Nintendo e-Reader for the Game Boy Advance - Review

Dan and Adrian take a look at the Nintendo e-Reader for the Game Boy Advance.

[prodelboy]

Guys thank you so much for putting the vid up.

[kaitlyn__L]

Really liked this one. Nice brief little look at it from a more general computing perspective instead of from superfans. The dry humour is also sorely lacking from most American YouTubers.

[necronom]

From what I've found, the strips contain 2.2K each.

[wealthyone]

I am enjoying those episode of niche hardware. Please make more. Your good!

[mrShh]

I remember Nintendo Power Magazine in the US gave away an e-Reader card called the EON Ticket for Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire that unlocked some kind of special in-game event. I threw it away because I didn't have the game or an e-Reader at the time. These days copies of that magazine with the e-Reader card included routinely sell for $80 or more 😭

[Ill_look_back_on_in_disgust]

I think the GBA e-Reader is one of the most unique products Nintendo has ever put out. There's nothing preventing homebrew other then needing to own a printer and glossy paper. The homebrew that people have produced for it is very limited but it's very amazing proof of concept stuff. Scanning is extremely finicky as you can see from the video but theoretically you could have a catalogue of paper strips that could store thousands of games that can be played on the e-Reader. Something else amazing is the Super Mario Advance 4 game had levels you can load from cards. So what people did was through a lot of trial and error produced their own levels by decoding the dot matrix and then printing out their own levels onto strips and then loading them in Super Mario Advance 4. Even though only a handful of people have ever done it, it's sort of the first 100% Nintendo hardware quality Mario Maker. There's documentation on how the dot matrix is formulated for various things and how the mario levels work, it's just very incomplete and hard to find. Also the video makes it sound like these things are rare, I don't think these things are that rare in the US. They sell for very little and I knew several people with them as a kid in the US. I think what ultimately led to the downfall of e-Reader homebrew scene was the release of the DS and its insane potential. The e-Reader was never a good product for consumers. They wanted re-sell old NES games without producing physical cartridges. What we got was a device that hardly anyone got any use from and even Nintendo didn't care too much to develop cool stuff for it. The potential was insane for something like this though. They could of ported entire console libraries like from the Atari 2600. It would never happen but the ability was there.