[Reel Big Fish]

So as most of you are aware (I bet) there is an GB emulator for the virtual boy that can be found here https://filetrip.net/oldies-downloads/other-oldies/download-gbemu-virtual-boy-7-3-16-f33506.html.

The emulator is a .bin file, and there is a rom injector program that comes with the download. I can get the .bin file to run on a virtual boy emulator, but what about actual hardware? Has anyone tried this? I don’t have a flashboy yet, I just ordered one and am waiting for it to come. Any input is appreciated, thanks.

• This topic was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Reel Big Fish.

Yes it works fine. I found I had to make sure the amount of roms I injected equated to a 2MB file, but other than that works great.

[Reel Big Fish]

Wow that’s amazing. I can’t wait to try it out. So could you put a few roms on there and stay under the 2MB mark, then use the padding software to pad the rest so you get to 2MB?

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Reel Big Fish.

Yeah it really is a technical feat, I can’t believe someone made this.
No, that’s the thing, padding it screwed it up for me. I had to make sure I added roms until it output a 2MB file. For some reason padding messes with this emulator. It’s no big deal though, the fact that this works at all and runs quite well for some games is amazing.

Oh ok I see what you mean. Now that I’m going through my GB roms, I see that they are all 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and 1024 KB. So it should be easy enough to put some on there that add up to 2024 kb.

And actually, there is 1 game that is 2024 kb! “NIV Bible & the 20 Lost Levels of Joshua”. haha

Yeah there ya go, and I found I didn’t even have to get it exact to 2MB, even if I got close to it I would still end up with a 2MB file.

Hm interesting. I wonder if it’s still being developed. Hopefully we can get some of our programmers out there to make improvements on it. Wouldn’t it be cool if one day we had near perfect emulation of GB, NES, and maybe even SNES on the VB? I don’t know how others feel about it, but I would love to be able to play all sorts of games on the VB. The red doesn’t bother me, and I love how good the sound system is on the VB, and the fact that you are “immersed” in the game.

He did release one update, but honestly I’m not sure there’s a whole lot else he can do.

While I think it would be cool to play all those systems on the VB, I’m not sure how technically possible it is. I can’t believe even the Gameboy worked. The VB only has a ~20mhz CPU. If you tried to emulate a Gameboy on any PC with a CPU about that powerful it would be a complete slideshow. I know, because I tried on a 386 quite a few years ago =P

You need a lot of CPU power to emulate another piece of hardware. There’s a reason you need a CPU in the hundreds of mhz to emulate a SNES decently. Nintendo couldn’t make the Super Nintendo emulate the Gameboy, it simply wasn’t powerful enough. That is why the Super Gameboy contained all the necessary Gameboy hardware inside the cartridge.

Like I said, I can’t believe the GB emulator for the VB is even technically possible. It must have taken some serious technical wizardry!

[Reel Big Fish]

Ah you know what you are right. I was forgetting that to emulate requires much much more processing power than the original. The VB has a better processor than the NES and one similar in strength to the SNES, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is good enough to emulate those consoles.

This article talks about how it takes a 3GHz processor to properly emulate the Super Nintendo’s 21.47MHz CPU. http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2712-why-perfect-hardware-snes-emulation-requires-a-3ghz-cpu/

I wonder though, if it would be possible to run NES on the VB. The NES has a 1.79 MHz processor, while the GB has a 4.19 MHz. And, as we can see, the VB with its 20 MHz CPU can emulate the Gameboy.

I could see a scenario where the VB would struggle to emulate NES games, and that would be games that had extra processing chips (mappers) in the cartridges. I wonder how many NES games have mappers..

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Reel Big Fish.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Reel Big Fish.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Reel Big Fish.

Can it save your game in the gameboy games?

Reel Big Fish wrote:
Ah you know what you are right. I was forgetting that to emulate requires much much more processing power than the original. The VB has a better processor than the NES and one similar in strength to the SNES, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is good enough to emulate those consoles….

The VB processor is actually more powerful than the SNES’. The SNES CPU was effectively clocked at 3.58mhz.

But yes, I could see NES maybe being possible, but it would require a similar type of coding skill that it took to make the GB emulator. In other words, it won’t be a simple task.

Nitrosoxide wrote:
Can it save your game in the gameboy games?

It’s suppose to but I’m getting hit or miss results with it.

There’s a problem about colors, too. GB has 4 shades of grey, wich are transposed to VB quite easily. But a NES has much more than that, and I fear that emulate a colored NES game on VB would result in a loss so important that the games could barely be played at all.
When there is red character on blue background, all two would become red and one couldn’t distinguish character from background.

Arvester wrote:
There’s a problem about colors, too. GB has 4 shades of grey, wich are transposed to VB quite easily. But a NES has much more than that, and I fear that emulate a colored NES game on VB would result in a loss so important that the games could barely be played at all.
When there is red character on blue background, all two would become red and one couldn’t distinguish character from background.

Yeah, but I think there is a solution to that. It would probably require more CPU power, but the colors can be inverted, then converted into black and white. That’s what I’ve done with my display pic. If you’ll look, there are 4 shades of red. I inverted it so the background would be dark red instead of bright red, then the 4 black/white colors translate nicely into the red virtual boy colors.

Nitrosoxide wrote:
Can it save your game in the gameboy games?

Yes it can. As long as the game you want to save is in the first slot of those that you inject, it will be able to save. Some users have reported that the feature is somewhat finicky, and will work better with some games than others.

As pointed out by JnL on the discord channel apparently to save a game you need to “Press R to save the backup SRAM. (Works only for the first game in the list)”.