Storing creatures with SQL

Homebrew alternatives to Pokémon Bank.

Posted on January 2, 2023

I really like to play Pokémon games. I played virtually all of them, up to Sun and Moon generation. The last generations for 3DS console came with Pokémon Bank, a cool app to store your Pokémon on the cloud and get your retro Pokémon back from even Generation I games using Virtual Console.

Although, I never had a 3DS, which means I played X/Y/OR/AS using emulators. The experience is pretty much the same and sometimes it is even better to have the opportunity to do soft resets and walkthroughs faster than in the actual console, but I really miss a tool to have the same place to store Pokémon as PokéBank runs for 3DS.

So I started to look through projects that replicates this very same utility from Pokémon Bank and I actually found some pretty interesting things:

Pokémon Chest

Pokémon Chest is a Pokémon Bank open source alternative available for Nintendo DS games (3rd through 5th generation) that makes possible the same features that Pokémon Bank does. I tried to use on my DSi (which I do have one) and it runs pretty ok, had some bugs and I would say that the UX is not the best, but it does what it says it does.

PHBank

“PHBank is a homebrew which allows to manage a local bank for XY and ORAS Pokémon games, just like the Pokébank, but as a free offline service. This homebrew is not intended to cheat (not even cloning). It’s just a storage solution.”

This is what the GitHub readme says about the project. I can’t check it because, well, I don’t have the console to try it out but the repository is now archived and the last commit was six years ago.