ROM Hack pokemon emerald increase rom size

[Nightmare-Rex]

well this seems most appropriate to post this (considering DS plays gba games) i wanted to complete my rom hack of pokemon emerald nightmare-rex edition that i havent worked on for years, but i got a problem. As i make new areas i noticed the game becomes more and more unstable, sutch as lots of areas i cannot give them a unique name and have been forced to have to use the same name over and over, if i give it a unique name it changes the other area's name (IE ordale town is nammed route 117 and if i change it back rout 117 becomes nammed ordale town) i am guessing it has to do with the fact that ive been adding areas, but the ROM size is the same, is there anyway to fix this such as makeing the ROM bigger?

 

[link491]

You can open the rom in a hex editor and use the expand function. I would recommend doubling the size, that will give you more than enough free space. Fair warning for you though, you might want to back your stuff up beforehand, since if the game is unstable to begin with, expansion might make it worse.
I would recommend using WindHex.

Edit: You might want to ask for Pokemon ROM hacking help on one of the many sites that's dedicated to that sort of thing, since there may be people around here that will condemn you for it. I'd look at Pokecommunity Myself.

 

[FAST6191]

I doubt it is a size issue, though as you asked expanding GBA games is pretty easy as you just add more space (there are no mappers, controllers, special chips.... troubling the GBA). If you are using a dedicated program it should be able to handle it, though it might not if it is one of the older ones.

What I suspect is happening more is that you have ran out of values for the game to parse -- it might only be able to read up to 128 of the things. You can change this but it is not an easy hack if you are asking questions like this.

 

[albertar]

there is an app that trims roms to take out unnecessary memory

 

[Nightmare-Rex]

thanks ill try the hex editor and if that dosent work ill try the pokecommunity. Also i dont think its a 128 issue, i changed only like 2 names of things i don't think i would run out of space on that, although i am getting confused on what findable items are being used and which ones are not.

UPdate: well i have increased the size from 16MB to 32MB, i havent yet noticed anything becoming more unstable althugh for some reason now i cant rename maps to test it, cant even rename them in the backup 16 MB version, i have no idea why.