Emulation How do I get GBA Pokemon games to work on PC emulators?

[BlackMod]

I've been having trouble getting any of the Pokemon GBA titles to go beyond the title screen before crashing (except for Emerald). Most of what I've seen people advise is to set the save type to flash and flash 128k, except I have tried that on all of my roms and the problem persists. They are all self-dumped using a Retrode 2, and I don't think they would be corrupt considering they all open up just fine in VBA-M and mGBA. Not even No$GBA, Higan, or DeSmuME have worked.
Normally I wouldn't want to waste anybody's time by asking if I could find the answer myself, but I wasted several hours trying to get this to work
I just wanna play pokeymans.

 

[Takokeshi]

They should be working fine, so I'd seriously consider the possibility that the dumps may be corrupted. Especially if they're able to load to the title screen but crash beyond that :s it's more than possible for a rom to be corrupted in a way where the intro and title screen data is fine, but some of the rest of the data is broken and the game isn't able to load it after the title screen.

Verify their checksums and compare against no-intro, to be sure.

Emerald
FireRed 1.0 FireRed 1.1
LeafGreen 1.0 LeafGreen 1.1
Ruby 1.0 Ruby 1.1 Ruby 1.2
Sapphire 1.0 Sapphire 1.1 Sapphire 1.2

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I've been having trouble getting any of the Pokemon GBA titles to go beyond the title screen before crashing (except for Emerald). Most of what I've seen people advise is to set the save type to flash and flash 128k, except I have tried that on all of my roms and the problem persists. They are all self-dumped using a Retrode 2, and I don't think they would be corrupt considering they all open up just fine in VBA-M and mGBA. Not even No$GBA, Higan, or DeSmuME have worked.
Normally I wouldn't want to waste anybody's time by asking if I could find the answer myself, but I wasted several hours trying to get this to work
I just wanna play pokeymans.

When you dump your own ROMs it's good practice to make 2 dumps and compare the hash of them to make sure the dump was good. A dirty connector could cause an intermittent connection on some pins, so the ROM appears to be dumped correctly but there's (random) corrupted data that's different every time it's dumped, the game might still boot and even work fine for a while if the corruption is not that severe.
But I can confirm that all Pokemon games should boot and save in any modern emulator without changing any settings. They'll still work even if the flash size is left at 64k, issues only appear after you beat the Elite 4.
And since this is happening in multiple emulators too, that rules out any weird configuration you might have that could cause issues, so it could only be a bad dump.

 

[BlackMod]

it could only be a bad dump.

Turns out, it was totally that. I looked at the file size of all my dumps and they were all half the size of Emerald.
Thankfully, editing the Retrode's CFG file let me fix that.

[forceSystem] gba
[forceSize] 16

They run just fine now. Thank you all for the help!

 

[Plazorn]

I've been having trouble getting any of the Pokemon GBA titles to go beyond the title screen before crashing (except for Emerald). Most of what I've seen people advise is to set the save type to flash and flash 128k, except I have tried that on all of my roms and the problem persists. They are all self-dumped using a Retrode 2, and I don't think they would be corrupt considering they all open up just fine in VBA-M and mGBA. Not even No$GBA, Higan, or DeSmuME have worked.
Normally I wouldn't want to waste anybody's time by asking if I could find the answer myself, but I wasted several hours trying to get this to work
I just wanna play pokeymans.

Look through the Internet Archive for real roms, these you have may be corrupted.
Also, (Unlike Most) I use Retroarch for all my retro games. Standalone emulators require lots of config to make them work correctly, however Retroarch has pre-configed cores that don't require must screwing around.

 

[BlackMod]

Look through the Internet Archive for real roms, these you have may be corrupted.
Also, (Unlike Most) I use Retroarch for all my retro games. Standalone emulators require lots of config to make them work correctly, however Retroarch has pre-configed cores that don't require must screwing around.

I don't feel comfortable illegally downloading when I can dump perfectly functioning roms myself.
And as far as emulators, mGBA doesn't require any fiddling with settings; everything I've thrown at it has worked just fine.

 

[Plazorn]

I don't feel comfortable illegally downloading when I can dump perfectly functioning roms myself.
And as far as emulators, mGBA doesn't require and fiddling with settings; everything I've thrown at it has worked just fine.

Good luck then! Maybe redump your cartridges, get a new redumper, or maybe your games are dirty? There are many possibilities.

 

[Kioku]

I don't feel comfortable illegally downloading when I can dump perfectly functioning roms myself.
And as far as emulators, mGBA doesn't require any fiddling with settings; everything I've thrown at it has worked just fine.

It may save you some headache, but I get it. It's just more work in the end.

 

[BlackMod]

Good luck then! Maybe redump your cartridges, get a new redumper, or maybe your games are dirty? There are many possibilities.

I ended up redumping with some altered settings and it fixed things perfectly, thank goodness.