I played all of the games growing up, all the way up to Emerald. I always wanted to complete the Pokedex without cheats, so…
-> Pokemon Emerald Recharged – a mod of Emerald with QoL changes, graphic changes, change in spawn rates (most noticeable, Feebas) and triggers for Pokemon that normally can't be achieved
-> Earlier I had played Pokemon Definitive Heart Gold – similar to above, but I caught the first 251 Pokemon and then decided I wanted all of Gen III but couldn't easily trade these to Emerald as it was in a different emulator so I just did it all again…
-> Pokemon FRLG+ – a mod that toggles between Fire Red and Leaf Green with a bunch of similar QoL changes
Using the Pizza Boy emulator I could trade to myself between these two ROMs on my phone. It was cool having an item that let me "trade evolve" and later the game granted access to the event tickets which would let me get Deoxys and so on. The biggest pain was getting Celebi who didn't have an event in the vanilla game and didn't show up in these mods.
-> I used the pomeg berry glitch for Celebi which was hell, as the glitch had been patched in these modded games so I started a fresh vanilla Emerald game to get it, traded all the prep work over, then used the daycare centre to fix the glitch and beat the Elite 4 so it could be traded over to complete the Emerald National Pokedex!
by ElWonAte