Developer Francis Stokes has begun dumping the read-only reminiscence (ROM) pictures from outdated Nintendo Sport Boy cartridges, however he is taking a special strategy to most — utilizing the Sport Boy {hardware} itself to repeat the cartridge contents and ship it out over the hyperlink port.
“The normal strategy is that you’d by some means discover a approach to open up the cartridge,” Stokes explains of the standard ROM-dumping course of, “so possibly you even have the proprietary screwdriver that interfaces with the screw that Nintendo determined they might use on these cartridges, and inside you’ll discover a circuit board and that circuit board might comprise quite a few chips — however not less than one in all them might be a ROM chip.”
“What you do is you desolder that ROM chip together with your hot-air rework station,” Stokes continues, “and you are taking the chip, and also you rigorously place it in your EPROM reader/author, and also you dump the information over some historic cable to your pc. After which you may have the information that’s what makes up the sport, and that is what hundreds instantly into an emulator.”
Stokes, fairly rightly, factors out a couple of drawbacks to this strategy — reminiscent of not everybody gaining access to a hot-air rework station or the talents to make use of it with out everlasting harm to the cartridge and the necessity for doubtlessly costly EPROM reader. His answer, then, is to make use of a bit of {hardware} already designed to learn the contents of Sport Boy cartridges: a Sport Boy.
“We do not want any specialised tools aside from the Sport Boy itself,” Stokes explains. In what Stokes calls a “heist,” the challenge sees the Sport Boy satisfied to run customized code, which reads within the contents of the cartridge at present put in in its slot then sends it out over the hyperlink port — a characteristic widespread to most Sport Boy handhelds that enables two or extra consoles to be linked collectively for multi-player gaming however which, in Stokes’ challenge, serves the aim of offering an output for the cartridge knowledge.
A customized “recreation” dumps the ROM contents to the hyperlink port, to be captured by a logic analyzer. (📷: Low Byte Productions)
Utilizing a Saleae logic analyzer to take alerts from the hyperlink port, Stokes’ customized “recreation’ runs from the Sport Boy’s inside reminiscence — permitting the cartridge holding the software program to be swapped out for the cartridge to be dumped — and sends the information to a number machine for storage as a comma separated worth (CSV) file, which may then be transformed right into a format acceptable to emulators.
Full challenge particulars can be found on Stokes’ YouTube channel, whereas the supply code for the ROM-dumping “recreation” has been included within the repository for Stoke’s TypeScript Embedded Sport Boy Macro Assembler (TEGA) on GitHub below the permissive MIT license.
