Hi everyone,
just to shorten the waiting time for M.K.’s patch a little bit … 😉
DaumenKinosaurier: an awarded stereoscopic flip book – now officially released on Virtual Boy
Today, KR155E and me are very proud to release this little project, which kept us having fun for a couple of months now. It’s based on “DaumenKinosaurier” – a 3D short movie that I’ve made as a student back in 2009. So basically, this ROM is a 3D movie player … for the Virtual Boy!
About the movie
DKS was a visual experiment made for a stereoscopic contest in 2009. The visual idea was to create a hand drawn, stereoscopic flipbook. Fore more detailed information and full movie credits, please check the videos’s description on YouTube.
You can find different 3d versions of the original movie on YouTube (duration approx. 1 minute):
small parallax version – for bigger 3d screens like cinemas
medium parallax version – for medium size 3d screens like TVs and PCs
large parallax version – for smaller 3d screens like mobile devices
zero parallax version – flat 2D version (but full 720p resolution instead)
About the VB port
On March 8th I received an e-mail from KR155E – Jorgeche and him experimented with video playback using VUEngine at this time. DKS seemed to be very suitable for this approach, so he asked me if we want to port it to the Virtual Boy … well … OF CAUSE!! I immediately started to optimize the original footage for a Virtual Boy presentation and provided the images to KR155E, who did the development on this. Togehther, we tried out different things, realized and discarded many ideas. My favorite feature in this ROM is the “Animation Gallery”.
One challenge due to this project also was to fit a full minute of film onto a standard 16 MBit FlashBoy! To achieve this, we had to optimize animation loops, reduce the sound design to a minimum and also shorten one of the scenes. The good thing about this is: you don’t have to care for padding modes at all – this ROM will fill up your FlashBoy with pure animation till the last byte!
Very special thanks also go out to jorgeche, who especially helped KR155E a lot with debugging and even implemented a new VUEngine animation method due to this project!
We also decided, to release this as open source! So please feel free to download the project files and use them as a template for your own VBDE projects – KR155E is going to post the source code in this thread soon …
DKS: VUEdition – CONTROLs:
Play Flipbook: standard movie playback
[A] – toggle play/pause
– (while paused) quit playback and return to main menu
Animation Gallery: browse the movie’s animations and frames
[A] – toggle play/pause
– quit browsing and return to main menu
[L/R-Triggers] – scene browsing
[D-PADs] (while paused) – frame browsing
About: read some project info & the credits
[A] – continue reading
– quit reading and return to main menu
DKS is one player only and has no saving functions.
DKS: VUEdition – CREDITs:
Programmer: Christian Radke
Graphics: Marten Reiß
Development Support: Jorge Eremiev
So please – grab your FlashBoys, start your (VU)Engines and enjoy! We’re very curious to read your feedback on this homebrew!
[The screenshots attached to this post are optimized for cross-eyed 3d viewing]
