While looking for footage of a shiny pokemon on an OG GB out of curiosity, I found this video where someone managed to remove the no-original GB lock from Crystal and shenanigans ensued… i really need to try this at some point https://youtu.be/5XyU-nX5Uf0
You can see why this game was for GBC only. See how everything is messed up? It defo needed that little bit of additional power to run
@Lugia what did it even have beyond gold and silver that required the gbc, anyway? the animated sprites probably took a lot of memory and needed the GBC's increased RAM, but did crystal have anything else that would need that much more power?
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@Lugia of course with knowing you have that RAM available, I'm sure you would make use of it to make things run smoother, so there's probably a ton of stuff being written into high RAM addresses that are aliased to low addresses on the DMG and overwriting other stuff, hence the glitchiness
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@Felthry besides sprites, there would be added content with the battle tower which may have needed additional memory to include..? Other than that? Well maybe the more animated intro, but I doubt its anymore animated than G/S?
Mystery Gift feature using the infrared may have been something else. Oh yeah and use of the cellphone adapter for the japan only event(s) (notably Celebi)
Besides all that, its essentially the same game with some minor story differences with Eusine and stuff. I think they may have wanted to either do an improved, “definitive” version like they did with Pokemon Blue following Red & Green in japan. Or maybe they had a deal w Nintendo to make a GBC exclusive. Or maybe both!
But honestly, just the animated sprites are worth the additional required space, since most if not all of them have ~4 frames. 4 x 256, makes a lotta tiles
@Lugia the sprites are heavily compressed, and it looks like they tried to confine the animation to as few tiles as possible, so I doubt the animation format actually requires four times the tiles of the static sprite (and definitely not 256 tiles per sprite either, the largest ones were 49 tiles (7x7) but they also came in 5x5 and 6x6 sizes. lots of memory, regardless)
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@Lugia we remember hearing that inventing a compression algorithm to make kanto fit in gold and silver was the first Big Thing that Iwata did that started him on the promotion path to CEO of nintendo
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@Lugia but yeah they crammed a ton of stuff into those cartridges
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@Felthry indeed, Iwata helped cram all of Kanto inside those cartridges. Before then, as proven by the leaked Spaceworld demo from a few years ago, Kanto was just going to be a single map containing all of kanto, with cities being represented by 1 or 2 buildings, except for Pallet Town which would have kept its original size. (Source: https://tcrf.net/Proto:Pokémon_Gold_and_Silver/Spaceworld_1997_Demo/Maps#Pallet_Town )
Mr. Iwata helped make Kanto and Johto in a single cartridge a reality, without much compromises. Definetively a good start on the road of becoming CEO
@Felthry oh yeah true. But in Gold and Silver, they already, as far as I’m aware, squeezed data in a lot to try and have it all fit in the cartridge. So maybe the additional data, even if compressed and confined, may have needed that extra juice
But i still think in the back of my mind that it was mostly a “yeah this’ll sell gameboys” kinda thing