[emddudley]

I was an intern at Fisher Price when they introduced the Pixter Color. I did QA on some of the games, the Dora one comes to mind. You can imagine the torture playing a level over and over.

The games were developed overseas (India I think?). I would send them bug reports in Mantis and overnight they would send a new build. Sometimes they would even fix the bugs. I would burn the builds on to EEPROMs and verify them the next day. The EEPROMS had a little round window so they could be erased in a UV box before programming.

Fisher Price used a video codec from Actimagine to fit video clips onto the game cartridges. That's how I learned about Virtualdub. I remember editing clips from a show called Winx.

The big competition was the Leapster LeapPad and they were trouncing us.

One fun thing the engineers did periodically was a toy teardown to see how competitors saved on cost. Cost was critical. They told me how Walmart basically dictates toy cost because they controlled the shelf space.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> The EEPROMS had a little round window so they could be erased in a UV box before programming.

Nitpick: That'd be a EPROM ("erasable programmable read-only memory"), not EEPROM ("electrically erasable programmable read-only memory"), right?

(But also thanks for the insight; I did wonder a bit as I was reading dmitrygr's article what the other side was of building these)

[dmitrygr]

I have an upcoming article on Pixter itself which includes giving them a LOT of credit for cost cutting. There are some quite clever things there. I also worked out how to dump games (not easy with those damn melody chips, or what did you call them?) and will release an archive of all games and working emulators.

[enoent]

Nice work Dmitry, looking forward to read your next article.

The later model Pixter Multimedia had the full memory space accessible via JTAG, which is how some carts and even boot ROM got dumped a while ago [1], is it the same deal with Pixter Color?

That OpenOCD script was a bit flaky, and sometimes the boot ROM would be already unloaded before reading, maybe you have some insights in how to make it more robust.

btw, have you looked into the original Pixter? The cart connector seems to have a very narrow bus, so it doesn't look like those carts have code, and probably can only be dumped with a decap.

[1]: https://qufb.gitlab.io/writeups/pixter

[dmitrygr]

That only dumps the data. That’s the easy part. None of that dumps the melodies.

The pin outs that page links to are also not quite accurate. I need to finish editing my other article on this.

I have indeed looked into the original Pixter. Deeply: I have decoded the bus, documented the device, dumped games, and produced a working emulator.

The cartridges do contain memory. Most of them are about 1 MB in size, split between code (the maximum for which is 32 kB) and audio effects + images which occupy the rest of the space. If you are very, very curious and don’t want to wait for me to finish my editing, email me and I can explain how it works.

[seg_lol]

When are you going to teach a Masterclass? Reverse engineering hardware is how you get the best internship money can't buy.

[dmitrygr]

I do once every few months as articles on https://dmitry.gr

[echelon_musk]

> Virtualdub

There's a blast from the past.

I remember using it to remux and join 2CD XviD movies into a single avi. Making sure to identify any duplicated key frames and delete them.

I still have a YouTube video I encoded with virtual dub ~20yrs ago.

[steve_adams_86]

> I would send them bug reports in Mantis and overnight they would send a new build. Sometimes they would even fix the bugs.

Haha, this brought me back to working on a project with some people overseas. So much 'work' done, so little progress made.

[oatmealcookie]

> They told me how Walmart basically dictates toy cost because they controlled the shelf space.

I wonder if that is still true due to online shopping.

[TheNewsIsHere]

At least as of a few years ago, it was indeed still true.

Walmart is huge in online shopping as well. They use this position to essentially tell vendors what they can charge if they want the shelf space. If you don’t say “ok”, and they can reproduce your good, then they absolutely will if there’s enough demand to bother. This is one fantastic reason to hold a patent on your goods (if patentable).