Making a R4 cartridge but with an ir transmitter (irDA)?

[Ventuaer]

Hi, I was curious. Ever since I learned about pokemon's IR cartridges and the pokewalker, I wanted to get one for myself, but they are too pricy and my japanese is too weak to just simply pick up a japanese copy of it. Instead, I wanted to approach it from the other angle, try to design a flash card that has an IR transmitter chip inside of it. I know how to code, but hardware is very much out of my scope, but I would like to learn how to do it.

I've been following the picowalker project, but not having anything that is actually compatible with the pokewalker is kind of...not fun to try out.

Where to start, what things to buy? I haven't been able to find the schematics/the DIY of R4 cartridges, but I am sure with some more time I would be able to find it. For the irda transmitter one of these should be able to do the trick?
https://www.digikey.cz/en/products/filter/irda-transceiver-modules/538?s=N4IgTCBcDaIJICUAiBBEBdAvkA

 

[gorgyrip]

http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek-ds-cart-infrared-component-lists.htm
get U2 from a japanese or cheaper cart. design a flex pcb. Fingers crossed that everything will fit inside de r4 cart and hoping that it will work.

And here's this in the work:

Hardware Project  Thread 'Open source flashcart project info'

Jan 20, 2025

Hello,
I am trying to make a fully open source flashcart for all DS/DSi/3DS consoles, although currently I am just going to focus on getting it working on the DS lite.
However, I can't seem to find much information on a few areas making it difficult to get what I need to actually start making the thing on my FPGA dev kit thing (me failing to find this information could just be my fault, lol).

Firstly, I can't really find any good resources on how the SD protocol works, I tried looking through the SDIO simplified specifications but that just feels like it has a lot of information missing...

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• Forum: Nintendo DS

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[Deleted member 702243]

it's not really an answer to your question, but if your goal is just to be able to use the pokéwalker in your native language, then buy literally any game that has an ir receiver, and simply play a rom of heartgold/soulsilver in your language using nds bootstrap on a dsi or 3ds. it will be able to use the ir receiver in the slot 1 cartridge and communicate with a pokéwalker the same way a genuine copy would, so you can use the pokéwalker as normal

I think that would be the way to go for what you want to do, if your alternative is to develop your own flashcart from scratch lol. you still have to buy a pokéwalker separately, but you would have to do that with a custom made flashcart too. until picowalker is ready at least, I guess

 

[Ventuaer]

it's not really an answer to your question, but if your goal is just to be able to use the pokéwalker in your native language, then buy literally any game that has an ir receiver, and simply play a rom of heartgold/soulsilver in your language using nds bootstrap on a dsi or 3ds. it will be able to use the ir receiver in the slot 1 cartridge and communicate with a pokéwalker the same way a genuine copy would, so you can use the pokéwalker as normal

I think that would be the way to go for what you want to do, if your alternative is to develop your own flashcart from scratch lol. you still have to buy a pokéwalker separately, but you would have to do that with a custom made flashcart too. until picowalker is ready at least, I guess

Oh, so nds bootstrap can use that cartridge's IR transciever to communicate? Neat! I was worried that the game has to run on the cartridge (flash cartridge or not) in order to use that IR transciever.
I don't have a pokewalker and currently looking for options to emulate it, one way or another. I have a flipper zero that I can technically try to make a sort of pokewalker clone out of (provided I get the correct pedometer and an irDA gpio connected), but somewhen in the future

 

[Deleted member 702243]

you might need a pokémon cart specifically, the other two games with ir use an older hardware revision that wasn't compatible with pokémon, and it's not clear if it has been fixed since 2022, and if it can even be fixed, if not. but non-english language versions of the games should be a lot cheaper (I found a copy of jp black for $19.90 usd on ebay right now)