Lupin's weblog

Yeah, the PokéUSB dumper works! I just had to rewrite the PC side software using a proper programming (C++) instead of Visual Basic and all the junk that was saved to the dump was gone.

I think that’s a good lesson for me, as a native Visual Basic programmer, to use more C++ from now on

I just played one of my dumps on my PC by running them in Minimon

Of course I can’t publish the dumps here, but schematics (it’s a very simple setup) and firmware/PC tool will follow so you may try to build one yourself

I got a new board with an Atmel ATmega16 chip on it, the chip has 4 IO ports (32 IO pins), it is very easy to programm (there even is a C compiler for it) and it is quite robust.

I first connected the cart using a FDD connector but then i decided to better solder all the wires directly to the board which worked a lot better. After figuring out that i have to turn off JTAG support to use a port pin that was blocked because of JTAG it started to work very good… but there are still some flaws that have to do with USB transfer, I think this is because i am using a 10 Mhz quarz and it’s really bad for generating standard baud rates which are needed for data transfer without errors.
The USB part is handled by an FT232BM chip, this chip converts the USB signal into an rs232 signal. It can go quite fast but i think my Microcontroller is not fast enough to keep up with the USB speed that’s why i have to use it at a lower speed.

Dumping a full 512kb cartridge will aproximately take 20 seconds or less, programming 512kb to a cartridge would most likely take exactly the same amount of time.

Here is a photo of what is currently lying on my table:

The hardest part about building it is to solder all the wires to the cartridge connector (some aren’t needed though). It is a good idea to test all wire connections before you glue the cables to the connector (you have to glue them to hold all pins/cables in place and make sure there won’t be a short contact) but after this is done the rest should be quite easy to do.

The Pokemon Mini ROMs seem to be very robust, it doesn’t matter much what voltage you are interfacing them with (the Atmel chip runs at 5V and interfaces the ROM with 5V IO even though the ROM is a 3.3V device).

I am currently working on the firmware and the dumper tool… I am quite sure a new quarz and some more resistors (i am not even using resistors for the LEDs, I am sure, if you want to be really cheap and don’t want to use any parts besides the cartridge connector you could just solder all wires directly to the microcontroller and it still would work ) would fix all the remaining problems.

The development board is from Olimex, it is quite cheap but there are some flaws in the board… this is what i e-mailed to Olimex to give them some suggestions for the board:

a) The quarz on the board is 8 Mhz which makes it VERY hard to get standard baud rates, which in turn makes it very hard to interface the FT232BM – better use a standard clock like 1.8432MHz, 3.6864MHz, 7.3728MHz, 11.0592MHz or 14.7456MHz.
For some reason i got my board with an 10 Mhz quarz instead of 8 Mhz and when i touch the quarz the chip goes crazy and sends weird characters to the FT232BM.

b) The soldering pads are quite easily removed…

c) There is no way to select if the device should act as high speed or low speed device, there should be a jumper on the board that makes this setting possible.

d) The reset IC on my board kept reseting the board at random intervals… maybe this is because the USB voltage is not constant but i was connecting the board directly to my PC so it was the best USB voltage that i could get. I just removed the reset IC.

….Chuuuuuuu~~~~~!!!!

Today was really boring. I am working on some game stuff… nothing serious but i hope to finish it soon

I just added a nice headphone jack to my PM, maybe this brings me one step closer to using it as an MP3 player

I used a triwing driver for opening the case (i got mine at electricquarter), you can also use it to open the GBA and many other Nintendo devices.

First of all you need to find a place for the headphone jack (the PM offers a lot of space below the cartridge connector), then you have to cut a hole into the case of the PM (i just used a soldering iron to melt the plastic and then used a knife to cut it away)… you better be careful while doing this and don’t use too much heat if you want to melt the plastic. After you placed the headphone jack in the case just connect the two wires that go to the PM speaker to the connectors of the headphone jack.

You better use a mono jack for this mod because the PM (of course) outputs mono sound

Here is an image of my moded PM (yeah, the colors look really gay ):

I also got an LCD+test board today. With the test board you can connect the LCD to the parallel port. The LCD has a quite low resolution (100×64 pixels, almost like the PM screen but this one is larger than the PM screen). I loaded up the Team Pokeme logo and it worked!

I got the parts at pollin.de. The LCD looks like it is suposed to be used in a phone… but it was the cheapest that i could find right now

The board of course had one of those flat plastic cable connectors that is used to connect the LCD (you see these very often in TFT screens, notebooks and everything that needs to be small). The pins of the connector are very small and very close that makes them quite hard to solder but even if you use a very thick tip you still can solder them very easily. First of all fix the part by soldering two opposite pins or glueing it to the PCB, then just use lots of solder (actually you are supposed to use only a bit of solder) and go down the row of pins, make sure all pins have some solder on them and go over the pins with the hot soldering iron to make sure all pins are soldered then use desoldering wick to remove the excess solder, just go over all pins using the desoldering wick there will be enough solder left to connect the pins. After you finished make sure there are no shorts between the pins and you’re done

Of course you have to be a bit careful when doing this, but it worked very well for me.

Yay, i just returned home… i don’t want to write more right now