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Sakura Taisen GB is a spin-off game of Sega's popular Sakura Wars series... on a Nintendo system. Rather than play as the captain of a troupe of actresses/mech pilots, the player controls a self-insert character as they undergo a trial enlistment with the Flower Division.
In the communications menu, there is a normally-inaccessible option to connect to a TV Adapter peripheral. This option appears sporadically on real hardware and either always or never on certain emulators. This adapter was never advertised, and no units are known to exist. The diagrams in the screenshots above are the only known images of this adapter. Despite this, the functionality for receiving data from this adapter is complete.
The adapter would have read barcodes from a TV screen and convert it to data to be read from the Game Boy Color's IR port. (Although the diagram shows it may have been connected to the Link Cable port, there are no functions in this game that use that port. It likely would have used it for power, which may have been a reason it was never released.)
The most likely source of these barcodes would have been the Dreamcast port of the original Sakura Taisen (released May 25, 2000, several months before this game). In that game, the One Long Day mode will show a brown TV icon showing a flashing barcode in the rooms of Flower Division members whose endings the player has attained, as well as a blue TV icon in the conversation after playing their minigame and saving scores. The Dreamcast version's manual states that "In One Long Day mode, you'll occasionally find a 'TV mark' displayed on the screen. Remember where these marks appear, something good might happen with them later."
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