Pokemon Emerald Ported to WebAssembly (100k FPS)

https://pokeemerald.com/

by tripplyons • 2 months ago

363 103 2 months ago

pokeemerald.com

eigenspace• 2 months ago

Very cool. Too bad this doesnt seem to work as a PWA, or am I jusr missing the button on Android Firefox?

parasti• 2 months ago

You have to use "Add to home" menu item on Firefox for Android. But this web app doesn't seem to be a PWA.

ameliaquining• 2 months ago

You could send a PR. It's reasonably straightforward to add a manifest to make the app installable (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...), and to use Workbox to make it work offline since it's fully static (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/workbox).

The one caveat is that a PWA needs an icon but the project doesn't currently have one, so you'd have to design, find, or LLM-generate one.

dmitrygr• 2 months ago

Ok. So what’s interesting here, presumably, is that this isn’t a wasm GBA emulator (which also exist and work). This is the game itself compiled to wasm. Even though no official source code was ever published, there was a community based decompilation.

tripplyons9• 2 months ago

Yes, it a recompilation of a community decompilation!

rootsudo• 2 months ago

I think the official source code was leaked, several times.

ironbound4• 2 months ago

They removed the credits and copyed from this project

https://github.com/rh-hideout/pokeemerald-expansion

Luc• 2 months ago

https://github.com/tripplyons/pokeemerald-wasm/

fc417fc8022• 2 months ago

How long until this is DMCA'd? How has the project it's based on stuck around for so long? Do I perhaps misunderstand what this is? https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald

mathgeek3• 2 months ago

It's a port of a disassembly that requires you to provide your own ROM. The legality of such things is a tangled web that anyone producing them needs to navigate very, very carefully.

oompydoompy74• 2 months ago

I’m of the opinion that projects like this should start hosting Forgejo instances in countries with favorable laws and just mirroring to Github for exposure.

orlp• 2 months ago

Copyright being as long as it is is a theft of our culture. I (and many of our generation) grew up with Pokemon, it's a common experience for many of us. A classic of our culture. Except we're not allowed to use it, remix it, build our own versions, etc. We still do, of course, but it's all illegal.

It didn't used to be this way.

I think 20-30 years of copyright should be plenty to extract whatever profits you deserve from the fruits of your labor. Anything beyond that is just holding culture hostage for the benefit of a few. It doesn't serve society in any meaningful way.

bottlepalm• 2 months ago

I get nervous releasing just symbols for a game and here is a full disassembly. I have no idea how tolerant the rights holders are to this kind of stuff. I guess you just roll the dice, but the power is in their hands how far they take action.

CM30• 2 months ago

Well, the decomp requires you to provide your own ROM, and doesn't include any of the assets from the original game. So, that's probably okay for the most part.

This browser based version on the other hand, is in far murkier territory. The fact you don't need a ROM means the assets are definitely included by default on this site, and Nintendo would have a way better case for getting it taken down.

It's basically equivalent to those ROM sites that let you play GBA ROMs in the browser through an emulator written in JavaScript or WebAssembly.

But Nintendo's lawyers pay a lot less attention to anything prior to the Switch generation, and the same presumably goes for the Pokemon Company ones. If this project gets a lot of media coverage it's probably toast, but if it's mostly discussed on the odd programming forum like this one, it could survive a very long time.

ironbound4• 2 months ago

Original project here https://github.com/rh-hideout/pokeemerald-expansion/blob/mas...

hawkice• 2 months ago

Confirming that saving genuinely works. Interesting stuff. Wonder if we can get trades working too.

tripplyons9• 2 months ago

Yeah, I made sure saving worked correctly

ceroxylon• 2 months ago

First thing I checked as well! I've been Poke-sniped, there goes a few hours.

CSMastermind• 2 months ago

I couldn't get trading working but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

itsthecourier3• 2 months ago

some weeks ago I made a Gameboy emulator from zero in rust and then exported it to wasm

https://holy-lake-f6df.sdreyesg.workers.dev/

took me 3 hours with Opus. Opus knew the whole ISA, clock, bus quirks, etc. from their training without any external docs

mathgeek3• 2 months ago

Likely because all of the external docs were already in its training set.

tripplyons9• 2 months ago

Yes, this project was made in around 15 hours of Codex.

itsthecourier3• 2 months ago

how much docs did you need to supply?

BearOso• 2 months ago

Alternatively, you could have downloaded an existing one. What you did is just a roundabout way of acquiring one of the many WASM Rust GB emulators in the training set. Except it probably now has several problems from reconstruction. You didn't learn anything new from the process. It's just wasteful in several ways.

itsthecourier3• 2 months ago

bro, I learned a lot, I did it step by step and discussed everything with Claude, then used the knowledge to build an emulator at work for a rtos machine (WIP)

oceansky• 2 months ago

Next step: 100% browser javascript pokémon emerald.

vorticalbox• 2 months ago

New LLM benchmark?

gobdovan2• 2 months ago

Any way to get sound?

tripplyons9• 2 months ago

I have not added that yet, but it would probably be quite easy to throw a few prompts to Codex to do so.

Weetile3• 2 months ago

Working on that at the moment. I have a private branch and have something nearly working. Will hope to share soon.

(Not original creator of the port!)

weird-eye-issue• 2 months ago

I did a Pokémon Crystal playthrough several months ago, still great games!

I used an emulator on my laptop with increased speed so it made everything like walking and combat way faster which was really nice and I probably would have given up if it wasn't for that

nosioptar3• 2 months ago

I use the cheat engine in zsnes to get rid of the grinding in final fantasy games.

I find it improves the game when I don't have to spend a bunch of time leveling up or earning gold for equipment.

t0bia_s• 2 months ago

Currently playing Pokémon Unbound, that is probably best ROM hack ever made. I grow up on 1st and 2nd GB and GBC games so Unbound feels a little bit bloated to me with 8 generations of monsters but man... This project is completely new experience, especially playing on retro hand-held like Trimui Brick Hammer.

Then I start to explore another Pokémon hacks and find out that those project has big fan community that are very enthusiastic about bringing new features to classical Pokémon formula. Documents/wiki on web are more detailed than original games has!

For example R.O.W.E mix all kind of modes that you can select, connect Johto and Kanto maps togather, gives you options to limit avalible generations of Pokémon's, so as veteran you can feel more like home.

Another hacks that I need to explore more - Pokémon Gaia and Pokémon Odyssey.

danielrmay• 2 months ago

Super neat. I'd love to see what it would be like to play with more modern &intuitive touch controls instead of just the D-pad and A/B.

firefax6• 2 months ago

Why Emerald -- is classic already done?

If anyone has emulator suggestions, I recently attempted a playthrough and found that midway through my copy of red, the game was corrupted? Oddest thing -- hadn't reading the point where you do the "Missingno trick" near cinnebar.

Anyways, I suspect the save got corrupted somehow but it made me swear off emulation and try a physical copy. (Which had the battery I replaced fail... it's been a comedy of errors).

patrickcorrigan• 2 months ago

Try https://afterplay.io it’s cross platform, saves every 20 seconds and keeps your last 50 saves which you can recover from if anything goes wrong

firefax6• 1 month ago

Thanks, this looks akin to what I'm looking for. Maybe a few features I don't need but looks interesting.

jeremyloy_wt• 2 months ago

Emerald is well regarded as the best of Generation 3, which is the final of the traditional 2D games and can trade with Fire Red/Leaf Green (remakes of the classic)

So you have available all of the original Pokémon

firefax6• 2 months ago

Ah good point. I was looking into buying a used copy of Fire Red / Leaf Green and they were surprisingly expensive.

I have a copy of red, but even with a new battery the save function keeps failing. I suspect I didn't seat the battery well and I need to solder it, but I am not trained in that and reluctant to have my first project involve an expensive retro cart.

tripplyons9• 2 months ago

I chose Pokemon Emerald because it is my favorite of the games that have been disassembled!

firefax6• 1 month ago

has RBY been disassembled, out of curiosity?

giancarlostoro3• 2 months ago

Maybe the internal battery died. I honestly recommend you look at GBC style handhelds or if you like the GBA style, Anbernic made one that looks insanely close to a GBA.

There also a craze of DS style emulators popping up. They all give you comfort knowing that your saves will be fine forever if you back them up, even if the device dies.

firefax6• 2 months ago

Yeah to be clear, I replaced the internal battery. I don't know if the issue is that it isn't seated properly, it was working for a spell. But I can't solder and don't want my first project to be a 1st gen copy of Pokemon.

Anyways, I just want a "known good" emulator for the game boy. It could be a GBA emulator since that's backwards compatible, but I just want something simple to play Pokémon.

To be clear I was weirded out because an emulated copy glitched out, not the physical one. Physical one just had a battery issue.

Innittech2• 2 months ago

29 FPS for me, what hardware are you using to get a hundred thousand FPS?

_vertigo• 2 months ago

iPhone 13. Did you change the slider at the bottom?

Innittech2• 2 months ago

Yeah, just found that. Now I'm getting 3000+FPS on my ancient Thinkpad T520.

zuzululu• 2 months ago

Nintendo lawyers intensifi

deadbabe• 2 months ago

What kind of mods and new features could be added?

wild_pointer• 2 months ago

There should be 2 options for speed, regular and sped up. Then there should be a key to speed the game up. When I was a kid, it was the space key for GBA. You could have the normal game and skip the boring parts fast.

Navaie• 2 months ago

Crashed when using a potion vs May :(

tripplyons9• 2 months ago

Thanks for the info, I will look into this! I got past that battle and further into the game in my testing, but I don't think I've tried using an item in battle yet.

ianm218• 2 months ago

What are considered the best games in WASM? I recently got into playing around with WASM - it would've been great if this technology was prevalent during the Flash games era

prinny_• 2 months ago

WASM is not for games specifically, it's for anything that needs native performance but also needs to run on the web.

kmeisthax• 2 months ago

It was, Adobe called it a few different names, and even burned a bunch of their remaining goodwill trying to lock it behind a revshare agreement.

wis• 2 months ago

Cool! I like the speeding up feature. I suggest making the UI indicate that you can press the keys `z` and `x` on the keyboard to trigger the A and B buttons respectively, I figured that out by pressing on my keyboard the A and B keys and then all the letter keys.

Btw, it seems there's a crash when you choose "Pokemon" in the "Fight/Bag/Pokemon/Run" menu:

https://i.ibb.co/tpVV8q83/poke-fight-menu.png

sergiotapia• 2 months ago

Z and X are old school emulator keys. I knew right away to use them from the visual boy advance / zsnes days. :D

folkrav• 2 months ago

Funny, I've been emulating games for literal decades at this point, but remapping buttons is one of the first things I did in every one of them, so I never knew the defaults hehe

tripplyons9• 2 months ago

Thanks for the info! I will collect all these reports today and get these issues fixed in the next few days when I can.

airstrike• 2 months ago

Please consider adding WASD support or alternatively allow keyboard configuration

vesche• 2 months ago

This is awesome! It would be neato if you could export and reload your save file, I clear my browser data a lot.

tripplyons9• 2 months ago

Yes, this has been a highly requested feature! This will be the next feature for me to add after addressing the bug reports.

theowaway2134562• 2 months ago

Certain entities seem to be displayed as numbers for me, like "You received a 6" etc when getting my first potion. Anyone else seeing this bug?

tripplyons9• 2 months ago

I have not encountered this, but I will note it down as something to look into. Which potion was it?

chownie• 2 months ago

There's an NPC who walks you to the pokemart and gives you a potion. For me that dialogue was something like "You receive a !" and it then said "You place it in the 23 pocket" -- seems related?

CarVac• 2 months ago

Zigzagoon using growl made it say my "hp rose"

arthurcolle• 2 months ago

This is amazing. Are the left right up down controls a bit wonky? If I cycle through the letters in the name select menu it seem to buggily not actually go through it?

astlouis442• 2 months ago

Really exciting to see more games ported to WASM. For anyone interested, I just did a HN post detailing a port I spent the last 5 days on - Xonotic, an arena FPS. Includes a technical writeup too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48428133

potsandpans• 2 months ago

This is super cool. Do you have any code up in a public repo that I could peek at? I've been working on and off on a static recompiler for playstation games, wasm was kind of my end goal.

astlouis442• 2 months ago

Thanks man, feel free me to DM me on X if you'd like to discuss further, I am planning to push the code to a repo seeing as Xonotic is an OSS game and requires any changes to also be open sourced. And a Playstation recomp implemented in WASM is interesting to think about!

X link: https://x.com/AlexStLouis10

simianwords• 2 months ago

Question to WASM and low level nerds: is this the sort of things LLMs are good at? Since the end verification is stable and conclusive and you can just "goal" this project into existence until this somewhat objective verification is met.

gobdovan2• 2 months ago

WASM is just a binary instruction format for a virtual stack machine. So instead of having many instruction sets for different CPUs and so on, you write for a portable VM (think of like JVM but lower level) that then can be ran on many CPUs and also on web browsers.

If there's already C code (for pokemon emerald there already was a decompiled C/ASM codebase), you usually just compile it and it works, or swap a few native dependencies with portable ones. If you have some ASM code already for some old architecture, then it's a pretty straight forward translation to WASM (not really, but iterable enough with LLMs). So yeah, you can have the first target for your thing to compile, then take a screenshot of first few frames for you to check visually and some framebuffer hashes for automatic verification and use those as an oracle for if it also works correctly. Then iterate a little more, maybe implement saving/loading and load a few checkpoints and register a few deterministic inputs and see some more framebuffer hashes, crashes, state checksums and you're good.

cadamsdotcom• 2 months ago

So you’re saying I have 1900 Game Boys in my pocket everywhere I go AND don’t have to buy batteries?

AND - I didn’t have to blow air on the cartridge connector for it to work?

Is this the future?

orliesaurus• 2 months ago

I crashed opening the Pokemon bag on the first fight

nosioptar3• 2 months ago

I know they're pretty standard controls, but I would suggest letting users remap keys.

Enter is off by itself, so you have to move a hand to press start. Switching to space would solve that.

(I prefer wasd for arrows, and h/j for b/a with y/u or u/I for start/select, but I think most b̵r̵a̵i̵n̵ ̵d̵a̵m̵a̵g̵e̵d̵ right handed people prefer arrows.)

Joker_vD• 2 months ago

I'm left-handed and I prefer ZX for AB and arrows for the D-pad. Which is actually the mirror of how the real Gameboy Advance was laid out.

...Why is the D-pad always on the left on all of the controllers/handhelds anyhow, and the buttons on the right? After all, they're aimed mainly at the right-handed people, right?

nosioptar3• 2 months ago

The story I heard was that early arcade games had the joystick on the right, and switched to the left to make it a bit harder so they'd make more money.

Another reason I prefer wasd is I mainly use laptops, they always have tiny arrow keys.

nrightnour• 2 months ago

Cool but any chance of audio? That's half of the experience.

Weetile3• 2 months ago

Working on an audio port at https://github.com/ottohg/pokeemerald-wasm, and I've gotten pretty far. It's working, but there are just accuracy and instrument issues that need to be sorted out before it's in a playable state.

Weetile3• 2 months ago

Working on a fork that has audio. If anyone wants to have Claude continue it, be my guest!

https://github.com/ottohg/pokeemerald-wasm

LoganDark• 2 months ago

Seems the game does not pick up my A press if I release and then re-press it again quickly. There are multiple frames between my release and re-press, so I have no idea why this is -- maybe something is interpreting key repeats instead of using raw keyup/keydown events?

shepherdjerred• 2 months ago

This is beautiful!

I had a project 'discord plays pokemon' written in TypeScript that allowed users to play Pokemon together.

The architecture was a GPU accelerated Docker container running a full browser and desktop environment.

With this it can all be done in-process. I threw Claude at the problem and it worked!

https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package...

villgax• 2 months ago

Awesome! Now to run on my ESP33

htshnr• 2 months ago

Nice! FYI: It currently freezes if you attempt to go to your Pokemon from the menu, and also when your starter evolves at level 16, making it unplayable further.

banyek• 2 months ago

omg, this is so good. My son keep asking me to buy it somewhere, and now he play it.

weezing• 2 months ago

This has no sound and is horribly bugged. Just get him a proper ROM on his phone or wherever.

ironbound4• 2 months ago

Found the Original decompiled project

https://github.com/rh-hideout/pokeemerald-expansion/blob/mas...

ironbound4• 2 months ago

OP says they used GPT 5.5 to make this? But existing project

https://x.com/skewbed/status/2063217866233479587

jxmorris12• 2 months ago

For some reason I can't get past the start page; I press all the buttons but nothing happens. Rats.

Frannky2• 2 months ago

Fun and pleasant. Speed up removes the chore feeling. I get bugs that make me loose the progress :(

Frannky2• 2 months ago

pokeemerald.wasm.RunAnimScriptCommand@https://pokeemerald.com/web/app.js line 723 > WebAssembly.compile:wasm-function[1318]:0x18836f pokeemerald.wasm.OpponentDoMoveAnimation@https://pokeemerald.com/web/app.js line 723 > WebAssembly.compile:wasm-function[1611]:0x19cdc7 pokeemerald.wasm.BattleMainCB1@https://pokeemerald.com/web/app.js line 723 > WebAssembly.compile:wasm-function[2548]:0x1eee63 pokeemerald.wasm.WasmRunFrame@https://pokeemerald.com/web/app.js line 723 > WebAssembly.compile:wasm-function[7320]:0x30d5f3 runFrames@https://pokeemerald.com/web/app.js:763:22 runFramesForTick@https://pokeemerald.com/web/app.js:846:14 tick@https://pokeemerald.com/web/app.js:856:36

Pokemon Emerald Ported to WebAssembly (100k FPS)

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