Wow, I got a lot of stuff that is definitely very damaged and thought I would test the cards to see if they still read. Here is the worst of the cards in question:
Okay, now I have a personal goal to see what stops it from reading properly. So next I tried to cut out a larger slice from the card, an entire sliver.
Looks pretty extreme, right? Well youâd be correct, that was enough to kill it hahaha!
But man, color me impressed, I was terribly worried previously about a single scratch on these killing the card, but it proved to be insanely resilient.
It must be using some level of redundancy. It might be able to impute a few bits of obstructed info here and there with some kind of like checksum calculation. But for it to work after cutting out a whole section, Iâd be really confounded if the pattern wasnât repeated elsewhere in the barcode
Really interesting that a decent chunk knocks it out. I thought theyâd repeat the data somewhere so it could read even when kids didnât do a full swipe. Wonder if itâs the specific location you cut out?
If you want to learn more, you can search for âHit Save!â and the experts there might tell you what you want to know instead of having to destroy your own cards.
Oh, very interesting little bit of info! I had checked out the site and read up about making e readers that could scan graded cards. Thought that was a really neat venture.
So 6 blocks can be lost and itâs still okay, not consecutive though. Regarding the damaging of my cards, Iâm okay with losing the card haha! They were extras in a lot and Iâve already got those RS Sets completed. So it was just a free test card and I enjoyed running the experiment for myselfđ
Iâm loving it a lot. I think it would be replaced with the QR codes at this point, though. It kind of already has been done with the codes for PTCGO. However, Iâd like to see something that actually has an affect on the games like these old e readers do. It would be a lot of fun to collect this type of thing for current games. I think itâd be a lot more likely to stick nowadays too as you donât need :
GBA
link cable
other GB(A/SP)
e reader
cards
copy of game.
Now youâd only need three of those, cards, game, and system, of which presumably two would already be in possession of one wanting these cards.
Do the ORAS cards affect the game itself? I believe someone recently was looking to collect them entirely if Im not mistaken
E-reader was definitely part of a fun time back in the day. I liked all that novelty connectivity tech that Nintendo was pushing back in the Gamecube days. Lots of good memories with stuff like the Gamecube to GBA connectivity for Wind Waker, Pac Man VS and Animal Crossing. Obviously even further back Pokemon Stadium was rad with the Transfer Pak. Ah, fun times.
Hereâs an old magazine ad I recently came across for the release of Expedition in the UK. Interestingly no E logo on the card in this ad! In fact the E-reader isnât really mentioned at all. I donât remember seeing any E-reader stuff in UK shops at that time.
I loved using the tingle tuner and was absolutely distraught when they removed it from the HD remake
It seems likely that maybe it was released in america first, and since it flopped, they didnât even want to try advertising for the e reader in Europe at all
Interesting discovery.
I had no idea that e-Card can still work despite theyâre highly played.
My first impression was READ ERROR message, but itâs amazing you can enjoy the content of the e-Cards despite the status of it.
As I frequently say: âEvery day, new things about Nintendo e-Reader come to lightâ
The caveat for the QR code is that it rarely holds the actual information, but rather a reference to it.
IDK that it could hold an entire program, or even a small database like an amiibo. Generally QRs refer to a web resource or contain a small amount of data such as contact information.
That would be nice. Until then, the only options to not kill your cards is use them in an emulator or have a printer accurate enough to print out the code strips.
Ahh! Okay, so itâs not likely that a QR code could perform in the same way as one of these dot strips on the e reader cards.
If that were the case, then yeah, I canât say that I want QR codes for playing the game. Iâd want something that could last through time and I donât have to worry about Nintendo cancelling the service
