wraggster
January 3rd, 2014, 21:47
http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/hacker.png?w=620&h=288 (http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/hacker.png)
[Adan] had an old Game Boy sitting around, and without anything better to do decided to investigate the link cable protocol with a microcontroller. He had a Stellaris Launchpad for the task, but initially had no project in mind. What he came up for this adventure in serial protocols is a first gen Pokemon trade spoofer (http://www.adanscotney.com/2014/01/spoofing-pokemon-trades-with-stellaris.html) that allows him to obtain pokemon without having two Game Boys, or for the weird ones out there, “friends.”
The Game Boy link protocol is extremely well documented (http://nocash.emubase.de/pandocs.htm#serialdatatransferlinkcable), so getting data from the Game Boy to the Launchpad was as simple as a soldering up an old link cable connector to a piece of perf board. After figuring out the electronics, [Adan] looked at what happened when two Pokemon games tried to trade pokemon. When two Game Boys are linked, there are two in-game options: trade or battle. Looking at the data coming after the ‘trade’ option, [Adan] found something that could possibly be the data structure of the Pokemon being sent. He reverse-engineered this all by himself before discovering this is also well documented (http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_data_structure_in_Generation_I).
Bringing everything together, [Adan] figured out how to trade non-existent Pokemon with a small dev board. Right now he’s only transmitting Pokemon that are hard-coded on the Launchpad, but it’s very possible to transmit the Pokemon values in real-time over USB.
Thanks [Dan] for sending this in, and no, we don’t know what’s up with the influx of Pokemon posts over the last week. Video of the spoof below.
http://hackaday.com/2014/01/02/spoofing-pokemon-trades/
[Adan] had an old Game Boy sitting around, and without anything better to do decided to investigate the link cable protocol with a microcontroller. He had a Stellaris Launchpad for the task, but initially had no project in mind. What he came up for this adventure in serial protocols is a first gen Pokemon trade spoofer (http://www.adanscotney.com/2014/01/spoofing-pokemon-trades-with-stellaris.html) that allows him to obtain pokemon without having two Game Boys, or for the weird ones out there, “friends.”
The Game Boy link protocol is extremely well documented (http://nocash.emubase.de/pandocs.htm#serialdatatransferlinkcable), so getting data from the Game Boy to the Launchpad was as simple as a soldering up an old link cable connector to a piece of perf board. After figuring out the electronics, [Adan] looked at what happened when two Pokemon games tried to trade pokemon. When two Game Boys are linked, there are two in-game options: trade or battle. Looking at the data coming after the ‘trade’ option, [Adan] found something that could possibly be the data structure of the Pokemon being sent. He reverse-engineered this all by himself before discovering this is also well documented (http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_data_structure_in_Generation_I).
Bringing everything together, [Adan] figured out how to trade non-existent Pokemon with a small dev board. Right now he’s only transmitting Pokemon that are hard-coded on the Launchpad, but it’s very possible to transmit the Pokemon values in real-time over USB.
Thanks [Dan] for sending this in, and no, we don’t know what’s up with the influx of Pokemon posts over the last week. Video of the spoof below.
http://hackaday.com/2014/01/02/spoofing-pokemon-trades/