Homebrew Tool Turns Analogue Pocket Into a Game Boy ROM Dumper

Your Analogue Pocket is about to gain a trick that dedicated cartridge dumpers have been doing for years — without leaving the device. openFPGA-CartTools, an unofficial FPGA project from developer Kroy, reads Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges through the Pocket’s cartridge slot and writes the ROMs to an SD card. It’s rough, developer-focused, and unfinished, but it’s already the most interesting thing to hit the Pocket’s openFPGA ecosystem in a while.

For handheld players, the promise here is bigger than a neat tech demo. The project is built in RTL, not as software running on a soft CPU, because the whole job is cartridge bus timing and pin direction. That means the Pocket is doing the low-level work its FPGA was designed for — and if Kroy’s roadmap lands, your Pocket becomes a portable preservation station capable of backing up carts and saves without a separate dongle.

A Dumper Built at the Hardware Level

The technical approach is what makes this more than a script. Kroy’s GitHub writeup stresses that openFPGA-CartTools is RTL rather than software on a soft CPU, because the entire job is cartridge bus timing and pin direction — hardware holds to the cycle, and a testbench can prove it. The repo enforces pin isolation so only one module can drive a connector pin; the build fails if that changes. That’s the kind of rigor you want when a timing slip can mean a corrupted read or a mangled save.

None of this is plug-and-play yet. The README is aimed at developers, and features like save data backup and restoration, RTC handling, and read-back verification are still missing. But the fact that it’s being done as an FPGA core rather than a software workaround says a lot about where the Pocket’s openFPGA ecosystem is heading — and how seriously the community treats cartridge preservation.

A Preservation Tool You Already Carry

The end goal is straightforward: dump your own cartridges legally, for use in emulators and recomps, without buying a separate dumper. For collectors with shelves of Game Boy, GBC, and GBA carts, that’s a meaningful step. Save batteries die, labels fade, and carts get lost — being able to back up the ROM and eventually the save data through the same slot you play through is a genuinely useful archival workflow.

It also strengthens the case for the Analogue Pocket as the centerpiece of a retro handheld setup. Dedicated dumping hardware exists, but it’s another box, another cable, another thing to keep track of. If openFPGA-CartTools matures, the answer to “how do I preserve my collection?” becomes “with the handheld already in my bag.” That’s a win for the preservation scene and for anyone who’d rather not buy more hardware to protect the hardware they love.