Original Post
Profile Photo
Aug 08, 2012 • 00:43 Profile Photo Yeti_dude

Anyone here planning on going to the Classic Gaming Expo this weekend? I think I’ll attend since I live in Las Vegas. One big part of this event is the homebrew scene that attends. It is at the CGE that homebrew developers announce their games amid a bunch of hoopla. Mainly it’s Atari guys as far as I know but one real cool part is that these developers make cartridges and sell them at this event. I have a family friend who is coming to stay with my family who has been coming to this thing for several years just so he can pick up the latest homebrew releases. He’s partly the reason I’ve been exploring this VB dev scene.

I gotta say I think it’d be neat if one day some VB homebrews could make it to the convention and get people seeing the great work that is being done and has already been done by you guys. Anyone else have any thoughts about getting homebrew VB games more visibility? Anyone just want to go to this expo and drown in nostalgia?

http://www.cgexpo.com

8 Replies
Profile Photo
Aug 08, 2012 • 08:00 Profile Photo TheForce81

I think that would be a great way to get the VB community the attention it deserves! Last year I went to Gamescom in Cologne, Germany and there was a VB set up for playing and people were all standing in line for it, they loved it! This was at a special area for retro gaming, the VB was easily the most popular device of everything out there.

If people were to get together on the VB in real life I think the VB will get way more popular in the retro scene.

That is my experience though.

Profile Photo
Aug 08, 2012 • 16:49 Profile Photo Super Bros.

Virtual Boy deserves some increased retro fan base love! It’s a great console, that needs it bad history removed.

I think they should demo games like Hunter, Jack Bros, Bound High and Innsmouth.

Profile Photo
Aug 10, 2012 • 07:35 Profile Photo Yeti_dude

So it looks like I’ll be attending the CGE this weekend. I’d really like to have some VB stuff to show off on the computer except that my little laptop is running a version of linux on it. I’ve been trying real hard to get any of the emulators or gccVB working properly but to no avail. The emulators will start up but I can’t seem to get any controls to work and building gccVB fails in the binutils stage.

Has anyone else had any success getting any of these VB applications running in Linux?

Profile Photo
Aug 10, 2012 • 08:59 Profile Photo TheForce81

Yeti_dude wrote:
So it looks like I’ll be attending the CGE this weekend. I’d really like to have some VB stuff to show off on the computer except that my little laptop is running a version of linux on it. I’ve been trying real hard to get any of the emulators or gccVB working properly but to no avail. The emulators will start up but I can’t seem to get any controls to work and building gccVB fails in the binutils stage.

Has anyone else had any success getting any of these VB applications running in Linux?

Why not make an image of your current install and temporarily install Windows? Shouldn’t take too much time and you can return to your previous install fast and easy!

Profile Photo
Aug 10, 2012 • 21:15 Profile Photo Greg Stevens

I use linux on all my machines. I’m able to run reality boy just fine with wine (although it’s a little slow on my netbook… but it’s a netbook). In fact I used the reality boy debug windows exe to create the SD Gundam english patch Ben and I just released. I’m not able to get the most recent version of gccVB working either. Some kind of bug with the version of GCC that gccVB was based on I think… But the VBASM (assembly) compiler works just fine through wine. I can also compile with the older version of gccVB through wine if you want to download that one. I haven’t messed with it much but it will compile and run roms in the reality boy emulator just fine. If you try them on an actual VB though it doesn’t display anything. I’ve only messed with it for about an hour so it’s probably just something needing added to to the VB INIT function but I haven’t tried to figure it out yet.

  • This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by Greg Stevens.
  • This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by Greg Stevens.
Profile Photo
Aug 11, 2012 • 06:35 Profile Photo Yeti_dude

I’ve been trying Reality Boy through Wine but I haven’t gotten the controls to work at all. No button on my keyboard seems to make any of the games work. I’m running crunch-bang Linux (Debian based) on my NetBook. The Dos based assembler hasn’t been any better for me but that’s probably because I don’t know how to do the Dos stuff through Wine very well. I’m going to keep fiddling around with everything so that maybe I can give some demos of the cool stuff others have done in the VB dev community.
It turns out that my family friend who goes to CGE is good friends with one of the three main organizers (Jersey guys) so I’d really like to make an impression to some of the people at the expo. My friend was floored when he found out that there was a C compiler for VB, let alone all the rom and bitmap editing tools and the flashboy. What’s drawn me to dive in to VB stuff is the untapped potential of this system. And I think others in the retro gaming scene might get excited too if they only knew of the great strides that have already been made in VB homebrew.
Just as an FYI, a table display booth at the classic Game Expo costs 100 bucks. Anyone interested in chipping in for a PlanetVB table for next year?

Profile Photo
Aug 11, 2012 • 15:37 Profile Photo Greg Stevens

I’ve noticed at the initial start up of the emulator there is a significant lag time before the controls start to register. It’s about 30 seconds on my machine. After the 30 seconds are up if you’re using the default controls either ‘Q’ [start] or ‘Z’ [A button] should get most games to start moving. If it’s running slow after that you can increase/decrease frame skip using +/-. I know when I first started using the emulator I didn’t think anything was working either but I just wasn’t waiting long enough for everything to initialize. As for wine. To compile using the assembler program it should be as simple as
linuxprompt> wine /directoryToAssembly/VBASM.EXE hello.asm -o hello.vb

using the gccVB version 1.0 I actually run wine in cmd.exe mode in which case it would be
linuxprimpt> wine cmd.exe

windowsprompt> /pathTogccBinDir/make.bat /pathToSource/ sourcefile

notice there is a space between pathToSource/ and the sourcefile name. Also no extension is used as the make.bat file takes care of it. It’s all in the readme for gccVB 1.0

hope this helps.

Profile Photo
Aug 14, 2012 • 00:59 Profile Photo Yeti_dude

Thanks Greg. Everything you said worked great for me. The only thing I didn’t try was gccVB v.1. I managed to figure out DOS well enough to get all the other utilities working in Windows and through Wine on my Linux netbook.
As for the CGE recap: I found a copy of VB Golf for 3 bucks so I picked that up. There was one vendor who had a few VB games with boxes: Red Alarm, Teleroboxer, Nestor’s Funky Bowling, and even Mario Tennis (that was going for 100$!). He was also selling simple VB accessories and I even picked up a nice stand from him (my stand clip is broken). Other than that there was Atari, Atari, and a good bit of Atari homebrew. There was also plenty of NES, SNES, era stuff from a lot of the vendors but the main focus of the convention was definitely pre-NES.
Everyone who I could get to listen enjoyed hearing about the cool stuff that’s been done with Virtual Boy by you guys. They were all impressed to hear about gccVB and Flashboy. Overall it was a cool experience and anyone who likes the oldest eras of gaming would enjoy it.

 

Write a reply

You must be logged in to reply to this topic.