Oeka Kids tablet

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Revision as of 15:55, 5 March 2022 by Tepples (talk | contribs) (finer category Pointing devices)
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The Oeka Kids tablet is a Famicom accessory from Bandai that resembles a drawing tablet, and plugs into the expansion port. There are two known games that use this peripheral, using iNES Mapper 096, both of which contain a variety of activities, such as painting, drawing lessons, hiragana lessons, and a variety of minigames such as mazes and sliding puzzles.

Very little information about this accessory is available, and only basic reverse engineering has been performed so far. As such, this information may be incorrect, but it seems to be acceptable for the two commercial games that use it.

Input ($4016 write)

7  bit  0
---- ----
xxxx xxAS
       ||
       |+- Strobe (0 = Latch, 1 = Read mode)
       +-- Advance to next bit

Bits can be read only while S is 1. It advances to the next bit when S is 1 and A transitions from 0 to 1.

Output ($4017 read)

7  bit  0
---- ----
xxxx DSxx
     ||
     |+-- 0 if strobe is 1, 1 otherwise.
     +--- (Inverted) Serial data if strobe is 1, 0 if strobe is 0.

The serial data is returned most significant bit first, and inverted (including the touch and click bits).

$4017.2
   ^
   |  <-- <-- <-- <--
   XXXXXXXXYYYYYYYYBA
   ||||||||||||||||||
   |||||||||||||||||+- Click
   ||||||||||||||||+-- Stylus is touching tablet
   ||||||||++++++++--- Stylus Y, scaled to 0-255
   ++++++++----------- Stylus X, scaled to 0-239

The fact that X and Y are scaled backwards is not an error - the games which use this mapper rescale the coordinates by multiplying X by 256/240 and multiplying Y by 240/256.