The GameBoy Tool is a command line interface for performing basic read and write operations on physical GameBoy, GameBoy Color and GameBoy Advance cartridges. This tool was designed for the Raspberry Pi Zero or Raspberry Pi Zero W (other Raspberry Pi versions not yet supported) with the appropriate hardware connected to the GPIO of the Raspberry Pi. This tool serves as the base functionality for the larger GBConsole project. Refer to the additional documentation here for information on setting up the hardware.
Please follow these steps to install and setup the GameBoy Tool. You will need your Raspberry Pi already setup with Raspbian Lite. Refer to this tutorial for getting Raspbian up and running (last known working version is 2020-02-13)
a) From the Raspberry Pi command line run the raspi configuration tool and set the following options
sudo raspi-config
Network Options -> Wi-Fi (setup)
Interfacing Options -> SPI (enable)
b) Reboot the Raspberry Pi and run the following commands to make sure the package manager is up to date
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
a) Run the following commands to install dependencies, download the source code and build the GameBoy Tool
cd /home/pi
sudo apt-get install -y libssl-dev
git clone https://github.com/pixelcircuits/GBTool.git
cd GBTool
make
b) The binary (GBTool) can be found in the GBTool folder once the build process is complete
The GameBoy Tool provides the following commands for reading, writing and getting info of connected cartridges
info - Gets basic info about the connected cartridge
readROM -o <output_filename> - Reads the cartridge ROM and writes the data to the given output file
readSave -o <output_filename> - Reads the cartridge save data and writes the data to the given output file
writeSave -i <input_filename> - Overwrites the cartridge save data from the given input file