Mega Man Battle Network: Mod Card Kit v1.0

IMPORTANT: If you use VBA-M to load saveable cards to then transfer the save to a real e-Reader, make a back-up of your e-Reader save file first! Saves created in VBA-M do not initialize the e-Reader calibration data, which when transferred to a real e-Reader WILL cause the card scanner to STOP WORKING! If this happens, you can repair the card reader by restoring your e-Reader back-up save file.

The Japanese versions of Rockman EXE 4 through 6 supported the Nintendo e-Reader in the form of "Kaizou Cards". Most of them were sold in booster packs or given away at events. You could scan these cards with the e-Reader and then transmit them to the game via Link Cable in order to receive rare items or boost MegaMan's power.

Like most other bonus features of the series, these cards were never distributed outside of Japan and did not work on the English versions of the games. In addition, over time, some of the cards have become quite rare and hard to find. Most of the cards have been ripped, but naturally, they are illegal to distribute. And some cards were never ripped, leaving their contents unobtainable.

This Mod Card Kit features custom cards that have been written from scratch and implement the Rockman EXE e-Card transmission protocol. They can be used to send over recreations of the original Kaizou Card data to Rockman EXE 4, Rockman EXE 5 and Rockman EXE 6. In addition, for the first time ever, you can also send Mod Cards to the English versions of Mega Man Battle Network 4 and Mega Man Battle Network 5!

To reiterate: the cards in this kit work on the English e-Reader. They do NOT work on the Japanese Card e-Reader or Card e-Reader+. However, they CAN transfer data to the Japanese versions of Rockman EXE 4 through 6.

Discuss this project at The Rockman EXE Zone: http://forums.therockmanexezone.com/topic/8937347/1/

The GitHub repository of this project can be found at: http://github.com/Prof9/mmbn-mod-card-kit/

Supported versions

The cards in this Mod Card Kit support the following versions:

Game	Japanese	North American	European
Mega Man Battle Network 4	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mega Man Battle Network 5	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mega Man Battle Network 6	Yes	No	No

Features

Of course, just implementing the transmission protocol wouldn't be any fun, so the e-Cards in this kit have some features and differences that set them apart from the original files.

• All card interface text has been fully translated into English.
• Multi-region support: each card works on both the English and Japanese versions of the game.
• Cards can be saved to the e-Reader's memory so you can scan them in an emulator, transfer your save back to your e-Reader and use the cards on your physical games.
• And of course, the cards are open source, so you can tinker with all the text and graphics if you want to.

This Mod Card Kit contains two types of Mod Cards: Saveable and Non-Saveable. The difference between the two is just that: the Saveable Mod Cards can be saved to the e-Reader's memory. The Non-Saveable cards cannot, and act just like the official Kaizou Cards produced by Capcom. These are more suited to being printed out on actual cards.

If you use the Saveable Mod Cards, note that some of them have the same name. In order to overwrite a Mod Card with the same name, you need to delete it from the e-Reader memory first. To do this, hold L+R when you boot up the e-Reader.

How to use

In this Mod Card Kit, you will find many files ending with in .raw. These are raw e-Card dump files, and you can scan these in emulators. Below you will find instructions on scanning cards and sending them to your game using No$gba.

Before you begin:

1. Gather a Nintendo DS or Nintendo DS Lite, a North American e-Reader and a SLOT-1 flash card that is capable of running homebrew.
2. Download the GBA Backup Tool v0.21 homebrew and extract it to the microSD card of your flash card.
3. Start up your Nintendo DS and run GBA Backup Tool.
4. Insert the e-Reader into SLOT-2, and press the A button.
5. The e-Reader should be detected with the game title CARDE_READER PSAE 00.
6. Press R twice to switch to ROM Backup mode.
7. Press B, then A to dump the e-Reader ROM to the flash card's microSD card.
8. Repeat steps 4 - 7 for any Mega Man Battle Network games that you want to transfer e-Cards to.

Transferring e-Cards to your game:

1. Download and run the No$gba emulator (gaming version).
2. Go to Options, then Emulation Setup, and set the Number of Emulated Gameboys to 2.
3. Make sure Link Cable Type is set to Automatic, then click OK.
4. Go to File, then Cartridge menu (FileName).
5. Make sure that Autostart Cartridge is checked, and set the dropdown menu beside it to All machines.
6. Navigate to your Mega Man Battle Network ROM and open it.
7. Go to File, then Cartridge menu (FileName).
8. Set the dropdown beside Autostart Cartridge to 2nd machine.
9. Navigate to the e-Reader ROM and open it.
10. Go to File, then Load e-Reader Dotcode.
11. Navigate to the e-Card that you want to scan and open it.
12. In the e-Reader menu, choose Scan Card. The e-Card will be scanned and loaded.
13. In Mega Man Battle Network, go to the MegaMan Screen. You should receive a message that a card has been received. Accept the transmission to receive the card data.

Note: this is not the only way to do it; there also exist versions of VisualBoy Advance that allow you to scan e-Cards. This may be more convenient if you are planning to transfer your Mod Cards to a pre-existing save file, as No$gba uses an encrypted save file format by default.

English e-Card support for Rockman EXE 6

Unfortunately, all e-Reader related code was removed from the English versions of Mega Man Battle Network 6. Nonetheless, the Rockman EXE 6 cards in this kit can transmit the English versions to English versions of Mega Man Battle Network 6; they will just not be detected by the game.

If you are a modder, you can instruct the Rockman EXE 6 e-Cards to show English text in your mod of the Japanese version of Rockman EXE 6. You can do this by writing the bytes 45 43 41 52 44 5F 45 4E to offset 7FF4FC in the game ROM. This works for both Cyber Beast Glaga and Cyber Beast Falzer versions, but ONLY works for Rockman EXE 6.

If you do this, then keep the following in mind:

1. The English text in the e-Card is encoded with the character table from the English version of Mega Man Battle Network 6, so make sure that your font is compatible with this character table.
2. For the BattleChip transmission cards, the chip text is sent in Japanese, so make sure that you read this text from the ROM in your mod, instead of reading it from RAM as normal.

Building from source

Before you can build e-Cards, you need to gather some tools and put them in the tools folder. You need the following files:

• armips.exe
• nedclib.dll
• nedcenc.exe
• nedcmake.exe
• nevpk.exe
• grit\grit.exe

Note that grit.exe must be in its own folder named grit inside the tools folder. Furthermore, the latest development version of ARMIPS is required, so you will need to build it from the source.

In order to build an e-Card, run compile.bat from the command line, and pass the path to an e-Card configuration file as the first argument. For instance:

compile.bat "cards\bn4\ChipTransmission\134-C001 PrixPowr.asm"

This will produce card.01.bin and card.01.raw in the out folder, as well as card.02.bin and card.02.raw for data that could not fit onto one card. There is no configuration file for the compile script; if you want to tweak some build settings, modify the compile.bat file directly.

Additionally, you can also run compile_all.bat. This script will compile all e-Card configuration files in the cards folder and write the resulting .raw files to the outall folder. If one of the cards fails to build, the script will halt and display an error, and wait for any key to be pressed before it will exit. If this happens, you can check log.txt to see the build log of the card that failed to build.

Credits

• caitsith2, for the superb Nintendo e-Reader Dev Tools.
• Capcom Product Dev 2, for the amazing Mega Man Battle Network series.
• exeguy11, for the Rockman EXE 6 translation patch.
• Greiga Master, for his work on ARMIPS that made this project far easier.
• Kingcom, for the brilliant ARMIPS assembler.
• Martin Korth, for the indispensible No$gba debugger.
• MidniteW, for help with translation/editing and beta testing.
• Nigoli, the prime Rockman EXE e-Reader guru.
• Nikslg, for help with beta testing.
• No-Intro, for the e-Reader Encyclopedia.
• Prof. 9, for this Mod Card Kit.
• Qwiscot, for the extremely useful Rockman EXE card-e+ Cards guide.
• Tim Schuerewegen, for his awesome e-Reader API documentation.

Rockman, Rockman EXE, Mega Man and Mega Man Battle Network are © Capcom 1987 - 2015. All rights belong to their respective owners.

Contact:

• Twitter: Prof9
• E-mail: Click to view
• Forums: The Rockman EXE Zone

Changelog:

v1.0 - 15 May 2015

• Initial release.

License

This Mod Card Kit is "licensed" under the terms of the Unlicense. See LICENSE.md for more information.

This license does NOT apply to files in the include folder, which were "borrowed" from the official Kaizou Cards produced by Capcom and contain data necessary for the transmission program to function correctly, such as graphics.

No e-Readers were harmed in the making of this Mod Card Kit.