Games can be played from an old Nintendo Game Boy Advance console based on… Device crashing sounds

Recently there has been an interesting discovery in the world of vintage equipment. It's about the Nintendo Game Boy Advance console, which entered the market in early 2001. It turns out that in order to copy the contents of the game cartridge, you can use the sounds that are played on the console immediately after it crashes. The whole process is very complex and requires specialized knowledge, but it is definitely worth learning about.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance games can be copied by analyzing the sounds that occur when the device malfunctions. The process was discovered by someone not long ago.

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Of course, the result of the described actions, namely copying the contents of the game cartridge, can be achieved using much simpler methods, but in this case it is not about the simplest solution, but about checking other possibilities. It turns out that when the cartridge in question is in the console and it fails (for example, by suddenly pulling it out and putting it back in), the device starts playing seemingly random sounds (squeaks and noises). However, after about two hours (1.50 hours to be precise), a sequence of all the sounds from the game (8-bit, 13100 Hz) is played, which, after proper recording and some editing, can later be converted into a copy of the game. Specific production (ROM).

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The process is complex because the entire recorded audio track must also be set correctly, and ultimately many such recordings are needed to recreate the original game. For this purpose, the author used Audacity and a script written in the Python programming language. Initially, the game was “dumped” from an mGBA emulator, and eventually also from a Pokémon Emerald game cartridge (a Nintendo DS console was used for this purpose, which can read physical cartridges from Game Boy Advance). You can see it all in the video below.

Source: YouTube @TheZZAZZGlitch, Flickr @Adrian Makles @Luis Torres R.