![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The printer in the Snap Station uses a video pass-through input to capture photos directly from the Nintendo 64’s video output. The station then resets the console and instructs the game to enter a photo display mode after the boot logo screen. When the player presses the Print button, the selection of photos chosen for printing is saved to the game cartridge. I recommend watching a video of the real Snap Station in action if you haven’t yet in order to help make sense of what happens at the end. The following video shows the Snap Station simulator in Project64: Using this information, I’ve implemented a Snap Station simulator in the Project64 emulator, as well as a hardware implementation using an iCEBreaker FPGA board. (With access to a real Snap Station, all I would’ve had to do was use a logic analyzer to observe what was being transmitted over the fourth controller port.) It was much trickier to identify the actual code responsible for handling the print functionality for reasons I’ll describe later, but with a combination of static analysis, dynamic analysis, and a custom FPGA-based hardware tool, I was able to reverse engineer the Snap Station’s control protocol without having access to one. That suggested that the code for handling some amount of the printing behavior might be present on all retail copies of the game.īy looking into the Pokémon Snap ROM, I was able to quickly confirm that the print menu text was present in the retail copy of the game: a08270 63 72 65 65 6e 2e 00 00 49 66 20 79 6f 75 20 6c >creen.If you like these pictures, please.make sure a print credit exists.then press \a to print.Return to the Title saving.Gall< Furthermore, some videos showing the interior of the station revealed that the printer hardware was actually connected to the Nintendo 64 through its fourth controller port. The Snap Stations themselves are hard to come by these days, but while watching some YouTube videos made by collectors I recalled that, in order to print your photos, you would insert your own Pokémon Snap game cartridge into the station. I’ve had one of the Charmander cards sitting around with my collection of Nintendo stuff for a while, which got me thinking about what it would be like to hack one of these kiosks.ĭescription of the Snap Station from the June 1999 issue of Nintendo Power Snap Stations could only be found at a Blockbuster video store (or a Lawson convenience store in Japan), and you’d have to pay for credits in the form of Pokémon-styled smart cards each time you wanted to print out a sheet of stickers. Back in 1999 when the original Pokémon Snap was released for the Nintendo 64, one of its coolest features was that you could print out the photos you took in-game on sticker sheets using a Snap Station. ![]()
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