suiCune: Pokemon Crystal Gets a Native PC Port Built From Scratch

Hot on the heels of the surprise Pokémon Platinum PC port, Pokémon Crystal has made its way to PC via a project called suiCune, developed by DanZC and wowjinxy. Unlike the Platinum port, suiCune is a clean port built from scratch in C99 based on the PRET (Pokémon Reverse Engineering Team) decompilation, with no dependency on leaked Nintendo source code.

The project has roots going back to 2022, when developer froggestspirit started a Crystal port using PRET’s decompilation work. That repository was archived in February 2022 after a few early commits. DanZC and wowjinxy then forked it and continued development, hand-converting the original Game Boy Color’s Z80 assembly into equivalent C99 logic rather than relying on an automated translation.

Developer wowjinxy described the effort: “suiCune had every single function hand written to match the exact logic of the assembly. It would be one thing to stop there, however we also kept save compatibility with the original Pokemon Crystal and got native online working by using REON, an open source reimplementation of the GameBoy’s network adapter.”