Did some testing with a bunch of things — long story short, none of them worked.
I grabbed the FW3Downgrader and downgraded the kernel and firmware to K1.01 and FW3, but it only reported that on the SP — original hardware. On The Pocket, it still showed as FW7.
Tried updating from the SP to FW9, worked fine. Put Omega into Pocket, still says FW7, same boot message about updating to FW9. Updating from the Pocket *looks* fine, as in things show they’ve been updated, but upon restarting the console, the same message about updating from FW7 to FW9 shows up.
Tried the recovery image as well and choosing “Update Loader” with the image flashed to an SD card, but it produces the same set of problems. Tried every which way, doing it from SP, doing it from the Pocket, downgrade on SP, upgrasde on Pocket and vice versa. Same issue persists.
There seems be no way a user can fix this and the fix may need to come directly from Analogue, but who knows. I think a safe measure would be to upgrasde to the latest firmware from original hardware first, then placing in the Pocket and using as normal.
The Mother 3 issue never fixed or corrected itself — nothing worked. Boots normally from SD sometimes, but most times it has grabbled visuals. Booting from NOR has never worked. Tested other SD cards, same problem. ROM works fine on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android emulators, and in original hardware, but fails on the Pocket.
Weird issue. Hopefully these notes can assist someone somewhere in finding a solution.