Coder Pepijn de Vos has created a single player trade program using an Arduino board, a link cable and a Game Boy.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played a Pokemon game. It’s funny because back when the series first debuted in North America, there was a period of a few years where I was absolutely obsessed with it. I played Pokemon Blue, Red and Yellow to death, spending hour after countless hour training my Pokemon, perfecting my team and, of course, striving to “catch ’em all”. As much time as I invested in them however, I found myself forever foiled by the nature of the games themselves. Save for a few rare occasions, I never had anyone I could trade with to complete my Pokemon collection.
If only they’d made Arduino boards back in the late-90s. By combining one of the aforementioned devices with a Game Boy, a link cable and cartridge copies of the first generation Pokemon games, coder Pepijin de Vos was able to create a custom program giving him the ability to perform one person. All that’s required is to attach your GameBoy to the Arduino and run Vos’s code to initiate the trade. The process apparently works with the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance.
Granted, this ability isn’t really all that useful now that modern Pokemon games and the advent of Wi-Fi have removed the necessity of archaic things like link cables. Even so, it’s still a nifty little hack that makes my inner-child giddy from its possibilities. If only I’d know back then that someone someday would invent something like this, I might have been trading away my favorite Khangaskhan. It almost brings a tear to the eyes.
Source: Endgadget
