Pokemon ROM Hacks And Tools

I started ROM hacking at 13. Home life was rough and Pokémon was something that had always been mine — I grew up partly in Japan and it was everywhere. The Chaos Black and Mewthree rumors floating around online sent me down the rabbit hole of how those fake games were supposedly made, and that turned into figuring out how to actually do it myself.

Learning to Hack

GBA assembly was not well documented when I started. Most of what existed online was scattered forum posts, and a lot of the tools for map editing and scripting were broken or abandoned. I spent a long time just figuring out what the existing tools couldn’t do, then building my own to fill the gaps. I released those tools to the community alongside tutorials, which became some of the more referenced resources for people getting started at the time.

That’s how I actually learned to program — not through school, but through needing to solve specific problems in ROM hacking and having no one to ask.

Notable Hacks

• Blackened Night: My first full hack. Story-driven, still technically in progress.
• A New Dawn: Sequel to Blackened Night, and the one I care most about finishing. This was always the passion project.
• Wooper Games: A series that took on a life of its own.
• Holiday Hacks: Mini-hacks themed around holidays.
• Gentlemon: A sprite mod putting every Pokémon in a top hat and monocle.
• Camp Baker: Based on my time working at a Boy Scout summer camp.

Between Blackened Night, A New Dawn, and the Wooper games, the projects pulled around a million views and hundreds of thousands of downloads combined.

Tools

• Hex Helper: Streamlined applying common hex edits.
• Magic Backup: Automatic backups for active ROM projects.
• Instant Pokémon Transfer System: Mass import/export of Pokémon data between ROMs.
• A-Offset: Locates lost offsets in Big-endian format games — useful for tracking down functions and data tables.