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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Christopher Harper

Clever coder crams a Solitaire game onto a single Nintendo GBA e-Reader card

Nintendo
The card-scanning Nintendo e-Reader peripheral for Game Boy Advance, originally released in Japan in 2001 and stateside in 2002.

Independent developer Matt Greer has published a blog post and YouTube video highlighting his achievement of bundling an entire game of Solitaire onto a single custom Nintendo e-Reader card. The card features just two "dotstrips" containing 2,192 bytes each, totaling just over 4.3 kilobytes of data.

The Nintendo e-Reader is a peripheral originally developed and released for the Game Boy Advance in December 2001 (Japan) and September 2002 (United States), allowing for full games or expansions to existing Game Boy Advance games to be read from scannable cards and saved to the e-Reader's (comparatively) whopping 8MB of onboard storage. Some e-Reader titles, particularly NES ports, used as many as 10 cards, while the e-Reader could have supported up to 12, and things like extra Super Mario Advance 4 levels required just one.

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