On a device with one screen, Settings > COMPANION VIEW picks how the companion shares it:

• WINDOW (the default): press BACK and the companion opens in the middle of the screen, over the game, which keeps running underneath. Your buttons work it like the game's own menus: the D-pad and A pick, L / R change tabs, B goes back, START closes it.
• SIDE PANEL: BACK slides it in beside the game; tap the padlock on its edge to lock it there (the game moves over), and drag that tab sideways to resize it.

Hold BACK to leave the game.

Hold a phone upright and the game sits across the top with the companion docked under it. Drag the grip on the companion's top edge to pick its height, or tap the grip to step through small, normal and full. Without a controller, the touch controls fill the space between the game and the companion.

On a dual-screen device, SINGLE SCREEN (Settings > SCREEN) plays it the one-screen way and hands the second screen back to Android, for a video or a chat app while you play.

PokeDaisy checks for a new version each time you open it and offers to install it. You can also check from Settings > VERSION.

The app's own text comes in English, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (Brazil's and Portugal's). By default it follows the ROM's language (the device's in the Library; no game is in Portuguese, so a Portuguese device keeps Portuguese over an English game); pick another under LANGUAGE in either Settings screen. Species, move and item names and the GUIDE pages stay as the game has them (a translated hack's in its language; Quetzal's in the ones its own IDIOMA options pick).

• Fast-forward with a speed cap (1.5× to 10×, or no cap), plus slow motion. Smart fast-forward drops to normal speed in menus and on the map, and keeps battles fast. Game speed (on the bottom screen's Settings) sets a pace that stays, per game: 0.25×, 0.5×, 1×, 1.5×, 2×, 3× or 4×.
• Real-time clock for the games that use one (Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald and ROM hacks): day and night, berries, tides and daily events follow the device's clock, and saves keep it.
• Fast-forward music that keeps playing the song at its normal speed, instead of chipmunk sound.
• Save states on hotkeys, with undo.
• Rewind (optional, Settings > REWIND): hold the REWIND HOLD hotkey (R on a keyboard; pick a pad button in HOTKEYS) to play the last ~20 seconds backwards. It never touches your save file.
• Status bar (optional): game, location, money, clock and battery above the game.
• Aspect: the game's own shape (the GBA's 3:2, the Game Boy's 10:9), stretched to fill a 16:9 top screen, or EXPAND: the overworld drawn past the GBA's edges - beside the game on a wide screen, above and below it on a phone held upright - so the screen shows more of the map with the pixels kept square (FireRed, LeafGreen, Emerald, Ruby and Sapphire, every language and revision, plus Unbound, Radical Red, Lazarus, SoulGold, Heart and Soul, Gaia, Odyssey, Amethyst 1.3.0, Glazed, Seaglass, Emerald Imperium, Emerald Rogue, Too Many Types 2, Recharged Yellow, Super Mariomon, Ultra Violet, FireRed Rocket Edition, Ash Gray, Ghost Grey, Elite Redux, Sword and Shield Ultimate Plus, GS Chronicles and Celia's hack; on the Game Boy, Pokémon Yellow, English, and Crystal, their field only; on the DS, Platinum, HeartGold and SoulSilver, their 3D overworld drawn past the screen's edges and their battles too). The extra strips are rebuilt every frame from the game's own map, tiles and sprites. Battles are wide too: their scenery runs on past the edges and the battlers, trainers and healthboxes slide in from off screen. Fog, ash and rain reach the screen's edges, and dark caves stay dark around Flash's light. On the title screen and in menus the strips glow with the colours at the game's edges, crossfading as you go in and out. Settings shows a preview of each. With EXPAND on, ZOOM (R3, the right stick's click; any button under HOTKEYS) steps out to see more of the surroundings, easing back in for battles, conversations and menus, and the right stick looks around (the view stays put until you walk; held while walking, it looks ahead with your character kept on screen).
• Shaders (optional): an LCD grid (plain or on paper), scanlines or a CRT look, and the colours as the GBA's own screen showed them - on the game and, if you like, the companion screen too. Edge smoothing (xBRZ, xBR, ScaleFX) on the game, alone or under any of them. UNLIT SCREEN shows the first GBA's screen with no light behind it: white is the screen's grey-green backing and dark pixels cast a soft shadow onto it.
• Overlays (optional, Settings > OVERLAY): a frame around the game - two of PokeDaisy's own, or your own RetroArch overlays (a .cfg with its PNG, a .zip of them, or any PNG with a see-through screen). None come bundled: bring the ones you already use. Pick them from either screen.
• Controls: remap every game button and hotkey, or turn hotkeys off. X and Y are a second START and SELECT, like the menu and registered-item buttons in the DS games. TURBO A and TURBO B can go on any button (GAME BUTTONS): held, they press A / B over and over, in game time, so they keep up with fast-forward. TOUCH CONTROLS appear when no controller is connected, and hide once a controller is used: ready-made layouts (SIDES keeps them in the bars beside the game), size, opacity, extra FF / QUICK MENU / turbo / state buttons, and EDIT LAYOUT to drag and resize each button, with a preview, upright and sideways apart. Bluetooth and USB controllers (8BitDo, GameSir, Xbox, ...) connect while a game is running without restarting it, and HOME / guide works like a BACK tap for the companion.
• Settings search: type what you're after ("key bindings", "rebind", "turbo", "box art") and the matching settings show, whatever PokeDaisy calls them. First-time setup also walks through the game buttons.
• Themes: PokeDaisy (the default, the website's light backdrop with floating logos) or one of eight game-coloured ones (FireRed, LeafGreen, Emerald, ...) for the library and settings, in Settings > THEME.

• List or grid view, recently played, and cover art from SteamGridDB or RetroAchievements box art (or pick your own image).
• Dual-screen launcher: with two screens, the game list is on one and the game you're on on the other: its cover, when you last played it and whether it has a save. X swaps the screens (animated), A opens the game, B its options, Y Settings - a legend in the corner shows them. Settings > DUAL-SCREEN LAUNCHER turns it off.
• ROMs can be plain .gba, .gb, .gbc or .nds files or zipped (.zip / .7z), in your ROMs folder or imported with +.
• Refresh rescans your ROMs folder and tells you what it found.
• Long-press a game to:
  • Rename or hide it.
  • Load a save file into it (your current save is kept as a dated backup).
  • See its info: ROM, save file and save states.
  • Give it its own save folder (another emulator's, so both keep playing the same save).
• Games the companion can't read yet are tagged NOT SUPPORTED. Their INFO, and the companion's own notice, have an ASK FOR SUPPORT button that opens a game request with the ROM's file name and SHA-1 (never the ROM).
• Best effort for those: in game, PokeDaisy reads the ROM as each game it knows, by itself, and keeps the one that fits. A different build of a supported version is then just supported; a hack that shares a supported game's memory gets party, bag, map and battles (tagged PARTIALLY SUPPORTED, with whatever didn't match - dex, guide, item text - switched off). When no game clearly fits, the companion asks WHICH GAME IS THIS? with the likely ones first (also under the library's INFO > PICK A GAME). It's remembered for that ROM; INFO > FORGET MATCH undoes it. Unsupported hacks of FireRed, LeafGreen, Emerald, Ruby or Sapphire in your ROMs folder are listed (tagged) so you can try them.
• Works with frontends like ES-DE, Cocoon and iiSU. They can launch a game straight into PokeDaisy. Setup guides for iiSU and ES-DE; the technical details are for other frontends.

Saves are standard .sav / .srm files, the same format as mGBA and RetroArch, so you can move them between emulators freely. A game finds its save by the ROM's file name (for a zipped game, the name of the ROM inside the archive, as in RetroArch).

To share saves with RetroArch, add its save folders under Settings > FOLDERS > ALSO LOOK IN (e.g. RetroArch/saves/mGBA and RetroArch/saves/gpSP): a save found there is played and written right there, so RetroArch keeps seeing it. New saves go to PokeDaisy's saves folder. A single game can also have its own folder (its library menu > SAVE FOLDER). Only the folders themselves are searched, never their subfolders, so a synced folder's version history (Syncthing's .stversions) is left alone.

Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, Crystal and the Crystal hacks Crystal Clear, Prism and Polished Crystal are the Game Boy games the companion reads, each in the game's own look (its font, icons and town maps, rebuilt from your ROM; Red and Blue in the colours a Super Game Boy gives them). The German, French, Italian and Spanish Yellows show their own names, Pokédex pages and battle words. Prism shows its own Pokémon, moves, types, six town maps and its own Pokédex (its 253 in the game's order). Polished Crystal shows its own Pokémon (regional forms included), moves, types, items, its Johto, Kanto and Orange Islands maps and its 289 in National order; its faithful builds keep the original games' types and moves, as the game does. Platinum, HeartGold and SoulSilver are the DS games the companion reads, in the USA release listed (Platinum's revision 1); their pictures, Pokédex pages and maps come from your cart. Platinum's battles show in the BATTLE tab, HeartGold's and SoulSilver's not yet, and on the DS the battle buttons don't press the game's menus yet. On a one-screen device a DS game shows its top screen; the touch screen needs a second screen for now. Map ◐ means place names only, without the map picture. Guide ◐ means the live pages only (the wild encounters here and the next boss), without the area lists. Battle ◐ means the battle panes work but haven't been checked in every kind of battle. The guides were written from each game's own data and may contain mistakes; the app says so the first time you open one.

This project may use AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude Code, to help with code generation, refactoring, and documentation. All changes are still reviewed by the maintainer and validated with the project's existing checks before release.

• mGBA by Vicki Pfau (endrift) and contributors runs the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and GBA games (MPL 2.0; source in third_party/mgba), with its bundled blip_buf (LGPL 2.1) and inih (BSD).
• melonDS by the melonDS team runs the DS games (GPL 3.0; source in third_party/melonds, PokeDaisy's changes in third_party/patches), with its bundled FatFs, Teakra (MIT), xxHash (BSD 2-Clause), tiny-AES-c (Unlicense), blip_buf (LGPL 2.1) and Dolphin's ARM64 emitter (GPL 2.0+).
• rcheevos by RetroAchievements.org (MIT) for achievements.
• Pixel Operator font by Jayvee Enaguas (CC0), and Atkinson Hyperlegible by the Braille Institute (OFL 1.1) for the manual's text.
• PixelMplus (M+ FONT LICENSE, M+ FONTS PROJECT) for Japanese text, converted to Pixel Operator's pixel grid by scripts/gen_jp_font.py.
• The pret decompilation projects (pokered, pokeyellow, pokegold, pokecrystal, pokefirered, pokeemerald, pokeruby, pokeplatinum, pokeheartgold), pokeemerald-expansion and Polished Crystal's source, which the game data and guides were checked against.
• Screen shaders: LCD and scanlines from mGBA's (MIT), the GBA colours by Pokefan531 and hunterk, LCD PAPER after RetroArch's simpletex_lcd and zfast_lcd (GPL 2.0+), and libretro's xBR, xBRZ and ScaleFX for edge smoothing (MIT, xBRZ GPL 3.0).
• PokeAPI (BSD 3-Clause) for the National Dex species list.
• AndroidX, Jetpack Compose, Kotlin and Apache Commons Compress (Apache 2.0), XZ for Java (0BSD).

Every license is in NOTICE and, in the app, under Settings > LICENSES.

• Cover art from SteamGridDB and its contributors, and box art from RetroAchievements.