GBA Pokémon Hacks

GBA Pokémon hacks are fan-made hacks of official Pokémon games that were also sold on bootleg cartridges (presumably without the knowledge of the creators).

Quartz

A hack of Ruby, released by the author as a patch file intended to be played by VBA users who already owned the Ruby cartridge and had a copy of its ROM image. The game has a great number of spelling and grammatical errors, which result from the hack being translated from Spanish, although the grammar improves throughout the game. The game also contains profanity and adult themes, which are absent from all official Pokémon games. Quartz replaced all names and graphics of traditional Pokémon with new, made-up Pokémon such as the rooster Pokémon Cottoster and the legendary Pokémon Kaosune, although some of the changes were only cosmetic and did not change learnsets or types. The game takes place in Corna, a heavily-edited Hoenn, and the player must navigate a very different series of paths. It also been published in cartridge form and sold as a bootleg game.

While the best-known bootleg cartridge as played on the actual GBA contains serious glitches and errors, the current patch file release works well with VBA when the patch is applied to a clean image of an actual Ruby cartridge. Another getaway that it has Gyarados on the boxart, stolen from the Pokémon Trading Card Game booster pack "Holo Phantoms".

Naranja

A Spanish hack and bootleg of Ruby in which the player plays as either Ash or Misty and travels around the Orange Archipelago (Naranja is a Spanish word which means "Orange"). Celebi appears on the box art and title screen.

Naranja has, much like Chaos Black and ShinyGold, also been published in cartridge form and sold as a bootleg game by pirates.

ChaosBlack

A hack of FireRed. The game contains many new Pokémon, and glitch ones (such as MissingNo), produced to fill the void left by the lack of a "third" game to compliment FireRed and LeafGreen. The description on the back of some bootleg boxes can inform gamers that it is a bootleg, such as typos or poor English and punctuation. Another large giveaway is the fact that the front cover has Chaos from the Sonic the Hedgehog games.

Frigo Returns

Pokémon Frigo Returns is a Pokémon Ruby/Saphire hack for the GBA.

It seems that there are different versions possibly distributed by different publishers. Some versions come with a very light color pallete, and some versions have the regular pallete from the original game (Ruby/Saphire). Some text is edited, some pre-made names are different, but for every different version of the game, there are differences. It seems that the original ROM has a text box in the begining of the game saying: "This game has been hacked by: The Phantom of Poké4Yu Inc.". But with most cartridge games, the text box isn't there. The cartridge vesions also have the light pallete, so whatever publisher this came from, they changed it enough to not give the Poké4Yu developer any credit exept for the title screen.

A possible publisher could have the tag VC due to some of the cartrages having a sticker over the screw with the letters VC.

In the game, you eventually find out who Frigo is. It is a pokémon that you obtain in a Pokémon Center in Odale town from a person who claims Oak says it is yours. The ID is No.40260 and is an ice/phychc pokémon.