Cdtrjyty

So I recently got my partner addicted to Pokemon, and they are about to start playing Heart Gold on a cartridge we found at Gamestop. I would like to play with them to help complete their Pokedex, and I was thinking emulation might be our best bet (we can not find a copy of soul silver from a reputable source in our budget, and it looks like Action Replays have also fallen by the wayside).

I saw a few old posts along these lines, but they either seemed to be for different use-cases (playing the game partially on an emulator, then continuing the save on hardware was one I saw) or threw out answers that required prior knowledge of some technology I am not familiar with (more on that below).

Right now we have a Heart Gold cartridge, a 3DS, a 3DSXL, and a laptop running DeSMUme (I also have experience running games on emulators, and can set up a different emulator if that would be better for what I need). I would like to do one of two things.

Optimally, I would like to be able to have a copy of Heart Gold running on my laptop (using a backup of our Heart Gold cartridge for legality's sake) that I can play on my own and use to battle or trade with my partner (either by connecting one DS to the laptop, or by transferring the emulated HG save to one DS and playing the original cartridge on another). This would allow me to build my own team, catch what pokemon I can, and hack the ROM to include Soul Silver exclusives.

If that's not possible/reasonable/legal enough to be considered on this website (I admit, that's taking the "backups are fair use" and argument to a bit of an extreme), I would like to be able to clone the physical cartridge to a ROM, hack the ROM with the pokemon I want to add (replacing an Kadabra with an Alakazam, adding version exclusives, etc) and then write the modified save back to the physical cartridge. I feel like it's a bit cheaper, but we could just call it a workaround for trading where my partner has to release a certain pokemon and I will add another pokemon for them.

Now, I have read some answers talk about using flash carts. Given that Action Replays are appearing to be rare, and break down quickly anyway, is using a flash cart my only option? If so, could you explain to someone who has little personal experience with flash carts where I could find one that is reliable for a reasonable price, and how I would use it to do either the first or second thing above?