itself to changes in tempo in GB Synth, but not in standard GB hardware. It also only hits the standard and bend notes in the Gen. 1 games, as opposed to everything in between in the GBA games. I'll apply this better in the upcoming update, but there's only so much I can reasonably do.
• Rapid noise instrument duty changes aren't implemented. This will be fixed in the upcoming update.
• Note sweeping/bending for the evolution start jingle has been implemented through DirectSound. I will properly implement it in the upcoming update.
• A few tunes, such as the Move Deleter track, have not been altered. This will be rectified in the upcoming update.
• There's a bug with the 8-bit Gym Leader Defeated music plays after you beat the Pokémon Champion. It restarts rather than continues to play upon exiting battle. This is due to an ASM command that points to the pointer of the GBA version of that song, so I won't be able to fully fix it myself.

Catch 'em All
Circa 2000.

Stuffing 300+ Pokémon into a game the size of FR/LG can make things awfully crazy and nonsensical, as well as not properly replicate habitats of the original games. What I offer is a "fitting" alternative: the first two generations. They're all soundly located and dispersed throughout the game. I've added several new events for the one-off Pokémon such as starters and legendaries. Consult the included location/event guides for more information!

Trade-evolved Pokémon still evolve through trade to keep with series canon, but can also be caught on one specific map in the game. The big update will change this.

If you wish to get Celebi, please read below in the "Other Patches" section.

Using this patch, or playing with the complete hack, will yield you the above, version-agnostic (even though it requires a specific ROM) title screen. Why the simple name "Pokémon", you may ask? Well, if you think about it, the name makes sense. What's the name of the original Final Fantasy? Final Fantasy, of course. As a remake of the original experience that took the world by storm, it holds the name strongly.



Wardrobe
Keepin' it old school with super-stylin' threads! Like this one!

One of the presentation changes of FireRed and LeafGreen was new clothing styles for the main characters (the player and the rival). With this hack, I try to replicate the looks of their original looks with reasonable results. Most relevant sprites, including the overworld sprites, battle sprites, and opening and credits sprites, have been changed to do so. Now you can roll with the fresh versions of these dudes! Quit trippin' on today's junk and start chillin' in the old days to the max!


And yes, the female protagonist has a hat on. It's to keep with the tradition that all playable characters in the main Pokémon games wear some sort of headwear.

Extras
For the hack-playing connoisseuers.

Did you ever wish that Game Freak had made a few things more user-friendly or convenient for serious playing? Or do you just want to enjoy a few of the spoils brought about from later generations? This hack attempts to satisfy that craving of yours. With a varying array of fixes available, there's certainly something here to please you.

Portions of this patch description that are in red are only available for FireRed, not LeafGreen. This is likely due to discrepancies in the code between FireRed and LeafGreen that extend beyond shifted data.

• Collecting items from the ground or from certain people now plays the proper fanfare instead of the Level Up tune.
• Cut down a tree once and it will be gone for the rest of the game.
• All move tutors will teach your Pokémon their moves an unlimited number of times.
• TMs are infinitely reusable. Item behavior and a few TM locations have been changed to accommodate for this. They now behave as they do in Gen. 6.
• All move tutors will teach your Pokémon their moves an unlimited number of times.
• You can use repels consecutivley as they run out, just like with the current games.
• Poison on the overworld no longer causes your Pokémon to faint. Its behavior is similar to the 4th Gen games.
• The Scope Lens, BrightPowder, Mental Herb, and Light Ball items are now obtainable.
• All missing flutes (sans the redundant Blue Flute) are now obtainable.
• All sensible missing Poké Ball and Mail types are now obtainable.
• The areas in Mt. Moon have been more properly filled out.
• All unneccesary tutorials have been removed. These include the intro screens, little girl, help sign in your room, Teachy TV, and Oak's advice during your fist battle.
• You now turn to face trainers when they engage you in battle.
• The Pokédex species glitch and roaming legendary IV glitch are now fixed.
• The Gamer trainer type has been reverted to Gambler, with all accompanying text changed as well.
• Giovanni's last Pokémon during the final Gym Leader Battle has been promoted back to a Rhydon.
• The Elite Four and Pokémon Champion have had their 1st playthrough teams' levels increased by 2 to reflect their original Red/Green/Blue iterations.
• The Pokémon League lobby music is now the Pokémon League theme.
• Some transparency tile issues have been fixed.
• Two charactes now hold their canonical U.S. names; Green and Charine are now Blue and Janine.
• The Game Freak opening now displays the word "Presents" as it should. Also, the title screen lasts a little longer before looping back to the demo.

Other Patches
Because goodness knows there's not enough patches in the download already!

Included in the download are a few other patches that can enhance your playing experience. These aren't part of Throwback itself and can be considered off-shoots.

• Celebi Giveaway: Outside of Japan, Celebi has never been obtainable in-game in any way, only available through direct giveaways. Noting this, along with the fact that Ilex Forest is not in FR/LG, I've decided to (currently) not have Celebi obtainable using the Catch 'em All patch. Instead, I've offered an alternative: a simulation of a real-world event that didn't happen but totally could have! Please read the included document pertaining to it before you use this patch.
• Decapitalization: This patch does just what you'd expect: it decapitalizes all the text in the game to meet with official game standards. In other words, everything besides menu items and certain headers are no longer shouting at you! Note that this won't affect events unique to my hack and that it will conflict with changes to text that other patches also change. It's incorporated into the main hack patch with all of these situations accounted for.
• Higher Quality Cries: This patch will increase the clarity of the cries of all Kanto and Johto Pokémon over what was previously available. The new cries were downsampled to 16000Hz based on space and diminishing returns, so don't expect miracles with this patch, just minor improvements. Since no higher-quality versions of Hoenn Pokémon cries are available to the public (to my knowledge, the DS and console games use the same audio files as the GBA games), their cries remain untouched. But that's kind of a good thing. This is a HUGE patch. Literally. The patch uses the entirety of the free space from 0xA00000 to 0xCFFFFF. Since the exact compression method used for cries is still not fully documented, I had to use full WAV files. If Throwback didn't cause any conflicts with other hackers' patches you may be using in tandem with it, there's a good chance this will.

Besides the above credits for their specific hacks, these are the more general thanks:

• Jambo51: for all of the custom ASM code present. Seriously, thank you so much!
• HackMew: for the basic THUMB ASM compiling tools (and again for your fixes above)
• DavidJCobb and NarutoActor: for providing crucial offsets

Game features/fixes utilized:

Jambo51: Music bank switching, time-based evolutions, Trainer facing fix
ZodiacDaGreat (with fixes by Shiny Quagsire): Real Time Clock
HackMew: Pokédex fix, Roaming IV fix
Darthatron: Modern Repel system
diegoisawesome: Game Freak opening fix, skip intro tutorials
FBI agent: Infinite TM usage
daniilS: 4th Gen Poison on the overworld behavior

Here is the list of tools used:

Spoiler:

HxD
WindHex
XSE
Sappy mod 17.1
A-Trainer
Adobe Photoshop
AdvanceMap 1.92
Item Manager
NSE 2.x
NTME
PGE's Pokémon Editor
unLZ hacked

Here's a banner if you want to support the hack!

The correct ROMs to patch to are BPRE and BPGE v1.0.

FireRed Download
LeafGreen Download

The .zip file for FireRed should contain the complete hack, a folder with the five separate patches, and various documentation for the hack. The LeafGreen download will have three individual patches, missing the Catch 'em All patch and the "other" patches. The main patch (FireRed only) includes all Throwback patches combined into one, along with full decapitalization of all text in the game - original or hack-added. If you want to patch things individually, then go ahead!

It should run fine on actual hardware. The only issue you will have is with obtaining Umbreon. The GBA doesn't have an internal clock, so the game won't have a dynamic in-game time to which it can refer. Because of this, if Eevee evolves via happiness, it will always evolve into Espeon.

The Pokémon location guides are for the content from Catch 'em All. Refer to them if ever you have a question about where a Pokémon can be found in the wild or need help finishing the events. The documentation includes locations for most of the things inserted into the hack. Only look at it if you're curious or are wanting to add your own things to the hack!

If anyone has any suggestions to create the best-yet-faithful version of the 1st Generation adventure, feel free to notify me. Also, anyone is free to use and modify these patches for their own projects so long as you give proper credit. Enjoy your time in Kanto!

[Elsa]

Wow... That GB player brings back a lot of nostalgia... I love it!
This hack is so cool and original! Nice work!

[RichterSnipes]

New Version Available!

I've put up a quick update to the hack that fixes capitalization consistency with move type names in battle. This will affect both the individual Decap patch and the complete Throwback patch.

Enjoy!

[Kambito]

i'm new at pokemon playing,my friend showed me Fire Red rom hacks and i loved.
anyways. i cant find the rom u want to patch... could u put the link here ?
or add my skype: kanguruhloko

[Alice]

Originally Posted by Kambito

i'm new at pokemon playing,my friend showed me Fire Red rom hacks and i loved.
anyways. i cant find the rom u want to patch... could u put the link here ?

We do not allow rom links here, it is against the forum rules. We also do not condone piracy. However that said, I will say that the rom you are looking for can be found easily by simply googling "Fire Red BPRE 1.0". I did a quick search for that phrase and I found multiple results.

[Kambito]

Originally Posted by Sukiyami

We do not allow rom links here, it is against the forum rules. We also do not condone piracy. However that said, I will say that the rom you are looking for can be found easily by simply googling "Fire Red BPRE 1.0". I did a quick search for that phrase and I found multiple results.

ty :d

[froyo93]

So i am using a mutlipatch tool for mac and it keeps failing when i try to patch fire red could i get some help maybe?

[RichterSnipes]

New Version Available!

As of now, my hack has its own, unique title screen. Check it out in the OP! It's used for the Catch 'em All portion of the patch, so you'll see it if you use either that patch or the whole hack. The credits have been updated to display a more conventional title since I'm throwing out the whole concept of a Pokémon game "version."

Oh, and I fixed a slight error with the standard title screen in the Decap patch. Hope you like the new identity!

Originally Posted by froyo93

So i am using a mutlipatch tool for mac and it keeps failing when i try to patch fire red could i get some help maybe?

Sorry, I can't give you direct help since I'm exclusively a Windows user. I'm guessing you're trying to use MultiPatch? It seems to be a reliable program, so I don't know why it would be acting up on your end.

[RichterSnipes]

Updates!

After having been lost the last several days, I'm back to upload a more substantial update to Throwback. Two things to talk about here.

First, the hack now has supports LeafGreen. The GB Player, Wardrobe, and (most of the) Extras patches have made the transition to the latter version and are ready for people to use in their desired color choice. For those of you who picked that version over the "typical, ordinary" FireRed, this is for you!

Second, the hack is now at version 3.7.1. With it comes reusable TMs, unlimited usage of the elemental Hyper Beam tutor, and some various fixes and optimizations. Time to take even more control in prepping your Pokémon for the big time!

Also, I've put a banner in the OP for anyone who wants to show their support of the hack. Enjoy!

[Elsa]

A hack that supports FireRed and LeafGreen? I am thoroughly impressed! I love this hack and I will probably take the time to play it soon and just listen to its 8-bit awesomeness.