Hey Guys! I just purchased a Virtual Boy, which I’ve been fascinated with my whole life, and I love it.

Naturally, something I’ve always been interested in is homebrew development for the console. I’ve seen the fabulous resources you guys have here on the site, and it’s all great stuff.

One thing I’d like to try, just as a beginner, is seeing a sort of “Hello World” in an emulator.

How would I go about doing so (i.e. how do I get the ball rolling)?

Thank you so much for having such a wonderful site dedicated to a wonderfully weird piece of Nintendo creativity!

I have such a Hello World program that I use for personal development, but it’s written against a devkit that isn’t public and never got finalized, so sending it to you won’t be too helpful… What you want to do is get a compiler set up so you can turn C source files into Virtual Boy ROMs. From there, I can assist in getting a Hello World program up and running.

Take a look at the Sacred Tech Scroll, which is a fairly accurate account of the system from the CPU’s perspective. What you ultimately want to do is store some kind of font graphics into character memory, arrange them on a background segment for the message you want to display, then set up a window containing that segment as its background. It sounds a bit complicated, but I’d be happy to walk you through it when the time comes.

I’ve attached the font I most commonly use for these programs.

Attachments:

1. 

   font-4.png
   

Just download vbde. It comes with a number of demos for libgccvb and vuengine. It’s actually rather easy to pick up.

If you have questions just post in the forums or contact me. There is also a Discord server.

How easy for someone with no coding skills?

thunderstruck wrote:
Just download vbde. It comes with a number of demos for libgccvb and vuengine. It’s actually rather easy to pick up.

If you have questions just post in the forums or contact me. There is also a Discord server.

Levine91 schrieb:
How easy for someone with no coding skills?

thunderstruck wrote:
Just download vbde. It comes with a number of demos for libgccvb and vuengine. It’s actually rather easy to pick up.

If you have questions just post in the forums or contact me. There is also a Discord server.

Depends on how good you are when it comes to learning new things. You will definitely have an easier time learning a newer (object oriented) language like java or c#. But c isn’t too bad and libgccvb and vuengine are good enough to to give you a faster start.

Just have a look at the demos and see if you can figure out what is going on. If not, maybe have a look at some java tutorials.

Programming itself isn’t that hard. It’s much more about logic then anything else. Writing clean, readable code on the other hand can be a challenge, especially with older programming languages. Then again, no one forces you to write clean code.