So, being the definitive Virtual Boy Website, with most of the big names in the scene on this very message board, what is the current state in Virtual Boy Emulation in 2010.

Reality Boy?

Red Dragon?

Something new?

What does the future hold!?

Reality Boy is the only one actively being developed AFAIK. And I’m using the term “actively” very loosely 😉 . Red Dragon was a nice modification of Reality Boy, but unfortunately is unsupported, though it probably wouldn’t take a whole lot of effort to roll the new Reality Boy code into Red Dragon.

I haven’t really followed ViBE at all (VB emu for Mac), so I can’t really tell you anything about that.

Honestly, I see Reality Boy being the VB emu for the forseeable future. There’s lots of things I don’t like about it, but it’s pretty mature, does lots of stuff well (enough), and it’s open source.

DogP

It would be nice to merge Reality Boy with the nice frontend Red Dragon had, I really miss all the cool features like CharMap or BGMap viewer.

Reality Boy also has all those features, KR155E. You just need to run the debug exe, press V to get the display started, then D to get the game running like normal. After that you can press Esc at any time to get to a menu with CharMap/BGMap viewer etc…

It would just be nice to see them updated for newer OS’s anyway. On Windows 7, when I try to use Reality Boy on full screen all the colors are messed up. Works fine windowed though.

[KR155E]

DanB schrieb:
Reality Boy also has all those features, KR155E. You just need to run the debug exe, press V to get the display started, then D to get the game running like normal. After that you can press Esc at any time to get to a menu with CharMap/BGMap viewer etc…

Ah, thanks! That’s nice to know! Still, there’s stuff like save states or cheat codes, which are Red Dragon exclusive (right?), and it’s front end is much more comfortable to use, in my opinion.

• This reply was modified 14 years, 11 months ago by KR155E.

How do you start debug mode from the front end? If I click the Debug Mode square I get nothing after pressing “Launch”.

There’s a disassembler in MESS, perhaps it could be used to output a complete disassembly of a game?

There’s a couple disassemblers out there, though I can’t find them ATM. IIRC they were on David Tucker’s site, though it may have been on Alberto’s site (Virtual-E). They’re probably mirrored here too.

DogP

There is no *good* or *accurate emulator* at the moment. I plan to make a VSF (Virtual Boy Sound Format like PSF and USF) but I don’t know much about the RISC currently. If anyone beats me to it, they will be…

[RunnerPack]

I’m sorry, but I can’t fill in the ellipsis in your last statement 😛

Also, I disagree with your statement. I think Reality Boy is both *good* and (fairly) *accurate* but, if you can do better, go for it.

Anyway… I was under the impression that PSFs are all the same, structure-wise, and only differ in the executable code inside, which comes from the game ROM itself, and the emulation code used to play them. See: http://wiki.neillcorlett.com/PSFFormat

In which case, all we need are a reasonably accurate VSU emulation core (i.e. one that supports DogP’s ingenious volume change technique) and someone to strip the non-sound-related code from the ROMs and compile them into “VSF” files. Enough is known from the v810 architecture documents to know what instructions do what, and the Wiki has all the info on what address locations do what, so… there ya go 😛

I suppose someone should contact “the authorities” (Neill Corlett?) and reserve a version byte (0x24?) and the “VSF” extension. Also, some custom tags might be necessary.

(As a side note, I doubt miniVSFs will ever be required/useful.)

If you want to be the one to do all that stuff, more power to ya! 😀 (of course, I’ll help out if I can…)

• This reply was modified 14 years, 11 months ago by RunnerPack.

Heh, I guess it’s kinda convenient that this discussion came up… if you look in the dev section, I just posted a VSU emulator, which, if I understand what you’re talking about, could be used for playing back a native VB sound format.

I’m not exactly sure how to extract the audio from the VB ROM, though it’s likely that most BGM would be contiguous, and logging writes to the sound regs in an emulator may take us to the right spot.

DogP

I think the idea is less to extract the sound code/data and more to delete/overwrite the non-sound code in the ROM. Basically, destroy the graphics data and the code that sends it to the VPU (and any other code, like controller input, etc.) and break down what remains into music tracks. The player is just a VB emulator that doesn’t bother with the VPU, etc.

You would have to log writes to the VSU to find out where songs are started, though (or just learn to read v810 machine code fluently :-P).