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 18, 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

18-10-26

• AI Assisted Protosynthesis ability has been added
• Modified font system further so that Protosynthesis word would render properly
• AI Assisted Ability Popups: This game now shows a popup when an ability is triggered. I was going to port CFRU’s code but failed again, then got fed up and threw it at claude. It actually just hooked the system through the vanilla “recordabilitybattle” function – which actually works better for me because I have quite a few abilities that I wrote by hand using battle scripts, and the “jumpifability” command also calls the function that was edited. So this works out better for me in the future if I need to write any more. This can also be disabled in the options menu if so desired (on by default)
• The title screen theme tune has been corrected. It was using the Pokémon Gold/Silver version before. I remade the bars leading up to the main melody to match what Pokémon Crystal’s is
• New Game corner game: AI Assisted Voltorb Flip: Claude aided in the porting of this game from the Emerald game corner expansion only. I still had to fix some bugs in the code that was present from the github repo itself…But it is working now! You will be able to use the blue slot machine in both game corners to play Voltorb Flip, just like in HGSS.
• Fixed issue whereupon the addition of the dynamic shadows overwrote a function that called the screen wipe effects – which broke several transitions.
• New game corner game: AI Assisted Tetris: While Claude aided in the porting process (mostly translating NES specific ASM into GBA compatible code) and hooking it up to a coin generator, the original code is based on the open source NESTris, with assets made by myself and sounds recreated based on the original Gameboy Tetris, also made by myself. It is the classic marathon mode with more modern features such as hard drop and showing the ghost piece. Available to play from the green machine in Celadon Game Corner
• Shiny eggs will now play the hatch animation with the correct Egg colour. This was not a bug in the traditional sense. Since eggs by default have the same palette for both shiny and non shiny eggs. I just added a branch in the egg hatch sequence to check for a specific variable at a specific value (the same one that forces things to be shiny) and have it load the shiny egg colours instead.
• Egg hatching via walking is now physically impossible. Before it used to be possible to but just take a long time. I modified the check to always return “No”
• Apparently Meowth’s cry was glitched, just fixed it
• The Date change menu now also shows the Year. I completely forgot about that until I went to test on my GBA and realised my mistake, This is all purely so that in 2028 for example, those starting on the 29th of February wont get screwed over…
• Reimported close to 300 Pokémon Cries. Using the DPCM compression method, saving a whole truckload of space, I would estimate over 1MB so far…
• The title screen now scrolls in from left and right just like the original Pokémon Crystal one does.

17-10-26

16-10-26

• Fixed game engine bug I hastily worked around a few weeks ago. For a brief moment the screen would flash before going into a building while it is raining. The original dirty hack was to skip the fadescreen palette write to the OAM, because by default in FireRed it would not clear, and would eventually cause your screen to go completely black.
• The Berserk ability should now work correctly, or to the best it can in a Gen 3 hack, anyway…
• EXP All usage will now truncate non-active Pokémon EXP gain to a single generic message. Active Pokémon and Pokémon holding the EXP Share will still announce their gain. This code was taken from Ender Steves Gen 6 EXP gain system.
• AI Assisted Dynamic Overworld shadows have been added. I have been sitting on this code for a year too. The original Dev couldn’t fix the problem it had when interacting with the dynamic OW palette system (the function that allows me to colour the following pokemon properly without the game pooping itself). Turns out It was incorrectly overwriting the function for “Fieldeff_shadow”.
• Fixed issue whereupon the Posters would not update properly when set.
• You are now able to set the Day/Month when you set the Time. This can only be done once! New save files that do not detect RTC will be prompted to do so before the intro sequence takes its course. Existing saves with incorrect date/time can use the bedroom wall clock to set the date and time, again the date only being able to be set once.
• Fixed a couple of instances where the player could get locked into an animation frame during locked scripted sequences
• Fixed issue that I caused that broke the catch tutorial
• AI Assisted Fixed issue whereupon the battle window would wipe the Day/Night filters and weather inside the catch tutorial. This was due to the palette overwriting the wrong object (for some reason the player HP bar – which because that disappears after the Poké Ball is picked from the bag, it also wiped the other stuff)
• Fixed typo on “Confirm” button on the “set date” window.