Houkago Game Time

Pokemon HGSS Time

Comment

Ho-oh and Lugia by ぽち

A few of us are going to play HG/SS.

After beating Red (and completing the national dex if you want, I’m going to), we’re going to do some wifi battles.

SOME RULES YO:

• A soft level cap of 70. That doesn’t mean you have to grind everything to 70, but don’t let any of your Pokemon that you plan to wifi battle with reach over 70.
• All of the standard clauses
• Only allowed tiers UU and lower. See a tier list here. Remember, HG/SS is GenIV rules with GenII pokemon, so when browsing Smogon, keep the tab on “D/P”.
  • Also, you can use OU/Uber in your single player stuff if you want, but it’s probably best to only really use UU and lower stuff so that you can level them.
• No items, duh. (Except for Pokemon hold items, of course).
• Keep your run legit, no hax or pokesav. We can have fun with random hax team afterwards if we feel like it.
  • You can use save states.
    • Beware, save states can cause battle crashes and instability. It’s best not to save state and just use the battery file, lest you like frustration.
  • Also, speeding up the game / frameskipping is perfectly fine.
    • Warning: Shit crashes a lot when toggling speed up, so you had better quick save state to different slots often otherwise you’re gonna be pissed off regularly. Moving too quickly will also cause regular tweaking. You’ll also often freeze the emulator or blackscreen if you have FPS cap off. Honestly I think playing in 1x is better for your sanity overall.
• You can EV train if you want, but I’m willing to bet none of us will bother!
• You can adjust your DS clock as much as you want for day/night and date changes.
• You can play whatever version you want. I’m playing SS (J) and Javad is playing HG (U) so we already have at least 1 of each, so you can just play whatever. You can see the Pokemon differences here, other than that everything is pretty much identical.

Emulator Stuff

important update: According to DrMason, who has actually spent some time playing now, apparently the wifi version of DeSmuME below is sort of buggy and crashes a fair bit. It’s more stable in the official build (non-wifi) 0.9.9, which is available here: download page. The saves for both versions of the emulator are fully compatible, so it’s a good idea to play your single player on 0.9.9 and just move to wifi version to trade/battle with each other.

The emulator of choice for Pokemon is DeSmuME. There’s a version of this emulator that can do emu -> ds/emu wifi play. Check out this forum post, it has everything you need. HG/SS has cross region play so you can play in japanese or english, it doesn’t matter.

DeSmuME works pretty well with Pokemon out of the box. There’s some black snow artifacting in terrain though, you can minimize this by switching the 3D renderer to OpenGL (it doesn’t fully fix it by any means), but the Soft Rasterizer renderer looks a bit better for basically everything else. Unfortunately, these artifacts can’t be fixed. No$gba doesn’t suffer the same problem, so if it really bugs you, you can play in No$gba (enjoy finding all the AP action relay codes) then convert the save over to DS or DeSmuME for the wi-fi battles.

Another quirk is sprite glitch. You might turn into a black shadow or a big block when you load into the overworld. If this happens, don’t worry about it, it’s common. It will go away on the next load to overworld, so just switch areas. Reloading the game often works too. Despite these quirks, DeSmuME is stable enough at 1x speed that it’s what speedrunners use for HG/SS.

For Magnification Filter, I did some out-of-battle comparisons that i’m too lazy to post and HQ2xS is the best looking one to me. I just play in normal at 1.5x with horizontal screens though, because even HQ2xS is a bit too smooth for me. Of course, DeSmuME has gamepad support and you can bind buttons to quick screencaps / framerate increases. Sound is sort of weird in the DS firmware, but don’t spend time trying to fix it because it’s fine in-game.

Fraps doesn’t hook onto DeSmuME though, but from what I can tell the internal recorder is actually usable, so whatever I guess. Fair warning: I’ve had it crash on me when I start AVI recordings, so save state before starting a recording.

Useful websites:
smogon
bulbapedia

ok fools be prepared to get destroyed by my omastar