I’ve had a little bit of spare time lately, so I decided to start working on my VB->TV adapter again. It’s not 100% perfect, but I’ve gotten quite a bit of it working now, and it’s playable. Here’s a video of it in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oco0rv93qd4 . Sorry for the crappy video, nobody was around hold the camera, so I was doing everything (including playing) one handed.
Anyway, for a quick overview of what it does… the signals come from the display, go through an adapter board (to drop the voltage for the FPGA), then go into the FPGA eval board. The FPGA takes the data and stores it in internal RAM to build it’s own frame buffer, and also measures the brightness signals. Then the TV driver reads the RAM and outputs the TV signal, outputting brightness depending on which shade of red is supposed to be displayed, and also the brightness registers.
There’s a few tweaks that I still need to do. The section that samples the brightness needs to be adjusted since the brightness flickers a little bit if it’s near a decision boundary in my code… it shouldn’t be tough to fix, I just gotta do it :P. The TV output code isn’t perfect, there’s a little bit of wrapping of the image (mostly hidden off the screen), so I just gotta get the timing nailed down better.
The bigger things I’ve still gotta add are color and also the ability to do 3D (I’m currently only capturing a single screen). I’ve already added color but have it disabled because it either doesn’t lock well, or I’m seeing the effect of the low color bandwidth. I don’t see a need for messing with 3D until I get color added (or shutter glasses). I think I also need to add interlacing… currently I think it’s only drawing the odd field. I’d also like to add VGA, since that’s really a much easier signal to deal with compared to NTSC, and much more can be done with it.
I guess I should also look into designing a small board that all the hardware could mount on and fit inside the VB. That’s still pretty far off, but it’d be nice to know how much stuff would be needed and how much space it’d all take up.
Anyway, I guess I’ve rambled enough… just wanted to drop by and keep everyone updated on the current progress.
Heheheh, April Fools on all you guys thinking it’s an April Fools joke :-). That’s actually a recent video of the display working… no camera tricks or any other kinds of tricks. I finally got around to working on it some more, and actually made some good progress… so I figured it was an appropriate time to show it off, since it was an April Fools joke a year ago.
Just another quick update… I’ve got both the left and right screen being displayed in true 3D using shutter glasses. I just got done playing Wario Land for about an hour… VERY COOL! 🙂 Now I gotta see about getting it displayed in red/blue.
Heh, changed my mine about waiting until later to do red/blue… it’s added and working, although I still gotta tweak the shades to get good cancellation.
Now if we could only get DogP to invent a time machine to bring his VBTV back to the mid-90s, we could get our hands on copies of VB Mario Land and Zero Racers. Well, either that, or color LEDs 😛
And how, exactly, would going back in time with the VBTV net you those games? Would it be by somehow making the VB appealing enough that its support lasts long enough for what would be unreleased games to actually hit the market?
(I guess it doesn’t really matter if it means I get to play Dragon Hopper and the other unreleased titles in the end, though.)
NamelessPlayer wrote:
And how, exactly, would going back in time with the VBTV net you those games? Would it be by somehow making the VB appealing enough that its support lasts long enough for what would be unreleased games to actually hit the market?
(I guess it doesn’t really matter if it means I get to play Dragon Hopper and the other unreleased titles in the end, though.)
I WAS joking, but one of the main flaws was that only one person could see it at a time. This broadens the appeal because now everyone can see the image. And color LEDs would still probably have saved the VB.
I was attesting to DogP’s amazing awesomeness with VB and other tech.
It kind of loses the point on a normal display, though-unless the TV displayed it in some form of stereoscopic manner, like two-color anaglyph or KMQ(over/under image layout used with prism glasses).
There are other methods listed here. Take your pick.
On the other hand, seeing SOMETHING is better than nothing, and most people will still get the point of these games if they saw them being played on TV displays back in E3 1996, just as people can get the point of 2D screenshots on this site. (I could even imagine some VB games like Bound High! still playing fine on a normal 2D display without a stereoscopic display mode as long as there’s enough visual cues to give the player an idea of exactly where everything is, though everyone here will insist that the only way to play such games is on the VB itself.)
(I also realized some time between making my last post and coming back here to read the reply that if a time machine DID exist, we could just head to E3 1996 and hang around in the VB section, thus explaining how we could play such games-and possibly get a copy if someone can filch one.)
Anyway, back to the point-is there a way to make one of these TV adapters without keeping the VB’s internals exposed to who knows what? If it were installed in a closed-up VB neatly, outputted in a variety of output standards(DVI, VGA, component, S-Video, and composite, though I’ll just settle for S-Video if necessary to keep complexity down), and had stereoscopic output to whatever display was connected, I’d consider ordering a pre-modded VB from this person and familiarize myself with it more.
(One of my main uses for it would be connecting the VB to a video capture card on a PC and recording gameplay footage that can be viewed stereoscopically with red/blue anaglyph glasses or whatever. It would also be much easier to play the VB when a camera isn’t jammed into the viewing area, leaving it free for my own two eyes. After all, if I got my hands on one of those elusive prototypes, you’d want fairly high-quality gameplay footage, right?)
Wow, awesome video! One question though, as it is hard to determine from the low-res vid: how is the framerate? Is it smooth enough to handle some of the blinking/flickering effects like in Teleroboxer? Just curious!
