GoKawiilFully Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter
Table of Contents
Pixter Color
The beginning
TLDR: First ever complete reverse engineering, documentation, emulation, and preservation of all Fisher-Price/Mattel Pixter device series and [almost] all the games.
In 2000, the famous American toy company Fisher-Price released a simple drawing-oriented handheld gaming console for kids called Pixter. It featured no brain-rotting social media and focused, instead, on drawing, sketching, and educational games. The initial sales figure from the holiday season of the release was half a million units, which is not too shabby at all. Besides letting kids draw using an included stylus on the 80x80 monochrome display while catchy tunes played on repeat from the speaker, the device also allowed plug-in games to expand the possible activities. There exist 25 known games for Pixter (I had to edit wikipedia to correct their record). Soon after, there was a Pixter Plus, which added more memory and expanded the built-in game. Then there was Pixter 2.0, which added wireless comms. Neither of those radically changed the device itself and all the games remained cross-compatible. One cool feature of Pixter devices was that you could draw an image in one game, using its stamps and tools, save it to internal memory, plug in another game, load it, and draw on top of it. So you could, literally, customize a cool car in "Cool Wheels", save the image, plug in "Barbie Fashion Show" and plop a barbie into your cool car image. What joy this must have been!
In 2003, Pixter Color came out, adding color, 4x the screen resolution, and a new game cartridge connector. An adapter came with it to allow it to run old games, and it ran them all (pixel-doubled) perfectly! Obviously, the old monochrome Pixters could not run new color games. The main purpose of the device remained the same - sketching and stickers with ability to save your compositions in memory, just in color now! Games got more advanced and intricate. There was even a camera attachment! There are 32 games known to exist for Pixter Color. In 2005, Pixter Multimedia came out, which added a better screen (quality-wise, the resolution remained the same) and a yet another game cartridge connector (a superset of the Pixter Color connector), allowing for Multimedia-only carts. Nine of these Pixter Multimedia exclusive game are known to exist.
As I had written before, my friend Josh pointed me at Pixter Color as potential PalmOS porting target, and after a lot of work, I got PalmOS fully working on that device. This is not that story, however! To get PalmOS working, the device had to be understood, a method to run code on it had to be found, and among all that research, a lot of work was done on documenting Pixter Color. Previously, a few places online mentioned that “THERE ARE CURRENTLY NO EMULATORS FOR THIS DEVICE OR PLATFORM. ANY CLAIMS TO OFFER THEM ARE SCAMS!”. This is no longer true, I am happy to report. I am here to present a complete historical preservation of all information pertaining to how Pixter devices work and almost all the games. However, let us go in order...
Sometimes, you get lucky
Pixter Color Slot 1 A0 || 2 D0 3 A1 || 4 D1 5 A2 || 6 D2 7 A3 || 8 D3 9 A4 || 10 D4 11 A5 || 12 D5 13 A6 || 14 D6 15 A7 || 16 D7 17 A8 || 18 D8 19 A9 || 20 D9 21 A10 || 22 D10 23 A11 || 24 D11 25 A12 || 26 D12 27 A13 || 28 D13 29 A14 || 30 D14 31 A15 || 32 D15 33 A16 || 34 PE1 35 A17 || 36 PE0 37 A18 || 38 nCS2 39 A19 || 40 nCS3 41 A20 || 42 nOE 43 A21 || 44 nWE 45 A22 || 46 PG6 47 A23 || 48 PD0 49 PD2 || 50 PD1 51 PD4 || 52 PF6 53 PD3 || 54 PF4 55 PD5 || 56 AUD 57 PD6 || 58 Vdd 59 Vss || 60 ??
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