Minor save edits and legality

[Thorf]

There is quite a lot of discussion here about the legality of edited Pokemon, but I've been wondering what effect (if any) minor edits have to a save file. For example, my wife DS's date was a year out when I used it to beat the elite four for the first time in Diamond, resulting in a weird save where I started my game in 2007 and finished it in 2006. Does changing these dates - or the dates Pokemon were caught on - have any effect on the integrity of the save file itself?

Generally I'm more interested in Pokesav and similar programs for their backup and storage capabilities rather than editing Pokemon stats and so on, but I want to know if these seemingly minor changes are going to have any effect on my game before going ahead with them.

[TheBeunhaas]

I have used nearly all features of pokesav, and, as long as you don't make your pokemon extremely illegal (e.g. IVs over 31, total EVs over 510 etc., you know it) then you should be perfectly fine. These games are stable these days, and the only crashing that I get is whenever I access data that isn't programmed (like pokémon with a decimal identifier greater than 494, basically anything you shouldn't do, like going to unprogrammed maps off the world map, but even then crashes are rare.)

So, you can use these things safely, and editing things like hall of fame debut can be done without too much hassle, aswell as saving and loading .pkm files.