gen1recomp/docs/new-features.md

New features (deliberate additions beyond the original)

Intentional enhancements this port adds on top of faithful Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow behavior. They have no Game Boy equivalent and are kept by design. Genuine divergences from the original (things still missing, wrong, or approximated) live in docs/known-differences.md; faithfully-ported behavior is in docs/behavior-porting-notes.md.

Survey zoom

The mouse wheel (or -/=), the Options ZOOM row, or hotkey 4 zooms the overworld between 1 pixel per world pixel (full survey) and 2× the window fit scale (close-up), in crisp integer steps. This has no Game Boy equivalent:

• Connected maps render their full bodies, and their NPCs appear as visual-only "ghosts", they wander but have no sight lines, triggers, dialogue, or collision until the map is actually entered.
• Menus, text boxes, and battles draw at normal scale on top of the zoomed world. Zoom input is ignored while a script, menu, or battle is active; the zoom offset is persisted as save.options.zoom (default 0 = FIT) and survives New Game via options.lua.
• Hotkey 4 ticks through every integer zoom level (survey → FIT → close-up → wrap). The Options row shows FIT / OUTn / INn.
• Beyond the border ring the void fill repeats indefinitely (see VOID FILL below); interiors keep their own border block. Each visible map area is colorized with its own SGB palette (the original recolored the whole screen per map).
• Neighbor maps load two connection hops out so corner-adjacent maps don't pop in and out, and ghost NPCs share instances with the real ones so their wander positions persist across seamless connection crossings (a warp or fresh map entry still respawns everything at its script position, like the original's per-entry sprite init).

VOID FILL

The Options VOID FILL row picks what paints the infinite beyond-edge space on OVERWORLD-tileset maps during survey zoom:

• TREES (default): solid tree wall block $0F.
• WATER: animated water tile $14 (same hshift cycle as on-map water).
• BLACK: solid black.

Other tilesets are unchanged (house/cave borders stay as authored). Persisted as save.options.voidFill.

Tilt mode

The 3 key (and the Options menu TILT row) cycles a visual-only perspective tilt of the overworld through OFF → 15° → 35° → 50° → OFF for an HD-2D / diorama look. Like survey zoom this is purely presentational and has no Game Boy equivalent:

• The entire map tilts as one rigid ground plane, paths, grass, water, floors, and every background-tile structure (buildings, trees, fences, signs; in Gen 1 these are baked into the tile layer, not sprites), so rows above the player recede and rows below come toward the viewer. Only things that actually stand on the ground draw as upright billboards, unscaled and pixel-identical to flat mode: the player, NPCs, item balls, and the standing FX attached to them (emote bubbles, the fishing rod, the FLY bird). The Poké Center heal-machine overlay stays on the ground plane with the machine tiles (it is OAM glued to a BG graphic, not a standing sprite). An earlier revision tried billboarding buildings/trees/signs too (cutting them out of the ground per hand-curated per-tileset tables); that chased an endless tail of special cases, dense tree canopy, fences fused into grass, building facades with their own baked-in fake perspective, because Gen 1's art was never drawn with a clean seam between ground and standing scenery. It wasn't merged; tilting everything but the characters as one plane is the simpler, shipped tradeoff (buildings recede/foreshorten with the ground like a photo of a diorama, rather than standing fully upright next to a full-height character).
• Cycling tweens the angle between levels over ~0.25s rather than snapping; with tilt fully off the world pass drops back onto the flat blit path, so flat rendering stays pixel-identical to tilt-off and off costs nothing.
• Tilt input is gated exactly like survey zoom, honored only while free-roaming, ignored while a script, menu, or battle is active, and it composes with survey zoom (the zoom scale feeds the projection). The tilt level is persisted in save.options.tilt (default OFF).
• It applies everywhere the overworld draws, interiors and caves included. Menus, text boxes, and battles render flat on top, unaffected, and the infinite beyond-the-border-ring fill stays flat by design.
• Collision, movement, sight lines, triggers, encounters, and scripts are untouched; nothing about the tilt reaches gameplay.

Colors mode

The 2 key (and the Options menu COLORS row) cycles the display mode through OG RED → SGB → ADVANCED → OG → OG INV → SGB INV → CLASSIC → OG RED (on Blue the first slot labels OG BLUE; on Yellow, OG YELLOW). The first three are the real colorizations; the rest are DMG-shade novelties:

• OG RED / OG BLUE: the Game Boy Color boot-ROM look for that cart -- one global BG palette + one OBJ palette, every map, no per-map variation (Red/Blue ship no CGB code, so on a GBC the boot ROM colors them globally). The player/NPCs keep the boot-ROM OBJ color over the terrain via the OBP bake + post-zone redraw (PaletteFX.GBC_BG / GBC_OBJ, or Blue's blue/pink pair).
• OG YELLOW (Yellow playthrough, same ogred save id): Pokemon Yellow's authentic GBC look from CGBBasePalettes (data/palettes_yellow.lua, sourced from pret/pokeyellow). Per-map / per-species colors, not a single boot-ROM ramp -- Yellow was CGB-enhanced.
• SGB (default): the per-map Super Game Boy region palettes (data/sgb/sgb_palettes.asm). Sprites tint with the region palette, as on real SGB. (This is the mode formerly mislabeled "GBC".)
• ADVANCED: pokered-gbc SuperPalettes -- real per-tile GBC coloring plus per-species mon colors (data/palettes_gbc.lua). (Formerly labeled "RED++"; it is the richest colorization rather than anything Red-specific.)
• OG: force the four DMG grays (colorization off).
• OG INV: inverted DMG grays.
• SGB INV: each SGB zone palette with shade order reversed.
• CLASSIC: original Game Boy pea-soup greens (#9BBC0F / #8BAC0F / #306230 / #0F380F).

The shade-remap transform is applied centrally in PaletteFX.sendColors, so it covers overworld, menus, battles, and tilt upright billboards. OG RED's global BG palette is supplied by OverworldState:overworldBgColors (per-map override in the overworld pass). Persisted as save.options.colors; the gbc / gbc_inv / redpp save ids are kept for back-compat under the new labels.

GBC FX

The 5 key (and the Options menu GBC FX row) cycles a "played on real unlit-GBC hardware" post-process through OFF → 1 → 2 → 3 → 4. The levels are a cumulative ladder:

• 1: reflective-screen backing transparency.
• 2: + LCD pixel grid.
• 3: + pixel drop shadows.
• 4: + sunlight glare and rainbow shimmer with a drifting light.

It runs as a final present pass after world + UI composite in Renderer:endFrame, inspired by the Pixel Transparency RetroArch shader (github.com/mattakins/Pixel_Transparency). Default OFF; persisted as save.options.gbcfx.

Mobile GPUs often compile the pass but present a black frame, so Android and iOS hide the row entirely, pin the level to OFF, and rewrite a level already persisted in options.lua (issue #136). POKEPORT_GBCFX overrides that decision either way, same tri-state as POKEPORT_TOUCH: =0 refuses the effect, =1 forces it available. The Anbernic handheld pack exports 0 from its launcher because the device reports "Linux" while its GPU is in the phone class (see Anbernic RG34XXSP).

Performance tier (low-end devices)

The Options PERFORMANCE row scales the port's optional presentation extras down for weaker hardware. The extras it governs are the three heaviest things the port adds on top of the original -- the whole-screen 3D TILT (transforms the entire map as a ground plane), the GBC FX post-process shader (a fullscreen pass), and survey ZOOM (zooming out renders the connected neighbor maps, a lot of extra overdraw) -- plus a hard FPS ceiling. None of this touches game logic, which is fixed-step off dt (src/core/FixedStep.lua), so every tier plays identically; they differ only in how much eye-candy the renderer is allowed to do.

Tier	TILT	GBC FX	Survey ZOOM	Extra FPS ceiling
HIGH	on	on	on	none
BALANCED	off	off	on	none
LOW	off	off	off	60
AUTO	picks a default from the device (below)

• AUTO (the default) reads the device once at boot: ARM Linux handhelds (e.g. the RG34XXSP) resolve to LOW, phones/tablets and very-low-core desktops to BALANCED, and everything else -- a normal desktop, and every existing options.lua that predates this option -- to HIGH, so the common case is unchanged. See src/core/Performance.detect.
• AUTO only chooses the default; all four tiers are selectable, so a wrong guess is one row away from being overridden.
• The clamps are applied live against your stored options and never rewrite them (Game:applyOptions), so a lower tier hides your TILT / GBC FX / ZOOM without forgetting them -- raising the tier restores exactly what you had. (This is why the TILT / GBC FX / ZOOM rows still show your saved choice on a clamped tier: it's your preference, waiting for a tier that can afford it.)
• Persisted as save.options.performance (auto | high | balanced | low); unit-tested in tests/engine/performance_tiers.lua.

Peer-to-peer link play (lua-enet)

Trades and link battles connect two copies of the game directly over lua-enet (ENet ships inside LÖVE, nothing to install, no server to run) on a reliable-ordered channel, replacing the original standalone Python room-code relay (tools/relay_server.py, deleted). HOST A GAME shows the host's LAN address (UDP 7777; POKEPORT_LINK_PORT overrides); JOIN A GAME enters it. Closing performs a graceful ENet disconnect so the final confirm/bye always lands; a vanished peer exits with "The link was broken." Internet play needs a forwarded UDP port or a VPN (deliberate tradeoff vs. the relay). Headless tests drive the protocol over an in-memory loopback (Net.loopbackPair); under LÖVE the same test file also exercises real UDP pairing.

Red, Blue, and Yellow copies link with each other, as the real cable does. The compatibility fingerprint hashes only data a link mode can actually read, so Yellow's Dragonair/Dragonite catch-rate retunes (the only R/B/Y link-surface difference) no longer read as different games (issue #511). Moving the fingerprint is a link parity change: builds from before this fix will refuse to pair with builds after it.

Fair play in link and online matches

A link session is decided by the battle and nothing else, so for its duration:

• Game speed is pinned to normal. The GAME SPEED option and POKEPORT_SPEED are ignored from the moment LINK PLAY opens until it closes, and apply again after. Fast-forward otherwise runs one peer's queue faster than the peer it is locked to and drains a tournament shot clock faster than the opponent racing it.
• Online play runs vanilla, except for your language. Picking ONLINE MATCH or TOURNAMENT with mods enabled offers to switch the gameplay ones off and relaunch (mods merge at boot, so a restart is the only way). The restart is confirmed, not silent. They stay listed as disabled, ready to switch back on. A mod that declares itself a translation and provably writes nothing but text stays on: the two games hash the same link surface, so a Spanish install and an English one can battle and trade, each reading the game in its own language and naming the other player's party out of its own text.
• Only a meaningful split ends a match. The per-turn state signature both peers exchange is split three ways: actives and bench carry species, HP, status, stat stages, PP and the rest of the party, and a divergence there ends the match as a draw. volatile carries per-turn flags both sides recompute anyway - a divergence there is logged and reported to mods, and play continues.

The relay logs which component diverged on which turn, so a desync report names something specific.

Custom boot text

The boot sequence replaces the Nintendo / GAME FREAK identifiers with "bois club" / "bryanthaboi", a deliberate branding customization. The rest of the boot beats (copyright splash, "presents" shooting-star, the Nidorino-vs-Gengar attract scene) mirror the original.

Custom Options

Options persist in a standalone options.lua (separate from the game progress save.lua), so audio/display/battle preferences survive New Game and aren't wiped when a save slot is cleared. Changing a row in the Options menu or cycling hotkeys 2/3/4/5 writes immediately; an in-game save also flushes the live options. Old saves that still embed an options table are migrated once into options.lua on load.

• Music / SFX volume
• PIKACHU VOL (0-7, Yellow only): trims Pikachu's PCM voice clips under the SFX level, so the follower's constant chatter, the title-screen cry and every in-battle "Pika!" can be pulled down (or muted at 0) without quieting the rest of the sound effects. The row is hidden on Red/Blue, which have no voice clips.
• Music Filter
• OG GLITCHES on / off (Gen 1 quirks vs. modern-clean battle rules)
• BATTLE LAYOUT (OG / WIDE); see "Widescreen battle layout" below
• COLORS (OG RED / SGB / ADVANCED / OG / OG INV / SGB INV / CLASSIC), also hotkey 2 (OG RED = GBC boot-ROM look; ADVANCED uses pokered-gbc SuperPalettes + per-species mon colors)
• TILT (OFF / 15 / 35 / 50), also hotkey 3 while free-roaming
• ZOOM (FIT / OUTn / INn), also hotkey 4 while free-roaming; wheel and -/= step one level and save
• VOID FILL (TREES / WATER / BLACK) for OVERWORLD beyond-edge space
• GBC FX (OFF / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4), also hotkey 5
• MAX FPS (30 / 40 / 50 / 60 / 75 / 90 / 100 / 120 / 144 / 160, default 60), a hard render frame-rate cap (save.options.fpsCap).

Battle transition cascade + white battle letterbox

Into-battle wipes still run the original eight styles inside the classic 160×144 letterbox. On wide/tall windows (survey zoom), matching black 8×8 blocks cascade outward from that square into the surrounding world so the void outside the OG wipe fills in lockstep. Once the battle state is up, letterbox voids around the battle canvas fill white instead of black so the whole window reads as one continuous battle screen.

Widescreen battle layout

Options BATTLE LAYOUT picks the battle screen's composition: OG (the default: the original 160×144 arrangement, unchanged) or WIDE, which gives battles a 304×144 native-pixel surface and a Gen 3-style arrangement on it:

• the foe's status box upper left, the foe's picture upper right;
• the player's picture lower left, the player's status box lower right, with a longer HP bar and the numeric HP under it;
• a full-width message window;
• a split "What will X do?" prompt / 2×2 command window;
• a 2×2 move menu, navigated with all four directions, with a PP and type panel attached to its right.

Only the composition changes. Pictures, palettes, HP-bar colors, font pages, window borders, sounds, animations, timing and every battle rule stay the engine's, so a COLORS mode or an asset mod still owns the look. Each side's picture keeps its original pixels and placement math and is composited into its own region of the wider battlefield -- nothing is scaled or squeezed -- and animations, which are authored in the original 160-pixel space, shift as one rigid group onto whichever side they play on. The whole screen is drawn at the window's integer fit scale for the wider surface, so a 304-pixel screen is drawn a step smaller than a 160-pixel one in the same window.

The wide surface is live only while the battle itself is the screen on top: a party menu, the bag or a nickname prompt is a 160×144 screen and brings the classic surface back with it.

On-screen touch controls (mobile)

On Android/iOS the game draws a translucent d-pad (bottom-left), A/B buttons (bottom-right, Game Boy diagonal), and +/- START/SELECT (bottom center) over the frame, using Xelu's CC0 controller prompts (assets/touch/). Real buttons, not gestures: press lands the frame the finger does, sliding on the d-pad changes direction without lifting, and multi-touch chords (e.g. hold a direction + tap B) work. The overlay only appears while no controller is being used: the first gamepad button or stick push hides it, the next screen touch brings it back, and unplugging the last controller restores it immediately. Layout re-derives from the window size on rotation. Desktop testing: POKEPORT_TOUCH=1 love . forces the overlay on and lets the mouse act as a finger (=0 forces it off).

The launcher's Touch Controls button opens a drag editor: move each button freely, resize the whole pad with -/+ (60% to 160%), Disable to hide the overlay permanently (for controllers / emulation handhelds -- distinct from the temporary gamepad auto-hide), Reset for defaults, Done to save into options.lua as normalized window fractions so a different screen keeps the relative placement.

Portrait and landscape are edited and saved separately (#633): the editor follows whichever orientation is on screen, and Reset only clears that one, so a layout that works held upright does not have to double as the one used sideways. An options.lua from before this split keeps its single layout in both orientations until one of them is edited. In-game, Options → TOUCH PAD toggles the same on/off flag without leaving a play session.

Screen orientation lock (Android)

Options → ORIENTATION (also in the launcher's gear menu) locks the screen to PORTRAIT, LANDSCAPE (either landscape, following the device), or REVERSE LANDSCAPE, or leaves it on AUTO (#592). AUTO allows every orientation but defers to the system: with auto-rotate turned off in Android's quick settings, the game stays put instead of following the sensor (#716). Changes apply immediately -- the screen rotates as the row is stepped -- and persist in options.lua. Android only: iOS follows the app's fixed orientation list, and desktop windows rotate nothing.

Translation support

Every string the player can read is now reachable from a mod, so a translation is an ordinary content mod rather than a fork.

Two things had to change. Text layout stopped counting bytes: the dialogue box measures a line in glyphs (charmap sequences), so a 3-byte character costs one column, a cut never lands inside a character, and a page with a non-default advance re-measures instead of overflowing. That also fixed 25 vanilla English lines that were wrapping early because é in POKéMON and POKéDEX costs two bytes ("I study POKéMON as" is 19 bytes and 18 glyphs, and the box was breaking it).

Second, the text the engine writes itself - battle messages, item results, menu labels, the link-play screens - moved behind src/core/Strings.lua and the new strings registry. Extracted script text was already overridable through text; this covers the other half. Entries are keyed by the English source, so a translation that has not reached a string yet keeps rendering in English and a half-finished translation stays playable.

Authors generate the whole thing:

python3 tools/modkit.py translation francais --language "Francais"

That scaffolds a mod with every translatable string as an empty catalog, plus a glyph-page and charmap stub, a naming-grid stub, and a francais-worksheet/ directory holding the English to translate from (deliberately outside the mod: extracted text is ROM content and must not be packed). --refresh re-harvests after an engine update, keeping existing translations and parking orphaned keys rather than dropping them.

A translation can also skip glyph pages entirely: scaffolding with --pixel-font (or registering mod.content.font:register("ttf", {}) in an existing mod) renders text through a bundled TTF covering Latin with diacritics, Cyrillic, kana and CJK, while box borders and <PK>-style macro glyphs keep their tiles. The font is "Plain Pixel Font" by Douglas Vautour (Burpy Fresh), licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (5x11 base characters, 11x11 double-width; see assets/fonts/plainpixel/README.md). Options on the registry entry: file for a mod-shipped TTF, size (the font's design em; Plain Pixel rasterizes cleanly only at multiples of 15), spacing added to every advance, yOffset for vertical alignment against the 8px cell grid, bold, which double-prints at a 1px offset for fonts whose strokes read too light, and tiles, the characters that keep their ROM tile instead of coming from the TTF.

tiles matters for a CJK translation. Sizing the font so a kana fills the 8px cell leaves Latin narrower than the tile font it replaces, which pulls the numeric columns out of line: the party menu's :L12 stops sitting over 34/ 34. Naming "0123456789/:" keeps those on the vanilla tiles, so numbers render exactly as they do in English while kana still come from the font. It takes a string of characters, or a list when a multi-character charmap sequence is meant.

See the wiki's Translations guide.

Save editor (bundled, reachable from the launcher)

The save editor ships inside every build instead of being a developer-only script, and the launcher's SAVE SLOT card grows an Edit label next to Delete on every slot that actually holds a save. Edit suspends the launcher, opens that slot's file in the editor, and Close hands the process back to the launcher with the slot list re-read (a rename, a badge or a dex change shows up on the row immediately). Unsaved edits arm a confirm first, so leaving cannot lose work. love . --editor still opens it standalone, where Close quits instead; --save <path> points it at any file, and a save can be dragged onto the window.

The editor now wears the launcher's visual language - the same navy radial field, 16px translucent cards, tri-colour version rail and green/yellow/red semantics - so the two windows read as one app. Six tabs:

• Party: the roster with sprites, HP bars and level chips on the left, and the mon inspector permanently docked on the right instead of floating over the list. Species, level, DVs and moves all round-trip through the Gen 1 formulas, so the inspector can never show illegal stats.
• Boxes: the 12 PC boxes as a 5x4 grid with a fill meter per box and a party dock, so deposit and withdraw live in one place. Empty slots are clickable and create a mon there.
• Items: money, a searchable item picker (replacing the arrows that cycled one id at a time through ~250 items), the configurable bag (20 slots by default), PC storage with no slot cap, and the eight badges as toggle chips. The picker, the bag and PC storage all scroll under the mouse wheel, so the whole catalog is reachable one-handed without typing a query.
• Events: flags, defeated trainers, taken items and per-map object toggles, with a real filter field and a two-column paged grid.
• Map: any map rendered with the game's own renderer, warps followable, and the player / lastHeal / lastOutdoor spawn points settable by clicking a cell. Setting lastOutdoor on a map the game would not accept as an outdoor source is refused with the reason.
• Dex: seen / owned completion meters and a four-column grid; owning implies seen and un-seeing clears owned, exactly as the game requires.

Two rules run through all of it. Every mutation goes through one funnel that sets the dirty flag and writes the status line together, so nothing changes silently and no branch can quietly no-op - "Party is full", "Bag is full", "click a cell first" all say so. And every destructive verb (Remove, Release, Clear all, Wipe dex) arms on the first click and commits on the second, relabelling itself to Confirm? in between.

A validation pill in the tab rail mirrors what the running game would quarantine on load; clicking it jumps to the tab holding the first problem.

Tiled map editing (mod authoring)

tools/tiled_export.py turns the imported ROM cache into a Tiled workspace, so maps can be edited in a real map editor and exported back out as a mod. It has its own document: docs/tiled-map-editing.md.

Pokédex diploma (both versions)

The Celadon Mansion 3F game designer shows the dex-completion diploma once 150 species are owned. On Yellow, the graphic artist next to him then offers to print it, saving the certificate as a PNG under prints/ in the save directory, and Bill's PC gains Yellow's PRINT BOX item which exports the current box list the same way.

Pokédex printing (Yellow)

Yellow's Game Boy Printer PRNT option in the Pokédex side menu is stood in for by an image export: choosing PRNT renders the mon's entry page (sprite, kind, number, height/weight, dex text) to a PNG at 4x scale under prints/ in the save directory, then reports the filename in a dialog. No printer hardware or link cable emulation involved; the file is the printout.

Find Mods (community mod indexes)

A FIND MODS tab sits beside MODS in the launcher and browses a published mod index: a metadata-only feed listing mods that live in their authors' own repositories. No index ships with the launcher and none is ever added automatically, so the tab opens on an "Add an index" prompt until you name one; paste an index URL or its owner/repo and it is remembered in options.lua. More than one index can be added, and the listings merge.

A feed author can publish per-mod release stats by adding three optional fields to an entry -- downloads (total across every release), and first_release / last_release (ISO days) -- which the listing shows in the same gold line the MODS tab uses. When a feed does not carry them, the row fetches the mod's own GitHub releases instead -- the same cached ModUpdate fetch the MODS tab uses, one entry per frame -- so the stats appear for any mod with a github field regardless of feed maintenance. The fields are additive: feeds that carry them stay readable by every build that predates them, and feeds that do not render exactly as before.

Soft reset (all versions)

Holding A, B, START and SELECT together restarts the game the way flicking a Game Boy's power switch did, dropping straight back to the title screen. It works from anywhere, including mid-battle, which the QUIT entry on the start menu cannot do: the original combo is how stationary and gift Pokemon get their stats rerolled without sitting through a full relaunch. Unsaved progress is discarded, exactly as on hardware.

As on the original, the four buttons have to stay held for 16 straight polls (better than a quarter of a second) and any direction in the mix cancels it, so it is hard to hit by accident -- including on the on-screen touch controls, where it would take four fingers held on four separate controls.

Controls rebinding (CONTROLS screen)

OPTIONS -> CONTROLS lists every Game Boy button with its current keyboard key and controller button side by side (Z/A). Press A on a row, then press and release the key or pad button you want; the rebind commits on the release. If that input already belongs to another row, the two rows swap, so no button is ever stranded without an input and no input ever serves two buttons. Holding a second key or pad button while the first is still down backs out of the capture without touching a keyboard; Escape still cancels too. SELECT clears one row back to its default, and START resets every binding after a confirmation.

Controllers a system has no mapping for (common on Linux handhelds and off-brand pads) report bare button numbers rather than names. Those are rebindable on the same screen and show up as JOY1, JOY2 and so on in the controller column. Recognized controllers are read only through their named buttons, so a rebind on those is never shadowed by the factory layout underneath it.

Mod profiles (#593)

The mod manager's PROFILES tab holds named setups. A profile remembers which mods are on, every mod's own options, and which save slot each game version plays, so swapping profiles swaps the whole playthrough and not just the mod list. The setup that existed before profiles shipped becomes PROFILE 1 the first time the manager opens.

EXPORT.. writes the selected profile to profiles/<NAME>.g1rmodlist in the save directory; drop a .g1rmodlist someone shared into that folder and IMPORT.. adds it. Imported profiles never overwrite an existing one (a name clash gets a number). Mods the shared profile names but that are not installed are reported when the profile is applied; installing them is still a manual trip through the mods list or Find Mods.

Windows: no console windows on launcher actions

Checking for updates, browsing a mod index, adding a mod repo, installing a mod and picking a ROM all run a host tool (curl, PowerShell) in a child process. On Windows those children used to each open their own console window, so a session could end up buried under half a dozen of them. The game now claims one console for itself at boot and hides it; the children inherit that invisible console and nothing pops up. Nothing else changes: file pickers are ordinary desktop dialogs and still appear normally, and a run started from a terminal (lovec.exe, what scripts\run.ps1 prefers) keeps its terminal and its printed output. Set POKEPORT_CONSOLE=1 to opt out.

A faster, higher-contrast launcher

The launcher and the save editor were rebuilt on one small immediate-mode UI kit (src/ui/kit/), replacing the vendored FlexLove layout engine. The visible result is that the launcher is quick: building and drawing a frame went from about 9 ms to under 1 ms on the same machine and the same data, at every window size, so the window keeps up with the pointer instead of trailing it. Measure it yourself with POKEPORT_LAUNCHER_PROF=200 love ..

Nothing blocks the window any more. Fetching a mod index, checking a mod for updates, listing versions, downloading an install and pulling thumbnails all run on background threads. Opening FIND MODS on a cold cache used to freeze the launcher for as long as the server took -- often minutes, with no indication anything was happening. Mod indexes are now also fetched at boot, so the tab is usually already populated by the time you reach it.

Anything you wait on says so. Every operation that takes time raises a loading panel with a spinner or a progress bar that cannot be clicked around or dismissed, so a half-finished install can never be interrupted by a stray click. Work that only affects one row (a mod's update check) shows a small spinner on that row instead and leaves the rest of the list usable.

Lists page instead of scrolling. Mods, Find Mods, save slots, settings, release notes and the version list all show a fixed number of rows with a pager underneath, and the number of rows comes from the window height -- a tall window shows more, a phone shows fewer. A long list costs exactly what a short one does. The mouse wheel turns pages.

Updates live in the top right. The in-app updater moved next to the settings gear and pulses when an update is waiting, instead of sitting in a banner at the bottom of the page that you had to scroll to notice. Checking for updates from there shows a loader like everything else.

The look. Black background, white outlines, no gradients or glows, and buttons that are solid colour-coded keys: green commits, blue navigates, red destroys, yellow wants attention. The three game tabs keep their red, blue and gold cartridge colours. Everything is about a third larger than before. The save editor follows the same theme, and adding an item there is now a searchable pop-up like adding a Pokemon, rather than a cramped list wedged into the tab.

Reset rebinds. Input rebinds are additive, so there was no in-game way to undo one. A RESET REBINDS row in Settings, and a matching button under Touch Controls on each game tab, restore the stock keyboard, gamepad and touch layout. Both ask twice.

Launch options: boot straight into a game

love . --game red skips the launcher and starts that game; --slot <id or number> picks the save slot to load, and --launcher forces the launcher anyway. POKEPORT_GAME / POKEPORT_SLOT do the same for shortcuts that can only pass environment variables. This is for one-click entries: a desktop shortcut per game, a Steam entry, or a handheld frontend. Asking for a game whose ROM has not been imported opens the launcher on that game's tab rather than failing.