Lupin's weblog

Today i got my IO-Warrior40 chip! yay!

Actually i didn’t make any soldering/electronics experience since today (that’s why i like the IO-Warrior40 chip, it is made for beginners) but it worked out quite well… I glued the USB connector to the board (it’s an USB A connector, not USB B… and since there seem to be no cables with male USB A connection on both sides i had to make my own cable ) then i soldered all the parts to the board using the schematics from codemercs.com but i only soldered one LED for testing purpose…

After puting the IO-Warrior40 chip in its socket the device was detected as an HID Device so i started the IO warrior testing software that comes with the SDK and toggled my LED on and off… fun!!!

I will try to obtain a cheap LCD with controller and interface it… but for now i am very happy that it didn’t explode

Here are some pictures so you can imagine how it looks like:
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6 Mhz resonator, IO-Warrior40 and LED are still missing…
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Very early shot… if the quality would be better you would be able to see my mad soldering skills
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The finished board from top.
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yay! The LED turned on!
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The board from below (i only need one wire at the bottom between the chip, the wire connects the GND pins (3 pins need to be connected to GND)… i will remove one of them… now )

I felt like starting to get in touch with micro controllers, so i ordered a nice little board with an ATmega16 chip, a programmer and a few electronic parts and tools. I will report with some pictures once i got some stuff working on the micro controller. My first attempts will be to make an USB interface to get some basic input/output done and then start making a cart programmer/dumper for the pokemon mini cart ROMs. Should be quite easy actually…

The USB controller that is on the development board allows only for low speed (1.5 mb/s) USB connections but i guess it will be fast enough for programming a 512Kb flash cart (by using a micro controller instead of direct port I/O the process of flashing also gets a lot faster). Another idea to make a fast Pokemon Mini cart programmer/dumper would be to use the old LPT-based design and instead of using the 82C55 I/O chip you could use a micro controller that comes for the same price but speeds up the flashing process a lot.

Oh yeah, i also ordered a custom I/O-only chip for USB (“IO-Warrior40″), i first wanted to use it to make the dumper/programmer but i figured that in low speed mode i would loose a lot of speed by using a I/O-only-chip approach and the USB latency times are probably too high to program flash memory…

I can’t wait to start working on this!

Photos, explanations and circuit designs coming soon… if i don’t screw up…

The pizza motivated me to do some small updates, i started to write the tutorial about sprites, you can already download the source code but the tutorial is not finished yet. I already have code for the next tutorials done but writing the tutorials consumes the most time :/

I added some screenshots and PokéSnake to the PM section (yes, there are more sections to come )

Stay tuned for more updates!

It’s so tasty…

I finally figured out WordPress and started to work on my little page

You’ll be able to find a real Pokemon Mini development tutorial here very soon. You can already find the first, incomplete, parts of the tutorials in the Pokemon Mini section.

I’m also going to move some of my old stuff to this page to finally have a way to present all my work at one website.

Enjoy your stay!
- Lupin