Support for the Gameboy Wisdom Tree Games / Mapper

[kynrek]

The analogue pocket, Krikzz's Everdrive GB, and GB operator all do not support the Wisdom Tree Games. There are 5 cartridges in all Exodus and Joshua (which are like crystal mines), Spiritual Warfare (which is like Zelda) and two bible cartridges, the King James Bible and the NIV Bible (with 20 lost levels of Joshua). I feel like these games are uncommon and should be documented/preserved so I wanted to try to help.

I contacted Krikzz a few months ago and he responded and said I had bad rom files because they wouldn't load in an emulator. Later someone pointed out to me that that they use a custom mapper chip
This site details the mapper chip used: https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Memory_Bank_Controllers#Wisdom_Tree
and need a emulator that specifically supports the wisdom tree mapper (like bgb). I am trying to get back in touch with Krikzz to prove that the roms were not bad and it is an unsupported mapper but never heard back via email.

I purchased 3 of the 5 wisdom tree cartridges (The bible carts are expensive and I lost the only one I had as a kid) and took detailed pictures showing that they use the same mapper chip:

Exodus - Motorola SN74LS377N FGN9519
Joshua - KS74HCTLS377N
Spiritual Warfare - Motorola SN74LS377N FFS9509

Here are high resolution copies of the pictures I took. Let me know if there is a database or somewhere that I can upload these to to help preserve these for posterity. Feel free to share these anywhere that would be helpful.

Picture Gallery: https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/scripturejot.com/Wisdom_Tree_Gameboy_Games/index.html

I plan to dump my roms as well now that I cleaned the board and confirmed they play on a real gameboy and send them to developers with requests to add support for the games along with the mapper information.

I ordered the GB Operator but the cartridges don't fit in it they are slightly too wide. I removed the case and pressed the microswitch that a normal cartridge would press (wisdom tree carts are open in the front) when being inserted and it showed the game as connected in the software but wouldn't play and would only dump 32kb so I emailed them and ordered an InsideGadgets GBxCart RW v1.4
I ordered a cartridge connector so I can dump my copy of the ROMS as I have tested and confirmed that the games do work properly on a real gameboy. (edited)

If anyone has pictures of the chips used in the NIV or KJV Bible cartridges and a good ROM dump I'd like to gather as much information as possible about them. If you are willing to lend or sell copies of these for reasonable prices let me know.

 

[SylverReZ]

Some dumps of the Wisdom Tree GB games already exist in PD/unlicensed collections.

 

[LoggerMan]

I just tried Joshua rom from the no-intro game boy pack on my analogue pocket and it does start but the graphics are garbled. I actually had this as a kid, my parents bought it from a vendor at their church. I hate church but loved video games, and though it may not be a good game the graphics and music are burned into my memory so it would be nice to play it on my Pocket. I don’t understand mappers though, guessing it’s non trivial to add it to the fpga core?

King James Bible is in the no-intro collection, probably all of them are, they aren’t exactly rare, wisdom tree sold these all over the world. King James starts on Pocket but doesn’t seem to work quite right.