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."

Comments

But at the end of the day...

[Tezkah]

... you realize that you spent your time hacking *pokemon minis*.

Re:But at the end of the day...

[Raven42rac]

Why not hack a Pokemon mini, everyone has to start somewhere, not everyone starts out hacking Crays and Beowulf clusters. Speaking of, here is the obligatory "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these".

Re:But at the end of the day...

[John Starks]

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.")

Re:But at the end of the day...

[kmhebert]

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.

Hacked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! I always wanted to play Pokemon vs Street Fighter.

looks pretty cool..

[dave1212]

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.

Shout-outs

[iswm]

Something about the 'shout-outs' in this article that keeps me from taking it a bit more seriously.

Re:Shout-outs

[Exiler]

The fact that it's the shout outs and not the child marketed cartoon-based franchise from Japan that prevents you from taking this article seriously keeps me from taking you a bit more seriously.

The real questions is...

[iserlohn]

Can NetBSD run on it yet? :)

Awesome...

[herrvinny]

Definitely going to try this stuff out. I'm a what people would call a Pokemon fanatic, have all the Pokemon Game Boy, GameCube and Nintendo 64 games (and occasionally duplicates of the same cartridge ;-) ), with all of them beat. (Okay, ladies and gentlemen, start your jokes).

But anyway, this looks _extremely_ nice, this might be useful as a screen to display quick stats on a server, or just as a game platform. Again, very nice job.

Re:Awesome...

[Quarters]

(Okay, ladies...)

Um...well, I guess I can respect your optimism.

Re:Awesome...

[foidulus]

given the current state of trolling, maybe gentlemen is also a bit optimistic :P

Improvement!

[xsupergr0verx]

Maybe they are hacking it to make the game fun?
Otherwise, I am impressed that a team of 8 year old girls had the know-how to hack their toys.
/sarcasm

1MB Max Cartridge Size

[Dan East]

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

Re:1MB Max Cartridge Size

[AmunRa]

Thers's actually only 19 Address bits therefore it has only half as much (512K) - still perfectly reasonable...

oo

[mattyrobinson69]

port linux to it
port bochs86 to it
run windown on it
play the windows version at an astonishingly bad fps/resolution

Call me crazy...

[gertsenl]

... but isn't this a violation of the DMCA? And isn't /. in violation for posting it? And aren't we in violation for reading it?

DAMN YOU, I'M A WANTED MAN! ::runs and hides under bed::

another site slashdotted

[tearmeapart]

caches: index gallery links projects Please note these links are not very thorough, but the site is not either. Please also note the "@ Safrax: HI SLASHDOT" and "@ Poo Poo Head: Slashdot can suck my ******" on the right panel.

Nutty base for a HUD

[vik]

And who is going to be the first sad person to use this as a basis for a wearable head-mounted display then?

Vik :v)

Re:hmm

[fpga_guy]

the site looks /.'ed. anyone got a mirror?

This is starting to shit me - I'm all for shameless self-promotion but goddammit make sure you've got a server that will last more than 10 seconds!

Can I also please make the Ob/. joke that the page is clearly being hosted on the pokemon-mini they've hacked?

IRC Channel

[Anonymous Coward]

For those that care.

#pmdev on EFnet

misspelled

[SuperBanana]

Can NetBSD run on it yet?

Hey, I think you misspelled "Linux"...

Re:23 Comments and the video is pulled.

[dave1212]

BT takes too long to set up. nah, let's see how spymac's storage holds up.
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3

What the heck

[pcmanjon]

1) post your website on slashdot to boast it
2) change your website to "bah come back later"
3) everyone who wants to see the page from slashdot doesn't get to due to said message, thus defeating the purpose of being posted on slashdot
4) ????????
5) profit!!!

Why's everyone dissing on Pokemon...?

[Bryan Gividen]

Ouch, seriously, ouch.

So I was about 12 when Pokemon Red/Blue came out. It was the driving force behind me learning how to build better webpages. And for a lot, the communities online turned into mini-hacking projects. It introduced kids to how to break open coding in a game and search for things. I friggin scanned the stripped coding along with tons of others who wanted to know how it worked. From there, tons of kids began to learn some variable formulas and indepth logics from the second set of games that led to new projects.

I agree, its a fad, but for some of us, it was our segway into learning more about technology, programming, and how to pick up women...

Okay, maybe not the last one, but the other two stand.

Re:but wait!

[Luigi30]

I can combine that into one healthy line.

*big breath of air*

In Soviet Russia, CP/M thinks of the children illegally while Windows XP is stable and unreliable and profits from insensitive clods who live near Iraq and Brazil.