Mingo runs Pokémon Emerald (Chinese) in your browser and turns every line of dialogue into a live lesson — pinyin over every character, tone colors, one-click word meanings, spoken audio, and an export-to-Anki vocab deck.
Pinyin above each character and Pleco-standard tone colors, rendered live as the game prints text.
Click any word for its meaning, traditional form, and per-character tones — powered by CC-CEDICT plus a game-specific dictionary.
Every line gets audio: pre-rendered native-quality voices, smart fragment splicing, and on-demand neural TTS for the long tail.
Save words as you play, drill them with built-in flashcards, or export to Anki/CSV in one click.
In-game saves persist in your browser across sessions. Back up or import .sav files anytime.
Your ROM and your save never leave your device. No account, no tracking, no upload.
Bring your own Chinese fan-translation of Pokémon Emerald (a .gba patch — vanilla US Emerald won't work). Best results: build from our GitHub fork, which the dialogue scanner supports out of the box. Stored only in your browser; pick it once.
The built-in scanner reads dialogue straight from the game's memory — no OCR, no lag, frame-accurate.
Read with pinyin, listen, click words you don't know, and walk away with an Anki deck of vocab you met in context.
No. You need your own Chinese fan-translation of Pokémon Emerald (a 简体中文 .gba ROM patch — the official game was never released in Chinese). Vanilla US/EU Emerald has no Chinese text for the scanner to read and won't work. Mingo is an emulator + study layer and ships no Nintendo content.
If you build your own ROM, use our pokeemerald-expansion fork (branch mingo-beacon): it embeds a small "tooling beacon" in the ROM so the dialogue scanner finds the right memory addresses in any build. ROMs built from other sources may play fine but show "Waiting for dialogue…" forever.
It's not OCR — the scanner reads the text directly from the emulated game's memory at 60 fps, so it's exact, including speaker names and battle text.
Pokémon dialogue is short, repetitive, and context-rich — great from HSK 2–3 up. With pinyin and one-click lookups, ambitious beginners do fine.
Everything — ROM, game saves, vocab deck, audio cache — lives in your browser's local storage. Nothing is uploaded.
The UI is responsive with an on-screen gamepad. Desktop is the best experience; mobile support is improving.