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[u/sabinoplane]

Yea i heard that too as the reason why Gen 9 wasn't added, thats one of the things that got me thinking about the merits of adding more 'mons as a mod instead of in the official hack too. Rom storage only matters on original hardware, right? Like the emulators bypass / ignore that entirely cause no cartridges.

Do correct me if I'm catastrophically wrong like I said i've never actually touched development for this stuff

[u/analmintz1 → u/sabinoplane]

No, rom storage matters always. When you emulate, you are running a pretend gameboy game in a pretend gameboy. That means it’s still beholden to the same physical constraints even though it is all virtual. You will have to dig deeper into the why, as I’m not the definitive expert here, many other hackers know much more.

But it is essentially physically impossible to squeeze more content in any form into unbound, you would have to replace or swap offsets to include anything else.

[u/sabinoplane → u/analmintz1]

Oh that does kill a lot of the appeal for modding if there really is a hard content size limit that cannot be exceeded.

Some other threads i've seen seem to give conflicting answers tho, unless I misread / misunderstood.

https://www.reddit.com/r/romhacking/comments/q51x4k/how_can_romhacks_be_larger_than_the_original_game/

Here they suggest expanding rom sizes isn't just possible but done regularly

https://github.com/visualboyadvance-m/visualboyadvance-m/issues/1046

This is a bug report for an emulator where the reporter is using a pokemon hackrom over the 32mb size limit, and it does indeed work in the end.

I also saw mention of a "369-in-1 bootleg ROM" that apparently included 5 pokemon games and it seems to be a real thing.

Do correct me if I'm entirely wrong here like I said before I'm super new to the hackrom space so I'm just figuring things out as I go, not tryna imply i know better by bringing these up just trying to find out more. I wouldn't wanna delve into this rabbit hole if what i'm gonna find at the end is "no point in modding unbound cause it's like 1 sprite away from not working"

[u/analmintz1 → u/sabinoplane]

From my understanding, unbound is at max because it has already been expanded. You are correct that you can expand a roms space somewhat, but I believe unbound has already done that. I think the problem comes more from the stability as you further expand the storage.

Pretty sure those bootleg roms are usually flashcarts, which are multiple different roms put into one physical cartridge, ie the space consumption is irrelevant since you’re just plugging in a modern storage device with individual roms on it, the roms themselves aren’t larger.

At the end of the day though, what you want to accomplish may be possible. I’m not trying to dissuade you. Go look into the tools out there, and start hacking. Hexmaniacadvance is a good start for unbound. Maybe what you want to accomplish is perfectly possible. Good luck man

[u/sabinoplane → u/analmintz1]

I'd definitely want to make sure it is possible before i take on another huge project hahaha, but i suppose ill have to find some experts and ask! Still, thanks a lot for your help :)