OK, so I was messing around with Bulbapedia earlier while figuring out some optimum levels to let my Diamond squad level up at and was reading the pages on the Gen 3 to Gen 4 importing, as opposed to the "time travel" trade scenario of Gen 1 and Gen 2, and as such started to wonder- what about a link between 2 and 3?



Before I start for those not 100% on the generations:

Gen 1: Red, Blue, Yellow

Gen 2: Gold, Silver, Crystal

Gen 3: Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, FireRed, LeafGreen

Gen 4: Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold, SoulSilver



As we all know (well, if you have any interest in the Pokemon games at all you should know) that sending data between generations has always been something that's had caveats and issues anyway: Gen 1 and Gen 2 has a "time travel" mechanism that allows trading by Gen 2 only allowing though on the Gen 2 cart's end creatures that are on Gen 1 and with only Gen 1 moves. As such, to a Gen 1 cart, a Gen 2 cart is just another Gen 1 cart, and while limiting the scope of trades this DOES make things doable.



Gen 3 to Gen 4 didn't involve trading, it involved importing. You stuck a Gen 3 cart into a DS with a Gen 4 card, booted the DS, then used the Pal Park facility to catch up to 6 Pokemon per day, who were your Gen 3 squad, removed from the Gen 3 cart as they were caught.



My thought at this point is about the missing link - a Gen 2 to Gen 3 path. Nintendo never did this as you can't link up GBA and GB© games, and the DS either can't read data from GB games at all (we're ignoring the fact that it can't execute the game data itself as all it's doing is reading and writing a flat file, not performing instructions in Z80 assembly) or they simply couldn't be bothered to support a game that would have been about 7 years old by the time the first gen 4 games came out.



What if this was doable? Is it? How I'm theorising is that a straight import could be doable a la Gen 3 --> Gen 4 with a PC application. Ignoring hardware for now (but we'll come back to this in a moment...), I see a PC utility that would basically run like an actual Pokemon game, for that extra layer of authenticity. When you start the program, it's as if you've just walked into a building like the games, with a character (it'd only be the one, you wouldn't choose it per se. Seeing as it's 2 to 3, it'd likely be Brendan who's used as the sprite with the entire place done up in Gen 3 graphics, but I digress from the core concept here), walking into what's in essence a building that's just the upper level of a Pokemon centre in Gold - specifically, the trading room section on the far right, and a PC - maybe a Nurse Joy on the left for squad healing and a couple of NPCs milling around just for the atmosphere chatting about the place like the GTS on Gen 4 and the Pokemon Communication Centre on Japanese Gen 2 did.



When you go over to the PC, you're asked to select a file from the actual Windows (I say Windows just for clarification purposes, this could easily be a cross platform app) computer you're running the utility from, and you pick a Gen 2 save file from a ROM. It then gets you to pick a Gen 3 ROM, you do that as well. You can then use the PC to arrange the party and boxes on the Gen 2 & Gen 3 sides, ensuring there's at least 1 Pokemon left in each squad to avoid issues if people aborted halfway though the procedure or whatever. Bearing in mind there's no easy way to check where a person saved by this method, you could easily be stuck in a large patch of grass with no Pokemon in a squad which is an instant recepie for crashing.



Once the Gen 2 side has 6 Pokemon in it to send (though as noted above, to avoid issues you'd only be able to actually send 5) and the Gen 3 side has gaps in the number of slots (up to 5) you want to send, you walk into the trade machine and there's some sort of animation a la the trade system that shows the Pokemon being sent, done one at a time. Once they're all done, you walk back out of the machine and going out of the door to the centre quits the app.



Doing Gen 2 --> 3 only removes the issues that come with bi-directional travel like erasing moves and etc. However here's where the clever part comes in - as I understand it, Gameshark/AR devices allow you to back up SRAM saves on GB© and GBA carts - this means you could have a direct line of travel with this utility and both of those to have a Pokemon on a Gen 1 cart travel all the way up though the chain so your original Pokemon Red starter Bulbasaur could be moved up to Heart Gold, for example.



I reckon this is feasible, certainly on the ROM side though I'm not 100% about hardware due to lack of knowledge on those save devices, and would plug a hole that's been left ever since Ruby & Sapphire were launched. Yes, arguably there's no need for this now that you can get all Pokemon using a combination of the Gen 3 and Gen 4 games but I'm thinking specifically for porting forward personal Pokemon from years back - or am I simply being too grandeous here and would a straightforward GUI app a la PokeSav be enough for most people - and more to the point, has something like this been done before, as if it would I'd be interested to hear about it.





Thoughts?

