GBCartRead: Arduino based Gameboy Cart Reader

Community Exhibition / Gallery
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Hi all,

Recently I’ve been collecting retro gaming consoles such as the Gameboy and SNES and whilst playing a game on the SNES I actually lost all my saves when I turned it off (turns out the battery got disconnected from the cartridge). The thought came to me, how can I backup the save game from these devices? There are cart readers around but they seem to be harder to find in this day and age so I thought why not make one myself using the Arduino as it’s so versatile!

My first step is to make GBCartRead, it's an Arduino based Gameboy Cartridge Reader which uses a Python script to interface with the Arduino. GBCartRead currently allows you to dump your ROM at this point in time (this was done so I could gain some experience with interfacing with the Gameboy Cartridge) but in the future should allow you to read/write to the cartridge's SRAM.

I provide a long tutorial as to how it works, explain lots of things such the concept of addressing, explain the code so anyone should be able to pick up what's going on, have a schematic and a quick youtube video available here: GBCartRead: Arduino based Gameboy Cart Reader – Part 1: Read the ROM « insideGadgets

Hope this is useful :slight_smile:

Alex.

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Cool project.

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Have you thought about taking out the ROM chip of a SNES game and replacing it with a reprogrammed one, so it plays a different game? Like this:

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No I haven't really thought of it. What would be cool is making your own MBC/Cart and then storing everything on an SD card (as there is a library for the Arduino on that)!

Edit: Seems like there is already one around: http://8bc.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1916&p=1