Tiger Game.com Video Capture, Game Screen Shots, More

[Brian_Provinciano]

With all the news about the upcoming handheld, the Gizmondo, I became reminded of the old handheld from eight years ago, the Tiger Game.com. It's appearently not the same Tiger developing it, but I'm not sure if that's the only reason it reminds me of it, heh.

Anyway, with this recent reminder, I decided to take a little time to dig into the little known handheld and have whipped together some pages with my findings. Of the findings include details on how the LCD and video signal work, along with pinouts.

As a bonus, with my new video capture device adaptor, I've taken nearly a hundred screen shots of Game.com games. Have a look and see what games you could have been playing eight years ago !

http://www.bripro.com/low/gamecom/index.php


Busy with work, and Grand Theftendo, I don't really have the time, nor plan to do any further reverse engineering or such with the Game.com, at least anytime in the near future. However, I thought I'd post my current findings, as it might spark other's interest in digging into it more.

[CRV]

The games look better in still screenshots than in motion.

[DogP]

That's awesome! I was working on RE'ing the game.com for a little bit, mostly to dump the carts so we could create an emulator, but I got bored with it and now it's sitting torn apart on a shelf :P . You haven't looked at the pinout of the cart have you? I looked at the datasheet of the CPU used and it's reset vector was at a certain address (don't remember ATM), but I figured that would help me figure out some of the address/data lines, but it's so much harder with all of those epoxy blob chips >_< . I'll get back to it one of these days...

DogP

[rbudrick]

Brian!, You rock!

I've always wanted someone to do this. Are the games still blurry on a monitor? What are the chances of paying you to build me one of these video adapters?

Congratulations dude!

Now if you could only crack the Gamegear.
-Rob

[vintagegamecrazy]

Man, those are some nice screens. Those seriously look better than the real console. Keep up the good work. Are you going to submit those to Joe for eh database at all, that would be really cool?

[Jorpho]

I thought the blob chips posed an insurmountable obstacle.

It's actually a little surprising that no one managed to leak the dev kit that (last time I checked) was still being sold by its original developer.

[K3V]

Very impressive!

You need to get interested in NUON and figure out how to wire up a rotary controller for Tempest 3000

[rbudrick]

I thought the blob chips posed an insurmountable obstacle.

It's actually a little surprising that no one managed to leak the dev kit that (last time I checked) was still being sold by its original developer.

Really? Do you have a URL? Any idea of the cost?

-Rob

[Ed Oscuro]

It's actually a little surprising that no one managed to leak the dev kit that (last time I checked) was still being sold by its original developer.

Hey, link? :D

[digitalpress]

Man, those are some nice screens. Those seriously look better than the real console. Keep up the good work. Are you going to submit those to Joe for eh database at all, that would be really cool?

Brian was kind enough to offer these to the DP site a few days ago. It's on my short list of things to do.

Thanks again, Brian!

[Ed Oscuro]

Hmm about that avatar of DP's, is that Kirk as Game.com'ed?

Well, I've looked through stuff. Very cool! Hillarious how you let that zombie sort of gnaw Leon to death :)

[Jorpho]

I thought the blob chips posed an insurmountable obstacle.

It's actually a little surprising that no one managed to leak the dev kit that (last time I checked) was still being sold by its original developer.

Really? Do you have a URL? Any idea of the cost?

Hooray, the Search function is working right now!

Go to http://www.handheldgames.com and look under Products/Accessories. (The old thread is here.)

[rbudrick]

That dev kit is not for sale. That company makes software, and that is one of the things they made. It is not for sale, per a phone call to the company.

-Rob

[rbudrick]

Racoon Lad was kind enough to point out to me that someone did actually finally crack the whole Game Gear video problem:

http://www.smspower.org/forums/viewt...er=asc&start=0

I've been waiting for something like this to come along for years! Congrats to all at SMSpower that worked on this.

I must admit, I am quite horrible at reading schematics. Is anyone here technically capable of making a dummy's guide to this? Or better yet, build the circuit and sell it to me?

<hears crickets>

-Rob

[Jorpho]

That dev kit is not for sale. That company makes software, and that is one of the things they made. It is not for sale, per a phone call to the company.

So they're just listing it there to show off their programming prowess?

Even if it's not for sale, such things have nonetheless been leaked before. (The Silhouette SNES emulator for the Mac was supposedly an official dev product from somewhere.)