Games > POKEMON GOLD FOR TIC-80
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Return to New Bark Town, choose your first Pokémon, and set out across Johto—this time inside a TIC-80 cartridge. Challenge the Pokémon League, sail to Kanto aboard the S.S. Aqua, collect all sixteen Gym Badges, and climb Mt. Silver to face Red. His defeat leads to the final credits and your return to the Pokémon Center outside the mountain; another League victory makes a rematch available.
This is an unofficial, source-driven adaptation of Pokémon Gold built around the official, unchanged TIC-80 Pro engine. The current cartridge contains **352 maps, 244 Pokémon species, 439 trainer teams, and all 251 moves with their battle animations**. These are the implemented content counts, rather than a claim that all 251 Pokémon can be collected.
The adventure includes the day/night cycle, time-dependent encounters and events, the Pokégear and radio, breeding and hatching, the Bug-Catching Contest, NPC trades, roaming Pokémon, and Johto's side activities. Kanto includes its accessible interiors and eight Gym Leaders, the Power Plant quest, Copycat and the Magnet Train Pass, the EXPN Card and Poké Flute, and Snorlax. After earning sixteen badges, speak to Professor Oak in Pallet Town to unlock Route 28 and Mt. Silver. The Safari Zone remains closed, as it does in Gold.
TIC-80 provides **1,024 bytes of persistent memory** for the game. The current format reserves 662 bytes for the party, world, progression and services, 358 bytes for boxed Pokémon, and four bytes for metadata and integrity checking. Box storage has its own reservation: later story progression cannot consume space already admitted for your PC Pokémon.
These constraints have visible effects. Please read them before planning a collection:
- **Seven PC pages of twenty Pokémon**, with automatic sorting and fixed box names. The PC behaves as one sorted collection; deposits can shift Pokémon between pages, and manual rearrangement is unavailable.
- **Storage is guaranteed for 140 normalized wild captures.** This covers the supported wild acquisition species/level combinations, every possible DV combination, natural moves, no training or PP Ups, no Pokérus, and the normalized ordinary/Friend Ball happiness profiles. For captures sent to boxes, held items are transferred to the Bag, or to the item PC when the Bag cannot receive them; a boxed capture is refused if neither can accept the item. This is a mathematical capacity bound, independent of story progress or capture order.
- **Eggs, gifts, NPC trades and Pokémon with additional training or move data can also be stored**, subject to the remaining encoded space. The 140 guarantee does **not** cover 140 arbitrarily trained, bred or modified Pokémon. A deposit may be refused before all seven pages are visually full.
- **No custom Pokémon nicknames**, including through the Name Rater. Species names are used normally; the fixed identities of special gifts and NPC trades are retained.
- Inventories use a fixed canonical item order, without SELECT rearrangement. The Bag retains **20 item stacks and 12 Ball stacks**, with up to 99 per stack. Key Items and TMs/HMs have their separate pockets; TMs allow up to 99 of each and HMs one of each. The **item PC holds 20 stacks**.
- Mail is limited to **one carried letter and one stored letter**. Capacity is checked before changing the Pokémon or mail state, including Kenya's letter.
The cartridge runs a custom Lua game runtime. Build tools extract and convert maps, scripts, tiles, sprites, fonts, menus, Pokémon data and musical sequences from the `pret/pokegold` sources. The original ROM is a development and comparison reference; it is not embedded as a complete ROM, and the cartridge does not emulate the Game Boy CPU.
Resources use the smallest applicable representation among raw storage, LZSS, DEFLATE and LZMA1. Compressed data is packed across TIC-80's eight cartridge banks, then loaded and decoded inside the cartridge. Game scripts and audio commands are interpreted by the port's own runtime. Preparation tools are needed to rebuild it, not to play it.
The screen adaptation preserves the original scale of tiles, sprites and text. The Game Boy's 160 × 144 display becomes TIC-80's 240 × 136 surface through screen-specific framing and layout adjustments, with the extra width available for presentation. Useful information is repositioned where necessary; this is not a globally stretched or reduced image. Rendering uses the two official video banks and their palettes to reproduce the source graphics and time-of-day colors. Display framing does not change logical map coordinates or collisions.
Music, sound effects and cries follow extracted source sequences and are synthesized using official TIC-80 sound registers and PCM. The aim is to preserve the composition and behavior, but **the sound is not a cycle-exact Game Boy APU reproduction**. Frequency and envelope quantization, phase behavior, analog filtering and the mono 7,680 Hz PCM path produce audible differences, particularly for noise and extreme pitches.
Comments
 gorplebleepus
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ai?
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 crashxxl
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Yes, AI was used to analyze the original game's assembly code and create scripts to extract and convert the assets into a compressed format that fits into the TIC-80's memory banks.
Just for context, this is purely a hobby project to explore what's possible and find creative workarounds to fit a large game into a tiny cartridge. |
 Nesbox
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Even with AI, it looks impressive!
Im not sure how long it will stay up before someone complains, but lets enjoy it while it lasts :) |
 fizzii01
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Downloaded! 😁
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