Pokemon Gold Pocket Monsters (ROM hack)

[Vikograd]

Hey, first time posting here!

So I recently started digging around my multicarts and found a strange version of Pokemon Gold on one of them and was wondering if anyone has heard of it. It seems to be a ROM hack of the English version of Pokemon Gold but with the intro being changed along with the dialogues and the Pokemon not having their official names. The game displays "Pokemon World" on startup instead of the Gamefreak logo and Nintendo's credit has been replaced by "PiKACHU". The game uses the original title screen but the text says "Pokemon GOLD Pocket Monsters" and Nintendo's copyright is once again overwritten by "PiKACHU".

Is this a known hack in the community? I'm going to try and document this with a page on the wiki so if anyone has any further information on the game I'd appreciate it.

Also here's some pictures I took of the startup sequence and the screen where you choose your name (notice how the font is smaller but bold, compared to Pokemon's usual font).

[crazyboy92mk2]

Hey, first time posting here!

So I recently started digging around my multicarts and found a strange version of Pokemon Gold on one of them and was wondering if anyone has heard of it. It seems to be a ROM hack of the English version of Pokemon Gold but with the intro being changed along with the dialogues and the Pokemon not having their official names. The game displays "Pokemon World" on startup instead of the Gamefreak logo and Nintendo's credit has been replaced by "PiKACHU". The game uses the original title screen but the text says "Pokemon GOLD Pocket Monsters" and Nintendo's copyright is once again overwritten by "PiKACHU".

Is this a known hack in the community? I'm going to try and document this with a page on the wiki so if anyone has any further information on the game I'd appreciate it.

Also here's some pictures I took of the startup sequence and the screen where you choose your name (notice how the font is smaller but bold, compared to Pokemon's usual font).

This is quite interesting. This is Japanese version of Pokemon Gold, not the US/European version BTW.

[Ankos]

I dumped the ROM for it off of one of my multicarts and posted it to my ROMs thread. In my experience it appears on Ka Sheng and JY multicarts. I've never seen an equivalent version for Silver though, though there are other translations for the generation 2 pokemon games

[Vikograd]

This is quite interesting. This is Japanese version of Pokemon Gold, not the US/European version BTW.
[/quote]

Oh, so this might be a pre-release translation by whoever pirated this. Was this even a thing back then? - to translate a game for a different region where it hasn't officially been released yet to better sell ones pirated work? Thanks for the info though!

[Vikograd]

I dumped the ROM for it off of one of my multicarts and posted it to my ROMs thread. In my experience it appears on Ka Sheng and JY multicarts. I've never seen an equivalent version for Silver though, though there are other translations for the generation 2 pokemon games

I found this one on a Game USA Color Advance cartidge that I got bundled with my GBA a few years ago.
I made a wiki page for it as well because I couldn't find anything about these multicarts on the internet...
https://bootleggames.fandom.com/wiki/100_in_1_Game_USA_Color_Advance

[Ankos]

This is quite interesting. This is Japanese version of Pokemon Gold, not the US/European version BTW.

Oh, so this might be a pre-release translation by whoever pirated this. Was this even a thing back then? - to translate a game for a different region where it hasn't officially been released yet to better sell ones pirated work? Thanks for the info though!
[/quote]
Yes, that was a practice. It happened with quite a few Pokemon titles. I've seen it with Pokemon Green, Pokemon Gold, Pokemon Crystal, Pokemon Fire Red, Pokemon Sapphire, and Pokemon Emerald. There were also fan translations people tried to squeeze out before the official one, and some of those wound up on pirate carts as well

[Vikograd]

Yes, that was a practice. It happened with quite a few Pokemon titles. I've seen it with Pokemon Green, Pokemon Gold, Pokemon Crystal, Pokemon Fire Red, Pokemon Sapphire, and Pokemon Emerald. There were also fan translations people tried to squeeze out before the official one, and some of those wound up on pirate carts as well

Wow, that's basically the entire Pokemon franchise up until the DS games came out. I assume there's no way of knowing whether it was released before the official games were released or after, but this is still very interesting

[Ankos]

I dumped the ROM for it off of one of my multicarts and posted it to my ROMs thread. In my experience it appears on Ka Sheng and JY multicarts. I've never seen an equivalent version for Silver though, though there are other translations for the generation 2 pokemon games

I found this one on a Game USA Color Advance cartidge that I got bundled with my GBA a few years ago.
I made a wiki page for it as well because I couldn't find anything about these multicarts on the internet...
https://bootleggames.fandom.com/wiki/100_in_1_Game_USA_Color_Advance

That is a sort of well known manufacturer, but they are not Ka Sheng or JY. If I remember right you could sort of tell how much stuff was on these by the ID  code since a lot of these lie about their game count, though I don't remember exactly how the trick worked

[Ankos]

Oh. Taizou (the person who runs hhug.me) posted how the ID system works for UC multis in the discord. So your multi's ID is "UC-100M01".

The 100 refers to the claimed game count. The M refers to the ROM size (so any multi of theirs with an M after the game count is going to be quite big) and the 01 after the M refers to this multi's number in relation to the others that were released. So it is the first 100 in 1 multi with this ROM size the company made

[Vikograd]

Oh. Taizou (the person who runs hhug.me) posted how the ID system works for UC multis in the discord. So your multi's ID is "UC-100M01".

The 100 refers to the claimed game count. The M refers to the ROM size (so any multi of theirs with an M after the game count is going to be quite big) and the 01 after the M refers to this multi's number in relation to the others that were released. So it is the first 100 in 1 multi with this ROM size the company made

That's neat. Indeed this cart is quite big, as it doesn't contain a single repeat except different versions of the Pokemon games and one game that's present in both Japanese and English. Can you tell what UC stands for, or is it just a random acronym the pirate company chose? (UC for USA Color coming to mind...)

[Ankos]

I'm not sure. I have a cart with a similar look with a UK ID, so I think it has to do with where these were sold, but I don't think these normally pop up in the wild in the USA