Is there a way to modify the hardware so that the slot to swipe the cards isn’t so narrow? Something closer to a regular barcode gun used at a supermarket would make this an easier request, but swiping some of these cards five times through an e-Reader sounds like a nightmare… after all, Pokemon intentionally got rid of the e-reader strip for the e-series holo cards and put it on the normal rare versions, since they knew people would not want to swipe and risk damaging their holos.
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Yeah I was thinking of this too. The last thing someone with a 5 figure card wants to do is potentially dent it.
If it works through a sleeve, I wonder if an extremely high quality scanner couldn’t get the data you need. Much safer for the cards since flat
Are you sure that the sample, FPO & matchprint cards have unique dotcodes that are different from the regular Expedition release? It would seem strange to me that Media Factory/WOTC went through the extra effort to make a unique dotcode for those few handfuls of cards (that weren’t even supposed to be released).
I really have no clue about that though and I wish you the best of luck for your honorable quest to preserve history.
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What about printing a 2400 DPI scan onto cardstock and swiping that through? Or would you need too fancy a printer?
Here’s the video I was mentioning
At 10 minutes in he scans the printout
As a followup, I tried scanning in an e-reader card on my scanner. (Max res scan is multiple GB though) It’s probably good enough to produce a working copy and is a million times safer for the cards. If you zoom in you can see all the actual dots.
This is from within a card sleeve, probably even clearer without one
If that mod still lets it work, that seems like a great option
Patience is a virtue! Scanner must be purchased among other things 
Fyi scanning is totally possible even with a double sleeved card 
goodluck and I’m excited to see the results!!
Another side note. The Japanese cards have region restricted dot codes so you’ll need the Japanese gameboy advance and eReader. Unless there is a bypass to this
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@mthursty , the current plan is to first get a high enough res scanner and convert a scanned file into a .bmp and then there is software to convert the strip into pure dot code file. Originally I had thought printing the scan onto photo paper would work, but you are correct, would then have to order Japanese equipment as well. I am working with OP on discord (don’t know if he’s active on e4 anymore) to figure out best methods.
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This definitely isn’t perfect as I used an online tool (Pixlr) to play with the colour levels, but it’s pretty easy to remove most of the noise:
This is of course far from perfect using the Imgur-scaled low-res images (does anyone know how tolerant the e-Reader device is?), but if you did this with something like Photoshop on the full resolution image you can probably go down the printing route pretty easily.
These are the steps I used on Pixlr (I’m sure there’s probably a way to do it with Levels alone) but I’m no designer:
- Use the Colour Balance adjustment option to set Midtones to Red -100% and Highlights to Blue -100% and Green -100%;
- Use the Picker tool to select the colour of the now faded red dots from the card’s background pattern;
- Use the Colour Lookup adjustment option to cover most of the red with black and adjust the slider until the dots are invisible;
- Use the Wand tool with default tolerance (32) to select and remove the black;
- Use the Levels adjustment to make the now red e-Reader code black again.
@pichufan, I tried something similar in Photoshop. I do not think image editing alone can do the trick for dot code conversion. However there is software to recognize the dots and convert the strip to dot code.
@qwachansey
The full scan is over 300MB, but if you send the software my way Id love to try it
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I used some image software that I use for tracking bacteria or other cellular substances
The software is free and called ImageJ
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I don’t have the software but a .bmp to .dot conversion should work.
This is also a helpful resource: www.caitsith2.com/ereader/devtools.htm
I could not get Raw2bmp to work… Seg faults right away
EDIT: I’ve uploaded a larger res file here, maybe one of you can get the preprocessing & conversion to work, then test w/ my koffing in an emulator.
About 300MB
I have a complete ungraded FPO set if there’s someone in the DC area that is willing to do the work.