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.
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.
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.
