Pokemon Crystal Advance Redux ROM

Pokemon Crystal Advance Redux is a GBA ROM Hack by Arnie on Pokemon Fire Red in English. It was last updated on October 25, 2026.

Also, be sure to check out Pokemon Stone Dragon 2.

Description

Pokemon Crystal Advance Redux is a continuation/alternate version of Pokemon Crystal Advance. This hack is the culmination of everything that has been created within the binary FireRed hacking community. Using HexManiacAdvance as the tool of choice, with a shedload of custom machine code modifications.

Features

• The Complete Experience: This game can be played from start to finish, from picking your Pokémon to beating Red. Aside from some other features and additions I am currently working on, it is fully enjoyable
• Character Choice: You are able to select between 9 different characters to play the game with. Each protagonist from the first 4 generations of mainline games, both male and female. Plus a bonus option where you can play as Ash Ketchum.
• GBA Compatibility: This game is regularly tested on real GBA hardware to ensure that it works correctly for those of you (and myself) who occasionally like to play it as authentically as possible.
• Day, Night, Seasons: The environment will change depending on what time of day/month it is, to keep things fresh. The DNS has seen some improvements since this initial post. The game now has a fully implemented night lighting system.
• High Quality Arenas: I have worked hard to create a multitude of battle backgrounds, some modified from existing public works, some of my own creation. Static Legendary encounters have more gravitas by having their own unique battle background, as well as many more. Outdoor backgrounds also change based on time of day, and what season you are playing in.
• Battle system speed improvemets: Scroll-in animations removed for all trainers and wild pokemon, wait time between actions have been vastly shortened, dialogue loads quicker. All adds up to a far better than stock experience, even on real GBA hardware.
• Type chart improvements: Includes the addition of the Fairy Type. This change also affects Goldenrod Gym which in-turn has become a dual Normal/Fairy type Gym. This includes most Fairy type moves from gen 6 and the inclusion of Sylveon as an Eeveelution.
• Pokémon Migration: Creatures from the 3rd and 4th generations are a-plenty here, as well as regional variants and evolutions of Gen 1-4 Pokémon from newer Generations. Want to do a solo run with Dudunsparce? Now you can! In total there are 553 Pokémon visible in the Pokédex, with more obtainable via the Form Changer.
• Learn-set improvements: All Pokémon have had moveset improvements, largely based on moves obtained within other vanilla Pokémon games, a few have been…more creative…And have added moves based on moves obtainable through other Pokémon franchise games (Wobuffet obtains Psywave and Rock Smash based on moves used in the mystery dungeon games and TCG, for example) – This was heavily inspired by Drayano’s hacks, of which I am a huge fan of
• Item availability improvements: Gone are the days where you have to wait 16 hours just to obtain some Leppa Berries; Ethers and Elixirs are obtainable within the Dept Stores and Pokémon League. Poéballs are cheaper to buy, PP Ups are purchasable from Dept Stores, Vitamins are cheaper to buy. All Wild Pokémon have had their item tables improved upon. Evolution items are attainable this way, However they are also purchasable. Additionally, the Gen 6 version of the EXP All system is included as a key item for you to collect, being ablke to enable/disable it at will.
• Stat EXP system: The EV training system has been tweaked to recreate the old Gen1/2 Stat system, whereby you can get max EVs in every stat, not just the current maximum of 2. This can be achieved either through Vitamin use or pure battling, it does not matter. the Power items are also available for direct EV training regardless of encounter.
• New/Reinstated areas: Areas that were available in Pokémon Liquid Crystal have returned, meaning extra places to explore. More to come on these in the future. Sadly the Orange Islands from Pokemon Liquid Crystal have been removed in their entirety.
• New TMs and Move Tutors: Some old, less useful TMs have been replace with more useful ones. Say hello to Avalanche, Play Rough, Drain Punch, Drain Kiss and Dive. Every Gym also has a learnable Tutor move via the Champ Guy upon completion
• New Items: Gen 6 EXP share? Check! Portable PC? Check! Nature Mints and Ability Pills? Check! An item that allows for HM-less travel? Check! Items that allow you to max out your IVs and EVs? Check too! (The last 2 are late game unlocks…)
• Higher level Curve: trainers will be slightly harder vs the vanilla games, with expanded teams. By the time you get to the elite four, trainer levels will be on average 10 higher than vanilla Crystal, and 20 by the end of the game. Kanto has been re-blanced to actually be fun to do battles in, and not feel like a chore.
• Double the trouble: Quite a few trainers are now double battles. Every Gym Leader is a double battle
• Obedience system changes: Happiness now affects all Pokémon in multiple ways. Happiness being too low? Good luck using it reliably as they will disobey. A high happiness will give you bonus EXP in battles.
• Placement differences: There will be some things that are still the same but in slightly different areas. I will leave these to be discovered.
• Evolution Changes: I have turned most single use held items into assistive evolution items. Pokémon that required trading now simply need to hold one of these associative held items and level up in battle. Eevee is now a purely stone evolving Pokémon, for example
• Higher Quality Audio samples: You may notice that Pokémon sound different, a bit more realistic? This is because I painstakingly ripped and recreated the sounds used in Pokémon Stadium 2 and inserted them into this ROM. Gen 3 and 4 Pokémon use their Gen 6 modulated sounds. These are encoded in a higher bitrate than standard also to give a more immersive experience. IDK about you but I was not a fan of the old square wave audio.
• Increased Shiny Odds: Gone are the days of you searching for 84 years just to get a rattata. Shiny odds are 1/256. Furthermore within Celadon Game Corner there is a machine that will generate a random Shiny Encounter for you to catch (this costs quite a few coins, mind)
• Fully Implemented Dive System: A complete implementation of Dive, fully scripted (no ASM/C# injection involved)
• Fully Functional GB Player: Remember when the GB Player in Liquid Crystal played a bunch of sounds with missing channels? Pepperidge Farm remembers; and so do I. Which is why I re-coded an entire section of the music bank handler, and then went through and remastered most of the music in the game. As of 18/4/24 (or 4/18/24 for those across the pond) every single GBA track in the game except for 2 has an accompanying GB audio variant – even then that is soon to change.
• Following Pokemon: Yeah you read that right; EVERY single Pokémon in this hack can now follow you around in the overworld. This could possibly be the first Vanilla Binary hack to get this done, but it is here in full, alongside specific special interactions with them. These are all custom drawn full 3 frame (still based on the original HGSS ones) follower sprites, so motion is as fluid as the player movement.
• Player Bedroom Decorations: Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal allowed you to decorate your bedroom with various ornaments and things. I have recreated that experience here, with over 130 different items to purchase and unlock throughout the game.
• Hidden Grottos: The feature that debuted in Gen 5 is also here, thanks to the engine powering the following pokémon system.
• Basic Tweaking: This game now features a fleshed out Level Cap system with multiple difficulty options to choose from, soft Nuzlocke mode (it is nothing more than blocking pokemon capture after catching one in a route).
• Fully Functional PokéRadio: This game has a radio that allows you to play music from multiple regions, and also recreates the interaction with Snorlax in Kanto.
• And Many, many More…

Changelog

25-10-26

• Fixed battle background issue on a specific tile inside Seafoam Islands
• Fixed incorrect layer type on a specific spot causing you to render underneath Groudon’s shadow
• Fixed issue whereupon the game would crash if you loaded into a save then immediately used the bed in the player room.
• Fixed several instances of the game freezing when backing out of adding decorations
• Another 40 Gen 4 cries have been re-imported using the DPCM compression, reclaiming about 220kb space overall; I only have 41 left so hopefully the next stint will finish them.
• Fixed incorrect instrument sample used on the title screen theme (normal)
• Fixed issue where EV IV page was ignoring the theme change
• Fixed issue where DNS evening/night loaded over the start menu and other areas
• fixed issue where scrolling down items in the TM Case/Berry Pouch/Tech Disk Box loaded the light theme text.
• Fixed issue where the battle transition was overwriting the DNS system
• AI Assisted New Battle UI: Now you will be able to select a more “modern” battle UI style, When set to Modern in the options, the fight/bag etc and the move selection buttons will appear in the HGSS style.
• Fixed issue with the double pot plant message
• Interacting with the small dolls before unlocking the decoration system should now correctly terminate the script before loading the menu
• The Ghost can no longer be caught
• Fixed palette issue with last used ball L button
• HP colours have been corrected in battle, as it should be
• The shadow from where the Pokéball spawns in when putting the Pokémon away inside the Pokémon Centre now also disappears corectly
• Fixed interaction issue with the poliwrath in Celadon City
• Fixed Apricorn icon colours
• Fixed issue whereupon using the Wonder Trade with 6 Pokémon in the party would send the traded Pokémon to the PC
• Fixed typo on Falkner
• AI assisted The ability popup timing has been fixed, you should no longer have activations after text for many abilities
• The Hall of fame text has been corrected when using dark themes
• Selling items window now adheres to the theme setting
• AI Assisted Fixed issue with Large followers that caused performance slowdown because of the way the DNS system was being handled.
• Fixed text on the party screen field move descriptions
• Fixed border block in Blackthorn Gym
• Fixed warp on the right hand fuchsia gatehouse. That one was my bad…
• Fixed typo on Pryce rematch script
• Decapped several instances related to Heal Block battle text.
• Fixed typo on Prof. Oak script.
• In the classic battle UI, the Start button now switches between the move type and the power, instead of Select. This fixes a conflict with the move switching mechanic.
• Fixed issue where the Competitive and Defiant abilities could load garbage data and cause an OOM error, crashing the game

24-10-26

23-10-26

• AI Assisted Rewrote algorithm that loaded the status icons in battles, fixing a weird bit shifting issue that happens if both you and the opponent have the same status.
• Fixed Celadon City Rocket poster
• Fixed issue whereupon the Tech Disk box would cause issues and crash if you had more than 44 of them stored. this was because I used the Berry Pouch as a template to make the Tech Disk box, and it had a 44 item storage limit for the text display.
• AI Assisted Stolen items from battle now automatically get sent to your Bag
• The bag now has the ability to be sorted by A-Z and Z-A via pressing Start
• Flaaffy’s icon has been fixed
• spawns added for ember spa
• spawns added for mt ember surface area
• AI Assisted You are now able to unlock a 4 item register system. The default is a single item with the Select Key. Lyra will give you the ability to register up to 4 items during your interactions with her, Existing users just need to walk through the same point on Route 37 where you would encounter Lyra to on the main story.
• The PokéRadio should no longer have flipped text colours when Dark theme is enabled
• Several ladders inside Cerulean Cave have been moved to fix wall blocking issues,
• Gold and Silver caps are now purchasable from Celadon Prize corner for 12500 coins each. They are very expensive but at least obtainable earlier.
• Found hidden code that was inactive within the Roulette game code. The table in Celadon City now allows you to bet 3x the wager of the one in Johto. Additionally, it offers “Special rate” bonuses on Saturday and Sunday that costs 2x coins to play but prizes are larger.
• The Wonder Trade system has been improved. It now plays the ingame trade sequence and the Pokémon even shows as having been gotten from a trade. Additionally, Wonder Trades have a 1/128 chance of being shiny now.
• New feature AI Assisted – Tag battles: There would be instances where you would normally have gone into a double battle with a partner and 2 foes (Lance in Mahogany being the most obvious one missing). Now I will be able to do that. The Lance battle inside Mahogany hideout is now a Tag Battle. Claude helped to extract the feature from the CFRU code.
• Fixed minor tile issue in Olivine CIty
• AI Assisted Move expansion: I now internally have the ability to add up to 1023 moves, up from 511 that was the original FireRed limitation. Nothing has changed right now, but what that means for the future is that I will be able to add the unique evolution moves of the Gen 7+ evolutions and legendaries that are missing signature attacks, among other things
• AI Assisted Fixed FireRed game engine bug where a Pokémon with more than 10 Egg moves can cause a buffer overflow and overwrite the players name when an Egg is collected from the daycare (because the players name was stored directly after the egg move list code), mostly because FireRed had a copy limit of 256 instead of 10, for some reason
• Fixed issue where I was accidentally using Saveblock RAM for the Tech Disk Box that was also being used by Box 6 in the PC.
• AI Assisted PC Box Expansion: You better believe it. 6 more PC boxes were added to the game, after a several hour session of analyzing, data moving and compression. Saving takes a little longer because of this change as more data is being written – Keep this in mind!
• AI Assisted Ruins puzzle RAM leak has been fixed, and was found during the saveblock analyzis. The ruins puzzles had a chance to overwrite basically everything in the save block that handled flag data, pokedex data and other important things. It now no longer does this
• The Tech Disk box should no longer have Berry pouches exit mesage
• Fixed a scenario in which the game could crash if you opened the tech disk box, but it was random…
• Tech disk descriptions have been corrected. I forgot to take into account that the berry pouch UI only had 2 lines for text
• Fixed mapping error in Bill’s house
• Fixed issue whereupon Ho-Oh would not appear until after the E4 was beaten, and not before