Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Pokemon Mini LCD Game Hacked
Team Pokeme writes "Nintendo's Pokemon Mini LCD mini-handheld has been hacked by us - you can check out the videos on our site for more information. The cartridge pinout has been reverse engineered by using logic analyzers (thanks to DarkFader), and also the instruction set by disassembling (thanks DaveX!) the Pokemon Mini emulator that is built into Pokemon Channel, a GameCube game.
DaveX wrote the first homebrew game, SokoMini, after finding out the tilemap stuff."
I checked the videos, it seems like an interesting idea, but also somewhat confusing. How many games were on it at one time, and what all can you play on it now?
Nice site, btw.
Looking at the pinout to the cartridge, it appears up to 1 MB is addressable.
The address bus is 10 bits, selectable to represent the high or low byte of the address.
2 ^ 20 = 1048576 bytes
Not too shabby.
(Well, I tried to post the pinout since their website is responding very slowly, but Slashdot wouldn't accept it - "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.")
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Well, hacking a little box like this isn't (to me) particularly interesting. It does make me think that in 5 years or so, when your cell phone is also your camera, pda, MP3 player, portable wireless broadband storage device, etc., and Microsoft, the RIAA, etc. have bribed congress to allow them to hard-wire draconian DRM into a device that no sane person would want to live without, some nerd somewhere will figure out how to hack it.
Warms my heart.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
If it did matter, the site is hosted out of the US... which might mean that if they are foriegners, the DMCA doesn't mean do anything to them unless the EU did something radical that I am not aware of.
i ght.html
WHOIS results for 81.209.148.144
Generated by www.DNSstuff.com
Country: GERMANY
% This is the RIPE Whois server.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% Rights restricted by copyright.
% See http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/copyr
inetnum: 81.209.148.0 - 81.209.148.255
If only someone would come up with a way to hack the Leap Pad or a similar device. I really like how durable the things are, they can take a beating, but the books for it just suck. Most books seem one step removed from the "Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour".
I would like to put my own lessons into it. Printing pages, recording, would all be fun. I don't see any other really durable hardware for kids that can be expanded. A 4 year old can do a lot of damage to things.
Because I am actually training small yellow mice and large fire-breathing dragons to make each other faint.
I know, it's not quite as dramatic as your post.
I'm a little annoyed by the attitude here. This is a pretty impressive reverse engineering job, but most of Slashdot is just laughing it off because the device was originally created for Pokemon related games.
I mean, I doubt any of the mad PHP coderz around here could do anything these guys just did. I know I couldn't.
Really, give them some credit.
(Cue posts saying "man, it was a joke.")
Yeah. I'm too impatient to wait for their servers to be back online, so I'm asking anyway...
...not to mention the final product's value in kicks and giggles.
Do we ("we" as in just about everyone not mentioned in the article) get the benefit of a tutorial or perhaps a just few elaborate hints on how to do this ourselves?
If nothing explaining how to do this was/is ever written, there is absolutely no point in slashdotting this.
On the other hand, if a tutorial is available, I'd love to get started on it. It'd certainly make a great summer project and even a great gift to a fellow geek...
Hey look, another post stating the server is running off of said equipment.. Oooh boy lets mod it funny because we all know we havent heard this a million damn times.
Fucking insenstive-beowolf-clustered-Russian engineered-clods!
This seems like a pretty pointless rant, you might as well say, "why do anything"? I think the story of the reverse engineering of the Pokemon Mini is worth the 100kb of disk space on some web server it takes up. As far as how relevant it may be as "tech news", I can say that I constantly read up on some new, cool technology that I don't plan on owning anytime soon. Does that make it irrelevant? The parent post seems to suffer from a lamentable anti-Pokemon bias, which is too bad because the games are great. I myself am only familiar with Pokemon Mini from the emulator used in the Pokemon Channel GC game. The games are not great but I applaud the reverse engineering of this clever device.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.