E-Reader Tools

Tools for developing applications for the Nintendo GBA E-Reader.

This is a port of CaitSith2's ereader tools to NodeJS as well as neflmake, originally written by Tim Schuerewegen

Goals

• Entirely written in TypeScript
• Full support for everything the original tools do
• Improvements and additions, such as raw to svg
• well documented and tested

Why?

• Generally non-native tools are easier to work with.
• Support actions in the eventual VSCode Ereader extension I plan to make.
• Support the eventual web version of these tools.
• Print out more accurate dotcode strips that more closely match Nintendo's

Status

Very alpha. So far only compress-vpk, convert-raw and create-sav exist and are quite raw (no pun intended). Not recommended for general usage yet.

To Use

npm install --global @city41/ereader-tools
compress-vpk --input myGame.bin --output myGame.vpk
create-sav --input myGame.vpk --output myGame.sav --type z80 --region us
convert-raw --input myGame.raw --output myGame
convert-raw --input myGame.raw --output myGame --format bmp
convert-raw --input myGame.raw --output myGame --format bmp --dpi 600
convert-raw --input myGame.raw --output myGame --format png

convert-raw

convert-raw is this toolset's equivalent to raw2bmp. It is currently in a transition/experimental phase and not recommended for use. For now I recommend sticking with raw2bmp. Ultimately I am very hopeful that convert-raw will create images that scan more reliably than the ones created by raw2bmp and match Nintendo's original dotstrips more closely, if not perfectly.

bmp

If you specify --format bmp, it will produce MS bitmap files identical to raw2bmp. It supports the same dpi's too: 300, 600, 1200 and 2400, specified with --dpi <dpi>.

To create bmps, it is doing the exact same steps as raw2bmp does. There also integration tests to verify the output matches raw2bmp.

png

If you specify --format png, then only 300 dpi is supported. This is not a useful output, 300 dpi almost certainly will not scan in an E-Reader. This really exists to help ensure the svg implementation is correct.

svg

Long term, this may be the main output format and likely the only supported format. With svg, --dpi is not supported. The resulting svg image can be scaled to any size needed, so dpi is irrelevant.

That assumes svg actually provides improvements. It might not. It does allow for controlling the gap between the dots, which should help with ink bleed that varies from printer to printer. Whether this is actually true or not remains to be seen.

Development

Publishing

ereader-tools uses semantic versioning

Publishing a new version is done by bumping the version in package.json

yarn version
yarn version v1.22.19
info Current version: 0.4.0
question New version: 0.4.1
info New version: 0.4.1
Done in 16.19s.

git push
git push --tags

Once the Publish action notices the version has changed, it will run a build and publish to npm.