
Two Years Ago, I Asked If Pokémon Red Saves Could Be Converted to FireRed… Today, It Works!
Two years ago, I made this post asking whether it would be possible to continue a Pokémon Red journey in Pokémon FireRed
Today, I’m happy to say that I built it!
pkmn 2.0 can convert a Pokémon Red save into a working Pokémon FireRed save. Think like how you migrate your iPhone 13 to an iPhone 17 Pro. You get back all your data (not only iCloud) with the added 17 Pro features. The same way is what my project successfully does. It’s able to transfer your entire save progression from pokemon red to fire red. No one has ever done it and I though this would be an
Amazing project because I have dreamed of playing my pokemon red save on fire red without having to replay the game (I could have just replayed cuz it could have taken less time but doing this project now anyone with a click of button can convert their red save to fire red!)
Red and FireRed have completely different save structures, so this isn’t a matter of copying bytes from one save to another. The converter instead translates the meaning of the Red save into the corresponding FireRed state.
It also generates a conversion report explaining what was transferred, what had to be changed, and what was safely defaulted when the two games don’t have a direct equivalent.
I tested the complete conversion in an emulator: the converted save loaded successfully, the Pokémon and supported progress appeared correctly, and FireRed could save and reload normally afterward.
The project is free and open source, and it does not include or distribute any ROMs.
GitHub (pls star and share the project so people can hear about it): https://github.com/AAAMAQ/pkmn-cli
A huge thank you to everyone who encouraged the original idea, the pret decompilation contributors, the Pokémon Community Conversion Standard and Poké Transporter GB teams, StrategyWiki contributors, and everyone else who helped preserve and document knowledge about these games.
I also used OpenAI Codex as a research and engineering collaborator throughout the project, while I directed the work and personally performed the gameplay verification. There may be glitches or issue, if any is there feel free to report it!
Two years ago, this was only an idea.
Now it works. ❤️🔥
I LOVE YOU FIRE RED!