The Gameboy Cartridge Reader is a GUI for interfacing with the Gameboy Cartridge Reader Board; a simple hardware tool to read and write to Gameboy and Gameboy Color Cartridges.
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The Gameboy Cartridge Reader (GCR), is a program for interfacing with the Gameboy Cartridge Reader Board (GCRB), a USB device for retrieving data from Gameboy and Gameboy Color cartridges. Using this program and the board, you can
- Extract the ROM data from a gameboy cartridge and run the game in an emulator.
- Make a backup of your savegame and restore such a backup at a later stage. This also means copying your savegame to an emulator and putting it back on the cartridge.
- Flashing a writable cartridge (32kb only). This allows you to write your own game or program and try it out on actual hardware.
The various components present on the GCRB are shown in the image below. The board uses a Atmega 32u4 microprocessor running at 16 MHz. You can connect the board to your computer using a Micro USB cable. The cartridge is slotted at the bottom in the cartridge port. When the board is powered via USB, the green LED at the left-top corner is on. The other status LEDs show you a visual indication on what the board is doing. Using a 12-bit binary counter, addresses can be put on the address bus and with the use of a few control lines, data can be fed or read from the Gameboy cartridge. You can communicate with the microprocessor using a serial interface which is visible on your computer as a virtual COM port. The GCR program shipped that accompanies the board sends instructions to the GCRB using a series of 8-byte commands and collects the response. This process is embedded in graphical user interface (GUI) allowing for easy and fast operation.
Detailed documentation on how to operate the GCRB is bundled with the GCR program. Simply hit F1 (or select 'Help Contents' from the 'Help' menu).
No serial port can be found
This is a relatively complicated problem to debug. You can try a couple of things:
- Try a different USB port
- Try a different USB cable
- Ensure that the GCRB is connected directly to the computer and not via a USB hub
If the problem persists, please contact the vendor for a solution.
The serial port is being recognized and displayed in Device Manager, yet I cannot interface with the GCR
This problem has been identified for one of the insider builds of Windows. The solution is to set Windows 8 compatibility mode for GCR.exe which resolves the issue. (thanks to Donny for contributing to this solution)