Compiling Pokemon Yellow

In this first part of our inaugural Thursday Gaming Stream. We compiled Pokemon Yellow from reverse engineered sources courtesy of the pret project and a tool chain provided by rgbds

How Do?

Here’s a quick recap of how to do it

First install a C compiler, make, and all the usual developer tools. On Fedora this is done like so.

In The Terminal type

sudo dnf -y groupinstall "Development Tools"
sudo dnf install flex bison git

Then you must clone, rgbds

git clone https://github.com/gbdev/rgbds.gi
cd rgbds
git checkout v0.5.2

Then do the build

make clean
make
sudo make install

You are now ready to compile Pokemon Yellow itself. To do that cd back to your home directory, or anywhere you want that’s not the rgbds directory. And execute

git clone https://github.com/pret/pokeyellow.git
cd pokeyellow
make

Assuming everything went according to plan you now a file called pokeyellow.gbc . This is the rom image of the game. Copy it somewhere safe. And fire it up in your favorite emulator.

To play along with us on stream you will need to complete one additional step. Download the .ips patch from PokeCommunity (Membership required) Mirror here, and apply it to the rom. There are several ways of doing that easiest way is probably Rom Patcher JS

Conclusion

Turns out with a little help from the community, and some linux know how all your 9 year old dreams can come true. Embrace the Joy of Linux everyone.