Pokémon Emerald Is Getting A Demake For The GAME BOY Color

We have all thought about this day, right? What if they crammed one of the best Pokémon games ever made onto one of the best GAME BOY consoles ever made? This was once impossible to do thanks to hardware restrictions, but we're in the boom of AI-assisted ports, demakes and ROM hacks, so it was only a matter of time before someone (and their AI buddy) was crazy enough to take a jab at it.

This week, Pokémon Emerald Color was announced, a demake of Pokémon Emerald that takes the Pokémon Crystal game and converts it as closely as possible to Emerald's storyline, mechanics and overall style, but with the graphical limitations of the Game Boy Colour, developed by davidpwalter on X.

If you ever wondered what it would be like to fight Rayquazza on Sky Pillar with GBC graphics, or seeing your favourite Gen-3 Pokémon on the GBC, heck even creating your own physical Pokemon Emerald GAME BOY Colour cart, then you're in luck, because it's being made possible sooner than you think.

The public beta will go live later this week, requiring your copies of both Pokémon Emerald and Pokémon Crystal in order to decompile them both on your own computer and to create the new Pokémon Emerald Colour ROM, which can be used on PC, on your emulator or even on your own GAME BOY Color/Advance using a flash cart.

There's still a lot of visual polishing left to do, alongside fixing some frame rate drops in certain areas of the game to make it run as smoothly as possible on original hardware; it's likely your emulators may be able to push beyond them, but the GBC may struggle physically, for now. I love seeing mad creations like this, and now my wonder of how Emerald would look on a GBC has now come true. I look forward to downloading this unofficial fan port via the official website sometime this week.

This demake is likely AI-assisted using ShinyGen AI, though we do not have confirmation of that from the developer as of now.