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.
A fixed cutoff (e.g. "<=200 is ink") only makes sense for sprites with a light background to split against; a mostly-opaque 16x16 icon has almost no pixel above that cutoff, so every such icon collapsed onto the same "all ink" hash and was flagged as a near-duplicate of anything else that also collapsed -- which was most of them, boulder.png included. Thresholding against the image's own mean keeps the split meaningful (and roughly balanced) no matter how light or dark the source is.
subprocess.run(..., capture_output=True, text=True) with no explicit
encoding falls back to locale.getpreferredencoding(False) -- the OS
default codepage. On Windows that's a legacy single-byte codepage
(e.g. cp1252), never UTF-8. When the LuaJIT dump contains a byte with
no mapping in that codepage, subprocess's internal _readerthread
crashes with an uncaught UnicodeDecodeError in a background thread; the
thread dies silently and the caller gets back stdout=None instead of a
string, crashing one line later with
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'splitlines'.
Concretely, the Yellow-side imported dataset contains:
"_ColosseumHeightText" -> "...6’8” tall!"
The right double quotation mark (U+201D) encodes in UTF-8 as E2 80 9D;
0x9D has no defined character in cp1252, so decoding as cp1252 fails
outright. Verified against the real imported dataset: the Red/Blue-only
dump has zero bytes outside cp1252's defined range; the Yellow dump has
exactly one, at this row.
UTF-8 is the actual encoding these dumps are produced in -- the driver
Lua sources are read/written as UTF-8 throughout this file, and LuaJIT
writes those source strings' bytes back out verbatim -- so passing
encoding="utf-8" explicitly at the three affected call sites
(run_loader, check_data_dump, dump_dataset) is a no-op on platforms
whose default codepage is already UTF-8 (Linux/macOS) and a correctness
fix on Windows.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This fixes the nil value returned when running validate or pack on Fedora 43. Since Love isn't running, luajit calls on an empty table. Providing a stub table resolves the nil error.
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