Archiving the 2002 e-Reader Trophy Cards: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

2023 Edit: This thread shows in real time the archiving of e-Reader dot codes, in particular the 2002 numbered trainer Trophy cards, which are the only e-Reader trophy cards. With the Nintendo e-Reader now over twenty years old, there was a risk of the data on the rarest cards being lost to time. As an example, you may be familiar with libraries archiving old film reels to preserve the video. Some of the cards featured here have fewer than five copies. In May 2023 the project run by HitSave! To archive every single Pokémon dot code for posterity was accomplished. Other than this edit I have not changed any of the posts to preserve the original two-year timeline.

Quite exhausted but will update with process tomorrow. Thanks so much @ereadercrew @sunicune for your help.

High res:

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Awesome work! So cool.

Imakuni is congratulating the winner. He even talks in sprite form!

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That’s awesome! Glad you let them do it. I wish the e-reader had been more if a thing. That would been super fun to have had more opportunities to use it.

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You should find a way to get a print out and then make a custom trophy case with it.

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This is insane!! Such an amazing discovery. I wonder if this is the first time something like this has ever been done!

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This is super big. Nice job!

You’ve got guts if it was a full swipe, but based on your description it seems a different method was used?

I’ve always been far too scared to swipe, so kudos to you for solving the mystery !

I never even thought of swiping them that’s amazing. Awesome to see a piece of Pokemon history like this!

It was done with help from the team at Hit Save (see hitsave.org and hitsave.org/blog/e-reader-fundraiser).

They even have a functional prototype of a modified e-Reader device which can scan cards which are contained in top loaders and graded cases.

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Doesn’t get better than this, the vintage retro feel is mindblowing, one of the best things I saw this year, congrats!

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Actual scrolling text translated with Google.

“Pampakapan! Congratulations on your victory
Hmm! You did your best! It was decided that I wouldn’t be able to raise my head! Nice to meet you from now on!
Champion!”

I’m assuming the raising your head thing is about bowing.

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As a huge Tomoaki Imakuni fan, I couldn’t be more thrilled about this discovery! Thanks so much for the effort you put into this!

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Thanks all. Like @pichufan mentioned, I deserve little of the credit for this and will later post pics of the rather insane and unexpected process involved (the model did not work as planned). The vast majority of the work and planning was done by e-reader archivists who deserve thanks for their dedication. It took about 8 hours to capture the data but months of preparation on their end.

Ultimately it came down to stripping all non essential functions of a of modified E-reader both for the sake of card preservation and ease of use. An e-reader is basically a camera that captures the dot code as you swipe, so all you need is the camera capturing you swipe the card back and forth a few thousand times at different angles and heights, which can be done with graded cards as well.

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Here is a better video for preservation:

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Thanks for sharing this, truly cool to see, it is exciting that there are still things to discover from the early days!

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Man those classic gameboy beeps are such an instant throwback of nostalgia. Thanks for sharing!

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Just to add a little clarification, due to CGCs new case design we had some problems swiping the card with our e-Reader mod as expected. However, our existing design works flawlessly with PSA cases and older case designs. A huge thank you to @qwachansey for taking the time to do this, even if it wasn’t entirely as straight forward as we expected.

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Wow that’s incredible, thanks so much for sharing this. Hidden gems like this are some of the most interesting parts of Pokemon, there’s so much effort and story beneath the surface.

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“Few thousand times” that already sounds like respectable effort :sweat_smile: