Reading real gameboy cartridges on Pi

ABrugsch

Some of you may recognise me from the sudomod forum (I was also registered on the old forum but never got round to re-signing up here)
Well the thing that's been holding up my retropie project has been the development of GBCartSlurp for the pi.
While it's still very much a work in progress, here's what I have:
A prototype PCB version of the breadboarded set of I2C port expanders (MCP23017) with a NDS lite cartridge port
My own C code which can dump Gameboy ROMs and saves and write saves back to the cart.
I'm working on:

getting the speed up as currently it takes 5 secs to dump a rom bank and larger carts have 128 banks which would take 10 mins!
Add a filesystem interpretation layer so emulators can use ROM/saves transparently
Also GBA support
Enjoy!

geneworld

The amount of want I have for this is ridiculous! do you have plans to sell these?

ABrugsch

I do. What was just going to be a feature of my pi-in-a-gameboy-shell build has morphed into a standalone project that just gets lots of love wherever I show it. So yeah. It's mostly open source but I'll make units for people to buy.

geneworld

@ABrugsch Awesome, please keep us updated!!

ABrugsch

I'll be updating here, sudomod, /r/Gameboy (and other subreddits) , facebook gameboy collectors group... All over the place really. Though my main log has been in sudomod so far

edmaul69

@ABrugsch this is pretty cool.

herb_fargus

Using a pi to dump a ROM and then use that same pi to play the ROM? What is this wizardry?!

ABrugsch

I know right.
If I get the FUSE layer working, you won't have to even 'dump' the rom first, the emulaor can just read the rom as if it's a file

ABrugsch

Hey @moosepr in the house!

moosepr

@ABrugsch they will let anyone in here 😛

smartroad

Awesome project! I love that you have LEDs on all the lines as well, people don't put enough pointlessly flashy LEDs on things anymore :( haha

ABrugsch

@smartroad that's mainly for debugging. I'm not hand soldering 27 pairs of 0805 led's and resistors again unless absolutely necessary ;)
Any "production" boards won't have them all. (a few maybe ;) )

ABrugsch

@herb_fargus i think I've put this in the wrong section... Should probably be in projects perhaps?

smartroad

@ABrugsch NO!!!! Flashy is good :D

ABrugsch

@smartroad agreed! But the lowest 8 bits of the address don't even flash... Just a blur like PWM dimming ;) and I haven't even sped it up to the max throughput yet!