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Nintendo e-Reader Gets Homebrew Dot-Code Games

Posted by simoniker on from the gotta-love-dem-hackers dept.

figa writes "Tim Schuerewegen announced that the Reed Solomon error correction used by the Nintendo Game Boy Advance e-Reader has been figured out. This was the last remaining obstacle to creating custom dot-code printouts for use with the GBA e-Reader (more info), which scans special Nintendo trading cards to load in mini-games on your Game Boy Advance. This should be a boon to homebrew GBA developers who want to print their own games - Schuerewegen has examples and documentation on his site, and has released a dot-code version of the homebrew BombSweeper game by SnowBro."

19 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Place You bets by Cyberglich · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How long till nintendo has this place shut down under the DMCA!

    1. Re:Place You bets by Schnapple · · Score: 5, Interesting
      How long till nintendo has this place shut down under the DMCA!
      I could be wrong, but I don't see Nintendo giving a damn about this. I finally picked one of these e-Readers up a few months back, only to find out Nintendo has essentially abandoned the thing. Those 13 NES games small enough to fit on five cards are the only ones being released. Most e-Reader cards are trite gimmicks, and the one release that looks rather interesting, the Game & Watch series, has been postponed so many times it looks like it'll never be released. Couple that with the fact that Nintendo is re-releasing some of the e-Reader NES games on GBA cartridges this summer and I don't think they'll give a damn that someone reverse engineered code that anyone can see.

      What I find interesting is how these things are to be printed or used. I was always on the impression that the information was too tiny to be reproduced except by high-end printers and scanners, making "piracy" a rare thing. Oh well, I guess I'll print some out on cardstock at work and see this afternoon...

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      Schnapple

    2. Re:Place You bets by t_allardyce · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Maybe, but thats not how management works: the legal departments lawyers see this and think "hmm big case, money" and then they make a presentation to the higher management featuring plenty of buzzwords including 'violation, intellectual property, copyright, stealing and terrorism' the management has no idea whats going on so they say "yeah heres some money fix it" The fact that this probably isnt even a DMCA violation doesnt matter, they are a big corporation and therefore they are _always_ right, even if they cant find a law to cover it they will still win, they'll probably just use the chewbacca defense (yeah there are similarly stupid things in real life that get pulled off in court).

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  2. Cauzin strip reader by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    So who remembers the old cauzin strip reader from the 80s when source code was actually listed in the computer magazines?

  3. Re:Homebrew? by InfinityWpi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Given that there are connectors that allow you to hook your GBA up to a USB port, it -is- reasonable to assume that, with way, way too much time on your hands, you could hack together some code that would let you beowulf these things... lesse, figure 16 UBS ports would let you hook 16 GBAs to a PC... code up a very simple kernel... of course, you'd then need 16 GBAs and 16 E-Readers... probably not worth it beyond being able to say "Hey, look what we did."

    But then, that's a good enough reason for most geeks.

  4. Hacked eReaders by dmayle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    With this, I think you'll start to see people hacking their eReaders to have enough memory to hold Nintendo ROMS and an emulator, or some such... I think the hardcopy computer code is a pretty cool idea...

    1. Re:Hacked eReaders by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      >With this, I think you'll start to see people hacking their eReaders to have enough memory to hold Nintendo ROMS and an emulator

      I'm not sure, but I think the e-Reader is just that: a card reader. The program/data goes into the GBA's internal RAM, so no hacking is needed.

      Of course, you DON'T want to know how many "cards" would be needed for a 256KB "emulator pack"...

      Okay, so it's about 1 card per 5KB. That means about 50-ish cards for a 256KB emulator pack.

      Still interested? :-)

  5. Curious like me ? by rcastro0 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    E-reader, uh ? I had never seen one of these. In fact, had never heard about them. So, to save you some time, this is what I found after looking for some info:
    Olympus Optical Co., Ltd. provides the "Dot Code Technology" used by the e-Reader to read data embedded on each e-Reader card. Each card can hold up to two code strips. A long bar holds 2.2 kilobytes of information and a short bar holds 1.4 kilobytes. The memory configuration in the e-Reader is 64Mb mask ROM and 1Mb flash memory. The scanned information transforms into a digital display on the Game Boy Advanced screen.

    More in this site. Frankly, it looks too large a device, and the info stored (4 kB) too little. Its price is cheap (US$ 39), but probably not so much for the young kids which would be interested. I would discard it as destined to fail if I didn't know the tremendous attraction that card trading games have for kids (see Magic The Gathering, Yu Gi Oh and Pokemon).
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  6. I want one on my buisness card! by Flat+Feet+Pete · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I want a line on my card, along with a QR code. Scan me, Scan me!

    Saying that a website where you could upload a gamboy sized image and have it produce a pdf encoding an image viewer would be very nice.

  7. Too much work by oGMo · · Score: 4, Interesting
    lesse, figure 16 UBS ports would let you hook 16 GBAs to a PC... code up a very simple kernel... of course, you'd then need 16 GBAs and 16 E-Readers... probably not worth it beyond being able to say "Hey, look what we did."

    There's no need to go to the trouble. You can already get flash carts that let you load far more code than one of these cards. Plus, on the GBA SP, there are both the regular 4-way serial connectors and the secondary I/O connector. I'm not sure the actual limits of either, but worst case you could chain them together, no USB hackery necessary.

    Of course, the GBA is hardly very powerful to begin with, as you imply, and this isn't really worth it besides the geek factor. However, 16-player doom might be fun, if you can find 16 people with GBAs...

    Or Tetrinet. I wish someone would port Tetrinet. 6 players there, and the GBA seriously lacks a good tetris.

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    Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage

    1. Re:Too much work by Jace+of+Fuse! · · Score: 2, Interesting

      16-player doom might be fun, if you can find 16 people with GBAs...

      With MILLIONS of GBAs sold... you should have no trouble finding someone with a GBA. Odds are you know lots of people with them, or people who have bought them for their kids.

      I personally own the original GBA and the SP, and I personally have at least 6 close friends with GBAs, and some family members.

      They're out there. You just might have a hard time finding people who want to huddle around for a game of DOOM.

      --

      "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

      Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
  8. Anti-piracy measures? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm not familiar with the actual e-reader mechanism, but from the description I've read of them, they're just fancy printed dots. It looks to me you could just pirate games with a good photocopier or scanner/printer. What are Nintendo's security measures? A special ink, or something?

  9. Re:Thanks to the awful Job Market by Kiryat+Malachi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is it really?

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  10. Finally! by mrseigen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I bought one with the intention that something like this would happen. I'll have to wait until after the slashdotting to translate my games to tiny little paper cards...

    Almost an anachronism, really. :) What's next, the "T-Reader"? I bet a GBA tape deck would really own.

  11. Re:Thanks to the awful Job Market by Kiryat+Malachi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I read the summaries on the first page.

    Each and every one appeared to be a comment. People make mistakes.

    Now, my one link, to the text of the law itself, says:

    "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law by 1
    President Clinton on October 28, 1998."

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    Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
    (I read with sigs off.)
  12. If memory serves, by Absurd+Being · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There was a gameboy printer out at some point. I'll be REALLY impressed when somebody figures out how to get the GBA to print its own cards for itself...

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    1. Re:If memory serves, by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The dots are too fine for the relatively shitty GB printer to output.

      --
      Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
  13. Re:The one thing Nintendo should do... by Abcd1234 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Indeed. The only console that rivals the GBA in terms of the size of it's homebrew community is the Dreamcast. Frankly, the GBA is *ridiculously* easy to develop for. You can use the standard GNU compiler chain (built to cross-compile for the ARM7TDMI), and the memory interfaces to the various hardware (VDP, etc) are incredibly simple and well documented. As for working on actual hardware, flash devices for the thing are dirt cheap, easy to find, and very easy to use. And for initial development, the emulators out there are excellent (hell, VBA can interface directly with gdb!). TBH, I can't think of a better platform for console hacking/experimentation, other than the DC, of course. :)

  14. not resolution, but relative frequency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Your deskjet won't probably print their games, but you can probably print your own games with a lower density and with less code.

    These types of devices look at things in a relative way; i.e. short exists relative to long, although they do have a broad absolute range as well.

    They have to have a lot of flexibility, because you're scanning by hand. You might scan quickly or slowly, but it should still usually work. That means that the absolute frequencies will differ, but the relative frequencies will be the same.