CartIO – Gameboy cart programmer/reader
Description:
This is the original CARTIO hardware as designed by Pascal Felber. It uses PC’s paraller port for programming/dumping. It can be used with modified game cartridge (ROM replaced with flash ROM), to run your own gameboy programs on the real gameboy. The device will also dump existing game cartridges.
Technical Details:
The circuit schematic can be found here. As it can be seen from the schematic, this is a rather simple device. It consists of some multiplexers and registers to allow accessing 16 address lines and 8 data lines that a Gameboy cartridge has.
Construction:
When I built this programmer I had no clue about PCBs. That’s why I took the hard approach. I connected all chips by soldering short wires all over the place. It was a very tedious task. I would highly recommend making a PCB for this one. Nevertheless, the programmer works just fine. I was able to dump a couple of ROMs successfuly and test them with an emulator. I have not been able to test the programming function of this device, as I still have to make a flash cart. The hardest part to locate was the cartridge connector. I was fortunate enough to find a dead gameboy in a thrift store for $5.
Here are some pictures of my programmer:
