Enable Surfing Pikachu Minigame (without Pokemon Stadium)

Enable Pikachu Surfing Minigame

There is a house near the beach where you can play a surfing minigame if your pikachu, which Oak gave you, knows Surf. As pikachu can't learn Surf from HMs, originally the only way to make that happen was either to get it through Pokemon Stadium, or a real-world event. It means it's pretty much impossible to get it these days without hacking.

The entire Pokemon Yellow game is full of a lot of checks to ensure the pikachu you have is both the one Oak gave you (STARTER_PIKACHU), and one you did not trade away to (then get back from) another player. This makes us have to take a lot of extra steps to change anything involving pikachu or the starter pokemon.

However to hackers this is a relatively easy fix! There are 2 main ways:

WAY ONE: Allow pikachu to learn surf by HMs:

Go to: data/pokemon/base_stats/pikachu.asm

-	     SUBSTITUTE,   FLASH
+	     SUBSTITUTE,   FLASH,        SURF,

WAY TWO: Disable the check for if pikachu knows surf or not. This way any pikachu caught in your game will be able to do the surfing minigame, but a pikachu traded in from another person's game will not. Code by SatoMew:

Go to: /scripts/SummerBeachHouse.asm and copy-paste this in to the relevant spot:

SurfinDudeText:
    text_asm
    ld a, [wd472]
    bit 7, a
    jr nz, .next
    ld hl, .SurfinDudeText4
    call PrintText
    jr .done
...

SummerBeachHouseSign4Text:
    text_asm
    ld a, 1
    ld [wDoNotWaitForButtonPressAfterDisplayingText], a
    ld a, [wd472]
    bit 7, a
    jr z, .asm_f2369

...

SatoMew’s advice: “I'd advise changing the 3 "bit 6"'s before this section from 6 to 7 as well”.

Happy surfin'!