OldAmber 0.0.1

A native C port of the Poke RBY Generation 1 engine, playable from the title screen to the Hall of Fame.

This is the first release. Behaviour follows the 1996 game closely: the formulas and values are transcribed from the original rather than approximated, quirks included. How far that carries into the famous edge cases varies, and reproducing them is a goal rather than a promise.

You supply your own legally acquired ROM

No game data ships here. The graphics, music, text, maps and stat tables come out of a cartridge dump you already own, read once on your own machine the first time you run the game. Your ROM is opened read-only and stays where it is.

Poke Red and Poke Blue are both supported. Each installs its own game data and its own save file, so you can have both at once; the launcher lists whichever are present and you pick one.

Downloads

Platform	File
Windows 10/11, 64-bit	OldAmber-0.0.1-windows-x64.zip
macOS 10.15+, Apple Silicon and Intel	OldAmber-0.0.1-macos-universal.zip
Linux, self-contained	OldAmber-0.0.1-x86_64.AppImage
Linux, Flatpak	OldAmber-0.0.1-linux-x86_64.flatpak
Linux, plain archive	OldAmber-0.0.1-linux-x64.tar.gz

Unpack, run it, point it at your ROM. It builds the game data in about ten seconds, once, and afterwards opens straight to PLAY. Nothing else to install.

Flatpak pins its own runtime, so it runs the same on an old Debian and a rolling Arch, and it is the native route on a Steam Deck:

flatpak install --user OldAmber-0.0.1-linux-x86_64.flatpak
flatpak run com.spiritsnails.OldAmber

AppImage carries its own libraries and needs only glibc 2.38 or newer. One file, mark it executable and run it. On Arch and its derivatives the AppImage format wants libfuse2, which those ship without; if it complains about libfuse.so.2, either pacman -S fuse2 or run it with --appimage-extract-and-run.

The tar.gz is smallest but expects SDL2, Wayland or X11, and PulseAudio already on the system.

macOS: the first launch needs a right-click

This build is ad-hoc signed, not notarised, so macOS refuses to open it from a download the first time. Once:

Right-click (or Control-click) OldAmber.app, choose Open, then Open again in the dialog.

If there is no Open button, it is the newer wording: System Settings, then Privacy & Security, then scroll down and choose Open Anyway.

Notarising removes this step and requires a paid Developer ID tied to a legal identity, which this project does not do.

Not in this release

• Trading and link battles. Absent for now, and planned. Everything else in the mainline single-player game is playable.
• Some presentation options are withheld because they are not finished: the Gen 2 battle UI, the Crystal sprite and cry sets, and the ENHANCED and VIBRANT palettes.

Checksums

0609f140166ff19540df35a6083e8c41ae549fc2128902c557a0fcfa719f18d7  OldAmber-0.0.1-windows-x64.zip
5cfca59586fa922503ac1ab88818b424f9c213a183ee0bdc407746d33659dd53  OldAmber-0.0.1-macos-universal.zip
1678eb3b1bbcd0a7d0683360ea7dc9c3c6b61b6327f80a7861af6ad598510eab  OldAmber-0.0.1-linux-x64.tar.gz
7f7709f84d2d09ac1b2161703fc144efdb380619595d79cf884a8fa39487ae25  OldAmber-0.0.1-x86_64.AppImage
3d419e3ac2a1b48da9a47f529e31dbd00d04c16b6b8266374074e42092be56f3  OldAmber-0.0.1-linux-x86_64.flatpak

Thanks

To pret, whose preservation work on the Game Boy Poke games has taught a generation of people how this hardware and these games actually work. This simply would not be possible without their work.

To SameBoy for its LCD and colour correction work as-well as it's APU architecture, and to NTSC-CRT for the composite signal simulation, both of which the presentation layer builds on.

This repository contains no ROM data and no proprietary assets. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.