It’s anniversary time! From today, Planet Virtual Boy can proudly look back at a lifespan of 10 years. Although I don’t want to make any big, sentimental speeches now, I’d like to take the opportunity to sincerely thank those, who make working on this site so much fun. To our fantastic community: Thank You! :biggrin:

Now that this is done, we can have a look at the presents (YAY!).

In parallel and independent of each other, two programs to convert ISX files generated by the official Virtual Boy C compiler “VUCC” to the VB ROM format have emerged. There is RunnerPack‘s ISX to VB ROM Converter v1.0 as well as LameBoy‘s VeeBee ISX2ROM v1.00. With those, it’s now not only possible to compile official source code, but also to use the official compiler for homebrew. Quote LameBoy:

I have decided to release VeeBee ISX2ROM, even though it may still have a few bugs.
ISX2ROM will convert Intelligent Systems ISX files (the files created by the official Nintendo Virtual Boy SDK for use with the VUE-Debugger) into ROM files usable by emulators or flashcarts.
This means that people can now use the official VUCC compiler to create Virtual Boy ROMs. Hopefully people will be more willing to create VB ROMs now they can use VUCC as well as GCCVB.

Oh, and HAPPY 10TH ANNIVERSARY PLANET VIRTUAL BOY!

Thanks to those great tools, we can now also release all 4 different versions of the VUE demo program from the official dev disks released last November. Those were converted by LameBoy using his ISX2ROM. Downloads:

• Sample Soft for VUE Programming (v1.0) (15kb)
• Sample Soft for VUE Programming (v1.1) (16kb)
• Sample Soft for VUE Programming (v1.1a) (16kb)
• Sample Soft for VUE Programming (v1.2) (16kb)

Do both version of the converters generate the same .vb files?

@e5frog: If you look at the ISX format doc I included, you’ll see that there really is only one possible ROM for any given ISX (unless crazy debugging stuff is added).

So, the answer is yes.

This is great news! Happy birthday PVB!

(I’d imagine VUCC is a less advanced compiler than gcc nowadays, though?)

It’s most likely less advanced in code generation and optimization, but it might also support more v810 (NVC) features, and more effectively. More testing is needed.

BTW, KR155E, dasi brought it to my attention that the download links to both converters are broken.

Also, you have the platform of mine set to “DOS”, but the included executable is actually for Win32, and the source should compile on just about any system (Linux, OSX, *BSD… probably even DOS, too ;-)).

Actually, after chatting with lameboyadvance, it seems that his will not make a ROM smaller than 512KB, but, other than the amount of padding, they should be the same.

One advantage that his has over mine it the ability to specify a ROM title, version, IDs, etc. even if they aren’t specified in the ISX. Of course, it may also overwrite existing ones, so it’s kind of a two-edged “S”-Word 😉 But, it could be changed, I’m sure. Mine could also be changed to allow the addition of the header stuff, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader 😀

Yes, mine currently has its minimum ROM size set to 512KB, as I thought thats the size most people would be using. I had planned for an INI file which would let you change it but that didn’t happen in time for v1.00. I’m hoping to include it in a later version.

As for the header information, ISX2ROM first writes the header you specified to the blank ROM, then writes the ISX data to it. This means that if the ISX file has its own header info it will overwrite the one you specified.