A new tool has arrived on GitHub that has the potential to read your Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges through the cart slot on your Analogue Pocket and write them to an SD Card. It's called openFPGA-CartTools, and it's an unofficial FPGA project for the Pocket which is available to download now.
According to retro-gamer.jp, the project comes to us from a dev called Kroy. It turns the Pocket into a dumper for your game files, allowing you to legally rip your own games for use in recomps and emulators. It's still in the creation stage at the minute, but there's a lot of potential here.
Writing on GitHub, Kroy says that 'it [openFPGA-CartTools] is RTL rather than software on a soft CPU because the whole job is cartridge bus timing and pin direction, which hardware holds to the cycle and a testbench can prove: cart_pins.sv is the only module allowed to drive a connector pin, and check_pin_isolation fails the build if that stops being true.'
The project isn't finished or ready for use by noobs like me yet. There's currently lots of tinkering that needs to happen to read and identify your ROMs successfully, with the downloadable README file giving information primarily aimed at developers rather than Analogue Pocket users. Plus, features like 'save data backup and restoration, RTC, and read-back verification' are yet to come.
I would think of it as a show of what the Pocket is capable of at the time being, but if Kroy can pull it all off, then it will be very impressive! Head to GitHub to download what's currently available!
