VUE News

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VUE Cart Reader v1.1In other news: I built a Virtual Boy dumper, which I dubbed “VUE Cart Reader” after the “GB Card Flasher” by Kraku & Chroost.

I pestered no-intro’s shippa into creating a source table for Virtual Boy and will proceed to dump all of my games (almost the entire library, sans the top 3) in due course (though I got delayed, see last post xD). So stay tuned for that update 😉

Will probably release schematics and software when I’m done with that. It’s basically an ATmega32U2 using the LUFA USB stack, some I/O extenders and the cart connector from a donor VB, as you can see above.
However, host side software is stuck in infancy using libusb. Currently, I implemented do_it{0,1,2} to dump data and did not code a proper user library/API… So I definitely aim to improve that before I dump the rest of the games, because I know I’ll slack off if I dump all of them first 🙂

P.S.: I also set up a repository at github.com/Tauwasser/GBCartFlasher1)This used to be gitorious.org/gb-cart-reader, but the repo moved when gitorious shut down. for my C re-implementation of the GB Cart Flasher firmware. I wanted to consolidate and push my different branches onto there (I have a few for dumping special games), but then I found BitBucket, so I guess I’ll move there before doing that 🙂 So still more stuff on the agenda for now.

 

References
↑1 This used to be gitorious.org/gb-cart-reader, but the repo moved when gitorious shut down.

Procrastination

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Yeah, so I uh.. procrastinated a little with everything here 🙁 Anyway, I totally had time today to fix some things up on this site, but as you can see, still no magic header image rotation 😐 I was busy doing important™ stuff™ for university, like working towards my M.Sc.

Anyway, what have I been up to lately? I bought some cartridges, hunted down other cartridges, dumped them and even entered some of them into the no-intro Dat-O-Matic.

Some time ago, I started collecting Game Boy Cartridge PCBs — after all, I did have some games from my trip to Japan from way before. So right now, I have collected a good number of PCBs to find out mappings etc. I started with a list from some Polish dude from over here and through opportune investments I now pretty much have all of the DMG PCBs and most of the CGB PCBs. Also:

  • the GB Memory Cartridge (G-MMC1),
  • Net de Get Minigame@100 (MBC6),
  • Kirby’s Tilt’n’Tumble & Command Master (MBC7), and
  • legitimate Chinese multi-cartridges DMG-601-CHN (TC74HC161AF), DMG-603-CHN, DMG-605-CHN (both MMM01)

Still haven’t found out if some form of naming scheme like for schedule 1 games applies.
The G-MMC1 cart is DMG-A20, MBC6 is CGB-A32 (CGB!), MBC7 2/4/8Mbit is DMG-A40, MBC7 16/32/64Mbit is DMG-47. I doubt any boards in-between exist, but at first I doubted that for the DMG-A0x, DMG-A1x boards as well and now I’m only missing 3 (+2 unlikely to exist) out of 20! So right now, I’m missing DMG-A00, DMG-A01 (both unlikely to exist), DMG-A05, DMG-A17, and DMG-A19. And that’s it for the schedule 2 (MBC-5) PCBs.

So that’s what I have been up to these days. I made schematics of all the boards and took pictures of all of them. I’ll see if I either upload to the wiki and document there, or upload here using an upload plugin or mix wiki and blog or whathaveyou…

Blog Tinkering

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Jack Frost So I finally got some webspace, my own second-level domain and I already set up a blog and a wiki (in private mode for now).

Basically, I have never done much web technology stuff, so this is my first plunge into unknown waters. And I already had to delete the wiki once because I somehow fatally screwed with it xD

I’m going to try to fight my way through this CSS madness and get some slider for my blog going (yeah, I’m vain like that). After that probably the first real post about some hardware I recently finished 🙂

Anyway, that’s all for today 🙂