A START menu overhaul for the Pokémon Gen 1 Recompilation Project.
A 3x3 grid of apps, drawn in colour over the overworld · runs on Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver and Crystal · nothing ever moves under your thumb
PokéGear Menu replaces the text list you get from START with a handheld device: a grid of apps, each one always in the same place. An app you have not earned yet sits dimmed where it will eventually live, so the layout you learn on your first badge is the layout you still have on your eighth.
Everything unlocked, and a fresh save. A locked app keeps its place rather than collapsing the grid.
| Gen 1 | Gen 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Row 1 | DEX PKM BAG | DEX PKM BAG |
| Row 2 | ID OPT SAV | MAP RAD PHN |
| Row 3 | MAP LNK MOD | ID OPT SAV |
| Page 2 | EXT | MOD EXT |
Three glyphs is what a 21px cell holds, so each caption is abbreviated to fit under its icon. A status bar across the top of the screen carries a clock, a battery, and three signal bars that fill while a link session is live.
On Gen 1 this is a reskin of the menu, not the Gen 2 PokéGear. The real PokéGear had a clock, a map, a radio and a phone; Gen 1 has only the clock and the map. MAP opens the TOWN MAP and needs you to be carrying it, exactly as using the item from the bag does.
On Gen 2 it is not a reskin at all. MAP, RADIO and PHONE open the engine's own PokéGear cards -- the actual town map, the tunable radio, the phone that can place calls. Each stays dimmed until the cart itself hands that card over: the Guide Gent for the map, the Radio Tower quiz for the radio, and Mom's call for the phone. SAVE closes the phone rather than returning to the grid, because that is what the cart's own save does.
LINK is Gen 1 only. Gen 2 link runs through the engine's own LinkBattle2
and the launcher arenas, a path this mod does not drive, so it comes off rather
than shipping as a dead app.
Page one is nine apps on both generations, so anything past that pages: EXT on Gen 1, MOD then EXT on Gen 2, reached with L and R or by walking off the edge of the grid. The trainer card has to be on the grid: the START menu is the engine's only door to it, and this mod replaces the START menu.
Mod manager: grab the release zip from
Releases and import it -- FIND MODS in the launcher, or drop
the zip into the save directory's imports/mods/ folder and rescan.
Manual: unzip the release into the game's mods/pokegear_menu/ directory.
It claims the StartMenu screen id, so it takes over the START menu with no
further configuration.
EXT on page two, in the pokeball red no other app uses, because it is the one that does not come back. It asks before it goes, starting on NO, and then returns you to the title -- the same confirm the built-in menu's own QUIT row puts up, on both generations.
The Game Boy's own soft reset still works too: hold A, B, SELECT and START together.
engine_internals is for re-running the START menu's own ui.start_menu.items
hook and reaching its built-in SAVE flow. network is for the LINK app: it
opens the engine's own src.link.LinkState, the vanilla peer-to-peer link play
screen, unmodified.
cmd /c mklink /J game\mods\pokegear_menu <path to this repo>
cd game && python3 tools/modkit.py validate mods/pokegear_menu --base imported
cd game && python3 tools/modkit.py lint mods/pokegear_menu
cd game && python3 tools/modkit.py gen2check mods/pokegear_menu
cd game && luajit mods/pokegear_menu/tests/phone_screen_test.lua
cd game && luajit mods/pokegear_menu/tests/gen2_apps_test.lua
python tools/gen_assets.py
Every pixel is declared as text in that script, so the art is original and carries its own provenance.
- The status bar clock reads real-world time, which sits outside the fiction. There is no in-game clock on Gen 1 to read instead.
- If another mod adds a row to the START menu, it lands on page two. The phone keeps its own nine apps on page one so an app never changes position, which overrides where the injecting mod asked its row to sit.
- SAVE borrows the built-in START menu to reach the engine's own save flow, so
opening it re-runs the
ui.start_menu.itemshook. Another mod's wrapper fires once more per save press as a result. - The phone draws its own 4x6 face for every label it shows, including the app captions, the clock and the footer, because the engine font does not fit a 21px cell.
Newest release: releases/latest -- full history in CHANGELOG.md.
MIT -- see LICENSE. Fork it, bundle it, build on it; just keep the
notice. The mod ships no game assets: the icons and the 4x6 label face are
generated by tools/gen_assets.py.