Here's a mostly-reverse-engineered structure from New Super Mario Bros. U that outlines what kinds of things they were collecting in 2012:

Man, I didn't mean to get people fear mongering about this... This is completely normal, inoffensive, they've been doing it for decades, and you agreed to it when you signed up for your Nintendo account. You can even disable it here, if you'd like:

This was still more interesting than I expected, at least, especially as a non-Pokemon fan!

Well, I tried very hard to find what the list of Pokemon names is used for, and we gave up on searching for the naughty words list. It'd also be neat to figure out what other differences might exist in the ROM. But I'm gonna have to call it quits here.

I love <failed Decrypt>

I found a function that initialises the emulator hacks based on the GBA ROM's ID. These are the IDs the emulator recognises for the Pokemon hacks. BPR and BPG are FireRed and LeafGreen, respectively, but AXV, AXP, and BPE are Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald, respectively. Huh.

Here's something from the emulator code: it sends telemetry about your game progress to Nintendo. There's quite a lot, including some things that aren't pictured, like which Pokemon you have and what level they're each at.

I'm not familiar enough with the GBA Classics app to have determined this myself, but I spoke with @LuigiBlood who confirmed for me that this is the same "Sloop" emulator.

Dumping the strings from the emulator executable, and holy hardcodes; it seems to have the name of every Pokemon in here. I didn't look very hard, but i didn't find what these are used for. Pokemon Home transfers or something, maybe? IDK.

Default player names (thanks to Skawo for finding these): RED LEAF FIRE GARY KAZ TORU ASH KENE GEKI JAK JANNE JONN KAMON KARL TAYLOR OSCAR HIRO MAX JON RALPH KAY TOSH ROAK OMI JODI AMANDA HILLARY MAKEY MICHI PAULA JUNE CASSIE REY SEDA KIKO MINA NORIE SAI MOMO SUZI

The game has a word filter - implemented in the ROM itself, not as an emulator patch. If you name yourself a swear, your name reverts to one of several default names. Offensive Pokemon nicknames revert to the species name.

The ROM opens up in mGBA, but it complains about an unimplemented syscall, which presumably means there are some emulator-specific hack shenanigans.

Notably, the ROMs contain the build date! Revision 0: 2004 04 26 11:20 Revision 1: 2004 07 20 09:30 Revision A: 2025 12 19 16:01 2025 12 19 15:38 22afedd9 (The second looks like a version control commit ID maybe?)

Of course, I immediately compared this ROM to the original. FireRed originally had two revisions (revisions 0 and 1). This ROM, surprisingly, isn't revision 1; it's a brand new revision A, and the ROM is very different.

OK, here's my "the (English) Pokemon FireRed game for the Nintendo Switch system" cursory analysis. First of all, I dumped the game to immediately discover the most sad romfs ever:

they removed the n64 trees new pokemon gen looks visually good wtf

important video

$20 is automatically overpriced for a GBA ROM, but what do you MEAN each language is a separate purchase??? That is *offensive*. And no, "but they did it on 3DS a million years ago" doesn't make it OK. And "well it's better than buying the og cart for $500" isn't helpful either.

I think that's also why Nintendo "requires" a VR headset. They don't want people to get a false impression of how bad the VB games are by playing them in an unintended way. It's not to be greedy - although if you want to criticise them for that there are plenty other examples.

The Virtual Boy Classics app uses Lua scripts for everything, so it'd be trivial to mod it to work in docked mode and render a fullscreen 2D image, but I think people who want that are missing the fact that these games were designed for 3D and don't play very well without it.