u/Jengolus

Here's an update for RAManimator, the Lua script that lets you animate GB & GBA games on desktop mGBA (doesn't work on mobile). It works as a wrapper around the ROM, so you can try to use it even with hacks not designed for it and might just get lucky. It runs out of the box for mainline Pokémon games of gens 1-3 in all languages.

This patch adds animations to the remaining monsters used by the rival in Red & Blue, meaning those fights are now fully animated. The new ones are Raticate, as well as the Abra, Magikarp, Exeggcute, and Growlithe lines.

Further, we have the first batch of contributed animations: 13 gen 2 fronts by Accad501 🎉 All other gen 2 sprites loop the animations from Crystal.

If you would like to contribute animations (also for gen 3 games), please don't hesitate to send them to me. RAManimator features an Aseprite plugin that lets you hot-patch the animations in-game as you draw, and provides some other amenities; the instructions are here, but you can also send me plain GIFs.

To see the animations from the original release in action, here's a video for gen 1 and another one for gen 3.

You can download it from the Github repo, where you'll also find the instructions on how to set it up for hacks.

I just published RAManimator, a Lua script you can use with mGBA to animate GB & GBA games. It monitors which graphics are loaded into RAM and places the frames directly there, so it works without changes to the actual ROM. It should run out of the box for mainline Pokémon games of gens 1-3 in all languages.

It also works with hacks if the monster sprites aren't changed. The docs contain instructions on how to generate a configuration directly from a decompilation repo if you want to support it explicitly (which would be super cool!).

To see the animations in action, here's a video for gen 1 and another one for gen 3.

You can download it from the Github repo, where you'll also find the instructions.

EDIT
Thank you for the interest! Here are the collected answers to the repeated questions for easier reference:

- This is not a ROM hack. It works by letting the emulator (only works on desktop mGBA) manipulate the RAM. That means you can apply it on top of already existing games and most technical limitations are gone, but it only works on desktop.

- It also works for Gen 2 where it does a slightly modified loop of the Crystal animations.

- The sprites for Gen 3 are ported from gen 5. That's why the back sprites are so small. Gen 5 scales them up with the dynamic camera, but a bare upscale looks really bad on GBA, sliding them down a bit like they are in the base games makes them even smaller. Talented people could animate the emerald expansion sprites, though. RAManimator has an interface to Aseprite / plain GIFs to do that.

Since it isn't a ROM hack, you can download it and load it for any hack you are currently playing -- if the ROM doesn't change the graphics, it might just work and does not require any patching!