Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia Randomizer

This is a tool for creating a randomizer of the game Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia.

A "randomizer" is a popular romhack for various Pokemon games that involves randomly changing the Pokemon encounters throughout the game.

This randomizer changes encounters in such a way that the game is guaranteed to still be beatable; that is, it will not replace a Pokemon whose field move is necessary to beat the level with a Pokemon that has a completely different field move. In fact, Pokemon's replacement are randomly chosen from the set of Pokemon that have the same field move as them, with the same field move strength or higher.

Usage

See "Releases" for Linux and Windows versions.

Run the tool in a terminal, supplying the input ROM file and the name of the output randomized ROM. ./range_randomizer [input file] [output file]

For example: ./range_randomizer rom.nds randomized.nds

The program will take a few seconds to run before generating a ROM with the specified output name.

References

AlmiaE -- an excellent tool for editing Shadows of Almia
FEAT -- for extracting DS rom, LZ10 compression

For my experiments in designing an optimal LZ10 compression algorithm (found in old/):

• Kärkkäinen, Juha, and Peter Sanders. "Simple linear work suffix array construction." Automata, Languages and Programming: 30th International Colloquium, ICALP 2003 Eindhoven, The Netherlands, June 30–July 4, 2003 Proceedings 30. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2003.
• Babenko, M.A., Starikovskaya, T.A. (2008). Computing Longest Common Substrings Via Suffix Arrays . In: Hirsch, E.A., Razborov, A.A., Semenov, A., Slissenko, A. (eds) Computer Science – Theory and Applications. CSR 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5010. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79709-8_10
• Kasai, T.; Lee, G.; Arimura, H.; Arikawa, S.; Park, K. (2001). Linear-Time Longest-Common-Prefix Computation in Suffix Arrays and Its Applications. Proceedings of the 12th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 2089. pp. 181–192. doi:10.1007/3-540-48194-X_17