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Nintendo e-Reader Gets Homebrew Dot-Code Games
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."
Decompiling games in not necessary to copy them, so this really doesn't mean anything for piracy.
Copying a Nintendo cartridge and reproducing it is easy, you take a stainless steel screen stretched on a frame, coat it with emulsion, bring it over to a screensetter (or film and a light source), burn a copy of the games instructions onto the screen, wash it out, block it out, and print the game onto a piece of silicone with conductive metal, cure it - and plug it in. Once set up (couple hundred dollars per cartridge) it costs barely more than the materials themselves to mass produce these.
With a high resolution scanner, Photoshop, screen printing equipment, silicone, and some conductive alloys with a low melting point you can reproduce a thousand cartridges for the price of 10 games in one day.
Remember when these were all over the place (10 years ago!) ? You'd buy a cartridge for $100 and it would have 150 games on it. I still have a couple of those, although most of the games are in Japanese.