A custom cart pairs an identity (title, shell colour, label art) with a base
game, a list of mods pinned to exact builds with their option values frozen,
a load order, and a seal. It ships no code of its own: every mod it names is
a separately published mod, which is what keeps a cart auditable before it
runs and reproducible after an author's repo disappears.
Format and storage:
- src/carts/CartManifest.lua parses and validates cart.json, canonicalises it
for hashing and reads/writes the .g1rcart bundle. The bundle is a data-only
serialised table read through SaveSerializer, so an imported cart can never
execute code. Canonical strings are length-prefixed because option keys and
values are author-controlled and could otherwise forge a record boundary and
collide two different carts onto one hash.
- Pins name a public source: a GitHub release with its sha256, a GameBanana
file id with its md5, or "local" for a capture that only exists on this
install. A local pin is unpublishable by construction, which is what makes
"build it here, publish later" possible without inventing a hash.
- Label art rides alongside the manifest rather than inside its identity, so
re-arting a cart does not tell every player their run is out of date.
src/core/Base64.lua decodes it; strict, with no whitespace tolerance.
Saves:
- Cart playthroughs live in the cart's own slot namespace (saves/cart_<id>/),
so a cart's file never sits beside a vanilla one and uninstalling a cart
never orphans a save. Every save records the cart build it was made under.
The seal:
- A sealed cart loads its pinned list, in its order, with its options, and
nothing else. A pinned mod with no frozen options gets an empty bucket so
unfrozen keys fall to schema defaults, identical for everyone; otherwise two
players on one cart quietly run different games.
- A sealed cart refuses to load when a pin is missing or installed at another
version. Playing a subset of the cart is the exact dishonesty the seal
exists to prevent, so the refusal loads nothing at all.
- Breaking the seal is permanent, marked per save slot, and downgrades that
playthrough to open behaviour. It cannot be cleared through any public API.
Launcher:
- A game's page carries a Custom Carts control and a picker; choosing a cart
turns the page into that cart's page, with its own cartridge, title and save
slots. The rail of five games never grows and a cart id never reaches
imp.tab or imp.panelVersion.
- Loader.planCart runs before boot so a refusal is visible on the page instead
of being discovered as an error after launch.
- Save as cart captures the enabled mods for a game and names, before the
player confirms, every mod that could only be pinned to this install and
whether the result can be shared at all.
Authoring:
- tools/cartkit.py scaffolds, validates, pins and packs a cart, and installs a
release workflow. Its writer is byte-identical to the engine's serialiser.
Crystal boots from a user-supplied ROM, imports a full cache and is playable:
copyright, the Crystal intro movie, the animated title, gender select, Oak,
and out into Johto. 122 of the cart's 169 script specials are implemented.
Import and data
- tools/make_crystal_manifest.py derives the manifest by importing
make_gold_manifest as a library, with three additive keyword seams. Gold and
Silver still regenerate byte-identical, which is the standing requirement for
touching that generator.
- crystal_symbol_deltas.py and crystal_movie_symbols.py carry the symbol delta:
Crystal renames the credits mons, splits the trainer card, Pokegear and
pack-pal blocks by gender, and replaces the intro and title outright.
- Crystal-only manifest keys: engineFlagOrder (162 flags to Gold's 93, so the
badge block sits one higher) and unownCharmap (the main charmap parser stops
at the first newcharmap so the two cannot contaminate each other).
Extractor
- RomExtractorGen2 becomes three-edition. Crystal corrections: PAL_MAP_BANK
0x13, a flat PICS_FIX pic bank, audio bank 0x5e, the mapSongs id-100 hole,
seven NPC trades, a TradeTexts stride of 8, the five Crystal tileset anim
steps with per-row degrade, and the column-major trainer card portraits.
- New: animated front sprites (frames, bitmasks, play and idle scripts), the
Battle Tower roster, Kris assets, Mobile System GB art, and the Crystal
intro and title via src/import/CrystalMovie.lua.
Engine
- GameVersion gains engine(id) and fixes(id). Gold and Silver keep their
original bugs where the bug is not hardware dependent; Crystal gets the fixes
Crystal shipped: Lucky Number boxes 10-14, surfing onto an NPC, and the
Reflect and Light Screen defence overflow.
- Crystal story: Suicune and Eusine, Celebi behind the GS Ball flag, the Ruins
of Alph chambers, Buena, the Move Tutor, the Poke Seer, and the Battle Tower
including the wInBattleTowerBattle badge-boost guard.
- Kris and the gender flag, animated fronts in battle and the summary screen,
and mon caught data.
Verification
- Every extracted asset is pixel-compared against pret's own source PNGs.
- Gold caches are byte-identical before and after, file for file.
- New Crystal suites plus a T2 Gen 2 tier; the full suite passes.
Silver: derived import manifest (tools/make_silver_manifest.py re-resolves
the Gold manifest's symbols from pokesilver.sym), silver GameVersion row,
generation-keyed extractor routing, required-files override, edition save
stamping (a Silver playthrough no longer writes into the Gold save),
checkver-driven edition data, SILVER/KAMON/OSCAR/MAX presets, GOLD rival
default, edition credits banner, Lugia title screen (OAM layouts, bob,
trail, palettes as title.lua data keys with Gold defaults so old caches
need no re-import), packaging for every build target, docs, and tests.
Launcher: the installed-mods list is one continuous scroll (rows culled to
the viewport) instead of a pager with an inner scroll viewport; the pad
cursor's edge-scroll no longer runs it to the bottom. The game dropdown
shows just the initial and caret. Find-tab behavior unchanged.
Title tempo: a sprite-anim frame shows duration+1 ticks
(engine/sprite_anims/core.asm GetSpriteAnimFrame), which locks both
editions' 64-tick wing beat to the 64-tick sine bob; the title screens no
longer run fast and out of phase.
The launcher spent ~9ms per frame building and drawing, and the Find Mods
tab could hang the window for minutes. Both had the same root cause: a
retained UI tree rebuilt every frame, and blocking curl calls made from the
draw path.
Replace the vendored FlexLove engine (28.5k lines) with src/ui/kit/ (Kit,
Theme, Layout, Loader). The kit caches Text objects and all measurement,
allocates nothing in the steady state, and draws flat. Build+draw is now
under 1ms at every window size and on every tab (POKEPORT_LAUNCHER_PROF).
Move every network call off the render thread onto a love.thread pool
(src/net/Fetch.lua): mod index fetches, per-mod release checks, find-tab
stats, thumbnails and mod installs. Mod indexes prewarm at boot so the
Find Mods tab is populated before it is opened.
Paginate every list -- mods, find, save slots, settings, release notes,
versions -- with the page size derived from the real viewport height, so a
500-mod index costs what a 10-mod one does. Scrolling is gone.
Anything that waits now raises a non-dismissable loader; per-row background
work shows an inline spinner instead. The in-app updater moves to the top
right beside the settings gear and pulses when an update is waiting.
Theme is black with white outlines, no gradients or glows, and solid
colour-coded embossed buttons with bold labels. The game tabs keep their
cartridge colours. Everything is 1.3x larger. The save editor shares the
theme, and adding an item there is now a searchable pop-up like adding a
Pokemon.
Also:
- Reset rebinds, in Settings and under Touch Controls. Rebinds are additive
(Input:applyBindings layers them over the defaults), so there was no
in-game way to undo one.
- Launch options: --game red [--slot N] / POKEPORT_GAME boots straight into
a game for shortcuts and frontends, falling back to that game's tab when
its ROM is not imported.
Fixes found while porting:
- Ellipsis and letterspacing truncated bytes, not codepoints, so a
multi-byte mod name crashed the first frame on a Japanese index.
Measurement no longer throws on malformed input either.
- The new font set missed UiFont's kana fallback, rendering translated
builds as tofu.
- Fetch workers idle in Channel:demand() and LOVE waits for live threads at
exit, so the process outlived the window; quitting mid-download also
waited on curl's 300s ceiling. Shut the pool down in love.quit and bound
its transfer timeouts.
- In one column the save-slot card drew below the fold, over the footer,
with no scrollbar left to reach it.
The two FlexLove engine tests guarded a scroll manager and an auto-height
propagation bug that no longer exist; replace them with a kit suite covering
page bounds, viewport sizing and UTF-8 truncation, and retarget the NX test
to assert the dependency is gone rather than that its perf guards are set.
* Resolve Find Mods stats from each mod's GitHub repo when the feed lacks them
A FIND MODS row now shows download/date stats even when its feed publishes
none: the row fetches the mod's own GitHub releases through the same
cached ModUpdate.fetchReleases the MODS tab uses (six-hour options cache,
so an installed mod's repo is instant). Feed-published stats still win
when present; otherwise one repo is fetched per frame -- the thumbnail
budget pattern -- so opening the tab never stalls for the whole listing.
ModUpdate.statsForReleases is the shared resolver.
* Fix crash opening the Find Mods tab: rename the stats cache field
The resolver stored results in self._findStats, which collides with the
method of the same name: self._findStats resolves through the metatable to
the function, so the or {} guard never fired and indexing it crashed the
launcher the moment the panel built. State now lives in _findStatsCache.
* Fix Find Mods crash: require ModUpdate in the find panel
buildFindPanel called ModUpdate.statsLine without a local require --
only buildModsPanel had one -- so opening the tab indexed a nil global.
* Retry Find Mods stats after failed repo fetches
A failed repo fetch (hourly GitHub API rate limit, transient network error)
was memoized as resolved, so a rate-limited first visit left those rows
empty for the whole session. Failures now schedule a 60s retry; a 404 is
still permanent so a renamed or vanished repo is fetched once.
* Add the MODS tab sort options to the Find Mods tab
lets a translation keep chosen characters on the rom tiles instead of the ttf.
needed for japanese: sizing the font for kana makes latin narrower, which
knocks the party menu numbers out of line.
A mod index can now publish three optional per-entry fields -- downloads
(total across every release), first_release and last_release (ISO days) --
which the FIND MODS listing shows in the same gold line the MODS tab uses.
The fields are additive by design: feeds that carry them stay readable by
every build that predates them (schema_version stays 1), and feeds that do
not render exactly as before. ModUpdate.statsLine builds the shared line;
the MODS tab reuses it. Parser, formatting, and parse coverage are tested.
Introduce an OPTIONS -> PERFORMANCE setting that scales the port's
optional presentation extras down for weaker hardware, so older/lower-end
devices can run the game smoothly.
The tier governs the three heaviest non-faithful extras -- the 3D TILT,
the GBC FX post-process shader, and survey ZOOM (which renders connected
neighbor maps) -- plus a hard FPS ceiling. It never touches game logic,
which is fixed-step off dt, so every tier plays identically.
- src/core/Performance.lua: tiers (auto/high/balanced/low), a conservative
device auto-detect (ARM handhelds -> low, phones -> balanced, normal
desktops -> high), per-tier caps, and the option-row cycle. Zero
requires, like GameVersion.
- Game:applyOptions clamps the *live* presentation state against the tier
without rewriting stored options, so a lower tier hides the player's
TILT/GBC FX/ZOOM/FPS choices and a higher tier restores them exactly.
- Zoom.offsetRange floors the range at FIT when survey is disallowed, so
the option row, hotkey, and mouse wheel all stop at close-up on LOW.
- New save.options.performance default "auto"; OPTIONS row heads the
display group and re-applies live.
- Tests: tests/engine/performance_tiers.lua (ROM-free); mod_ui_tests row
golden updated for the spliced row.
AUTO resolves to HIGH on a normal desktop and on every options.lua that
predates the option, so the common case is unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q6bFAiQyZ5jDmewsbB4LG9
bryanthaboi
Shane McGovern
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