Well, some topics seem to get off ‘topic’ lately, and get into a discussion of repros and the process…what we are doing next ect.

I thought it might be a good idea to post stuff on this thread..organize it a bit.

Maybe make other threads that deal with cart shells or if we have a viable connector ect.

Now…where are we atm with reproductions

Well let’s see

I’m planning on sending out the free carts still. Need to get the labels..I’m going to send out 70 carts it looks like.

People that get a free cart can order the packaging at tusks website. The packaging has a small hold up on the hint-book. We’re not sure how much it will cost yet..depends on how many pages the instructions and hintbook has…Poster looks really sweet..morintari did the artwork for the poster and hintbook ect..

For people that want to buy one CIB…we will offer a few CIB (25?) (should the labels be the same?) Funny thing happened. After I released the rom..I stopped getting emails about copy-write stuff.

Blox will be released soonish..we’re going to do a small release at first (25) to make sure there is interest. Blox 2 isn’t going to be done yet..small issue with the save function.

Fastball: remastered still looks like it’s a go. Most of thunderstrucks changes that he has planned has been coded..But the job of coding 50 + levels might take a bit.

We’re going to do a small resupply of the boundhigh/space pinball carts in tusks store (25 of each). This will be the last resupply planned for a bit..so we can get other games done. So, if you haven’t gotten one..order them now (will be a few weeks til we get the new carts in)

After that..nothings been decided.

If we do an english version of gundam..prices will be higher. Richard has to make it have sram..so production costs on his side will be higher. I can prob get the batteries pretty cheap on my side..and install them in the USA.

Other ideas…english version of space squash (if it gets fully translated). I think this is a much better game (fun) to play then gundam. But, you really NEED the translation of gundam to play it..while space squash you can just pick up and play. So, not sure on which one I’d like done first…but I’d like both done.

Homebrews ? Should we split the more ‘commercial’ releases with homebrew releases ? I guess we’ll have to see how well blox does.

Fishbones…

gamehero…

Soviet Union collection…maybe horvat can combine his roms into one ‘collection’..if he wants to..we can do a release with that…

Virtual Chris came out with a bunch of games..maybe a collection ? have to see the interest

Anyway..just wanted to update people on where we are at.

Also, 3 kinda small points I want to make..might seem small..but I want to get it out there before any potential problems happen…

1st. My thoughts might not be Tusk’s or Mindstorm’s…so if I posts my thoughts here..please don’t take it as their thoughts 🙂 Just cuz I say something here..doesn’t make it ‘official’ stuff.

2nd. You can post want you want to see done..but even if we get 20 posts saying ‘we want gundam’..don’t be upset if squash or something else is done first. Maybe we can get to the point that we have a vote on which game comes out next…but we aren’t there yet. We might not have the chips for a certain game..or the manual might not be done ect.

3rd. If I talk about games about to come out..or plans for future games..doesn’t mean we’re doing pre-order’s 🙂 It would be helpful to know how many people are wanting to buy a game..but I don’t think we’ll be taking money ahead of time yet. That first bound high thing was a bit of a mess. Tusk had the packaging..then all of a sudden we could do CIB’s..but people didn’t seem to understand the time it took to get the connectors send them off to mindstorm..get them back..put the carts together ect. If we do any type of pre-ordering thingy..I think Tusk will post on another thread or something.

-Bigmak

bigmak wrote:
Hrnms I understand the thought of unreleased prototypes captures the mind and people want to talk about them. But, it seems like threads like this one go off tangent quite a bit…

Please..lets use this thread to talk about the current state of reproductions…i’m not sure how dragon hopper and zero racers will be produced anytime soon….

Agreed. I take responsibility for wandering off topic; could you perhaps suggest an existing thread I might continue my musings in?

Dor-Si wrote:

Hedgetrimmer wrote:

Guy Perfect wrote:
Distributing or selling commercial games, even if translated, is very illegal. Don’t do it. I won’t allow it to happen.

Here here Ben. (or, Hear Hear Ben. For the spelling police)

I am however intrigued as to how ‘I won’t allow it to happen’ would be implemented.

I’ve learned over the years never to underestimate the capabilities of any one individual. It’s amazing how far one’s conviction can motivate him or her to stand behind a solid set of core values and effectuate change.

With that said, I understand Guy Perfect’s position of wanting to uphold copyrights. Integrity is a key factor in my field of employment, and it may very well be the same for him.

I do, however, feel this may be going a bit too far given the fact that these reproductions are based on a system that has been dead for close to 20 years and titles that no longer contribute to their respective companys’ portfolio. Some games may still live on in variations, but I fail to see how any of these companies would consider reengineered Virtual Boy games a threat to their bottom line.

I’m not well versed in the language of intellectual property rights, but it seems like the cost to pursue “action” may outweigh the benefits for these respective companies, especially based on the very limited demand and distribution for these games. I would definitely understand the conflict if Virtual Boy games were still being produced and available for retail purchase, but they aren’t.

It’s not the fact that we are distributing these for monetary profit. Rather, these ideas have been circulating so that all can enjoy the hard work of the original people and companies that created these games. Since being written off and all games/accessories liquidated thereafter, the Virtual Boy has not yielded any benefits for those companies. I guess I just don’t the point this far after the complete demise of the system.

Now that the Virtual Boy is in the annals of Nintendo history, it seems only fitting that we, the premier Virtual Boy community in the world, carry on its legacy.

…but that’s just my two cents.

Your “two cents” are worth considerably more. I’ve signed “nondisclosure agreements”; they say things like “associated with immediate or reasonably foreseeable business interests” — N has plainly made it clear they will NEVER have anything to do with VB. They engineered and sold a system with very few games; for a few of us die-hards who fell in love with the system, there is NO “legitimate purchase” option available.

If anyone reading this has one of the missing prototypes, I’m very certain we could agree to keep it quiet, and only share with a group here that agrees to not promulgate it at large. That is the spirit of “die-hard enthusiasts”.

FTR, I am very grateful for all the carts being made available; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing the homebrews, and the few prototypes we have. Seeing as how the whole world economy (especially the U.S.) will likely crash in the next couple of months anyway, what’s the point of hoarding them? For what purpose? The programmers did not spend all their blood sweat and tears crafting games so just a dozen “secret clique” people would have them; they were made to be enjoyed by more.

Honor the programmers.

vb-fan wrote:

If anyone reading this has one of the missing prototypes, I’m very certain we could agree to keep it quiet, and only share with a group here that agrees to not promulgate it at large. That is the spirit of “die-hard enthusiasts”.

FTR, I am very grateful for all the carts being made available; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing the homebrews, and the few prototypes we have. Seeing as how the whole world economy (especially the U.S.) will likely crash in the next couple of months anyway, what’s the point of hoarding them? For what purpose? The programmers did not spend all their blood sweat and tears crafting games so just a dozen “secret clique” people would have them; they were made to be enjoyed by more.

Honor the programmers.

I am not so sure of how easy it would be to find a group in the Virtual Boy community that would agree not to promulgate an unreleased game at large, and collectors who have unreleased games already know this. In fact, the Virtual Boy community is, unfortunately, tainted with a bad history of people breaking their word and doing things without thinking clearly of the repercussions and possibly screwing up much greater things for the rest of us.

There is only one person who I have to cite to support this, and that is user: jojobean. However, jojobean is NOT the person who screwed things up. Jojobean is the person who was trying to get all of the unreleased Virtual Boy games eventually released, and he seems to have been forced to go about it in one of the only ways that would, in all probability, successfully work, and the various individuals who met him with harsh accusations and who did not follow his instructions are the ones who very likely screwed up much greater things for the rest of us.

Some time, if you feel like it, go through jojobean’s post history on this site, reading all of the connected posts, especially the ones on the thread “Bound High ROM – buggy, can anyone help?”, and you will learn of some of the history behind how a portion of the rare or unreleased Virtual Boy ROMs got released. There was a long period of time when the “Big 4” commercial games – so Space Invaders, SD Gundam, Virtual Lab, and Virtual Bowling – were not available online, and none of the people who owned these games were interested at all in trying to get them available to anyone other than themselves. If what appears on the forum surrounding jojobean is true, and I am rather highly confident that it is, jojobean is partly responsible for the release of all 4 of these games to everyone, but he is not the person who released the games. The data strongly shows that he attempted to trade these games in private as part of the plan to pursue other games, namely unreleased games, and it was some person whom he trusted, whom he likely told not to release the ROMs, who did not follow his instructions and, thus, released the Big 4 ROMs online for everyone.

Now, was jojobean successful in getting some unreleased games? Yes, indeed, he was. He managed to get a fully working version of Space Pinball, the buggy version of Bound High, and he was even talking about acquiring Faceball and the big one, Dragon Hopper. He continued his pursuit of trying to get more unreleased games released, and during the process, he tried to find others of the Virtual Boy community whom could be trusted and who would help him with the financial burden of acquiring all the games, since the uber-collectors who had the games demanded vast sums of money. As such, his Space Pinball and buggy Bound High were being sold and traded around, with the purpose of getting more funds for Faceball and Dragon Hopper, and as a result of those trades and sales, eventually Space Pinball got released online, again not by jojobean who gave the instructions never to release it. Note: the version of Bound High that we all enjoy today should not be attributed to jojobean; that point must be made clear.

So, it can be rightly said that jojobean’s effort of trying to get unreleased games released resulted in the release of Space Invaders, SD Gundam, Virtual Lab, Virtual Bowling, and Space Pinball. And guess what? It does not end there, for I can say with firmness that jojobean is also partly responsible for the release of Faceball, because jojobean did things which led to the appearance of Mr. G on this forum, but please don’t expect me to share any more details about that, because Eric and I both know very well that we gave our word never to reveal the identity of the man who previously owned the Faceball cart or the identity of Mr. G, neither should we reveal the details surrounding the acquisition of Faceball, for such would be an extreme breach of trust.

What other important thing needs to be said concerning this? How about the fact that jojobean also claimed on this forum that he knew a guy who owns Dragon Hopper and that jojobean was in pursuit of the game? People charged jojobean with lying about Faceball. They didn’t believe he had any connection to it and that he was just lying to swindle people out of their money. And now Faceball is released, due in part to jojobean, which is all that I’m going to say concerning that. So am I going to think that jojobean was lying about knowing a guy who owns Dragon Hopper? Absolutely not. Did jojobean succeed in getting Dragon Hopper? I have no idea, but I sure do know that he succeeded in getting all the other games he ever mentioned, which people thought he was lying about, so it sure does cause a person to wonder. Nevertheless, what can I or anyone else do about it at this point? Probably not much at all. Why? Because jojobean has now seemingly disappeared entirely from the Virtual Boy scene. And why might that be? Most likely because he was so fed up with all the accusations thrown his way and breaches of trust from the Virtual Boy community that he no longer wants to have anything more to do with us. Am I very happy that all of those games got released online? I definitely am. Nevertheless, I am also rather confident that it was necessary for a single individual to take the route that Jojobean took, in order to get those games available for everyone. If nobody ever did that, then those games still might not be released, and I am also highly confident that jojobean was forced to take the routes that he took once he became highly aware of the personalities, who each had one of the few known copies of an unreleased game. Nevertheless, the releases of those games all occurred through breaches of trust, and I’m rather confident that the uber-collectors who still have the unreleased games were silently watching over it all. This leaves the question: if breaches of trust had not occurred with jojobean, would we now have access to Dragon Hopper, or have the breaches of trust resulted in the fact that jojobean’s purported source of Dragon Hopper is now guaranteed never to release the game?

Why am I writing all this? Because the fact is, all the uber-collectors who currently have unreleased games in their possession already know about such things and have known for a long time; my writing it out very clearly doesn’t change that fact. Therefore, the uber-collectors are not willing to work with multiple individuals at all, because they know that such is highly likely to result in the free release of the ROM of their game, which they may have paid thousands of dollars for and which they may be trying to use as leverage for the acquisition of some other unreleased game. While doing such, it seems to be very difficult, yet still possible, for one person to approach an uber-collector, gain his trust, pay him who knows what for the unreleased game, so long as the game-pursuer promises never to release it. If the game gets released, any chance at acquiring another game from the uber-collector is lost. I am rather confident that any other method is sure to fail, unless the game is currently in the possession of some person on the development team who worked on the game. It always seems that the people who helped to make a game that never got released are the ones who really don’t care much at all about the game and who are fine with the game getting released. Unfortunately, they aren’t the ones who usually have such games, due to the fact that they cared about the games so little that the games easily slipped out of their possession. But then, the game somehow finds its way into the collection of some private collector, who in many cases, unfortunately, loves to go Gollum Style on it.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
…
Note: the version of Bound High that we all enjoy today should not be attributed to jojobean; that point must be made clear.
…

Actually, he deserves at least some credit. He was the one from whom I received the BH source code. Without that, or at least the .isx file built from it, I probably wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making a utility to generate a ROM from the output of the Intelligent Systems compiler (VUCC).

Of course, I’m not the only one who made such a utility (“other people” had copies of the source, I later came to find out), so it would likely have come out anyway, eventually. Still, jojobean had something to do with it.

Heh… well, if that is the case, then it is all the more proof to show how vital of an asset jojobean was to the Virtual Boy community, since every single released game, apart from the very easy to acquire ones, can somehow trace back to him, and yet he was treated with such harshness by so many. I must say it is pretty disappointing to me.

Oki…this thread is so off topic ..i have no idea what to say..tried to put it back on track..doesn’t seem to matter. Guess I’ll start another thread to talk about reproduction news 😛

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Heh… well, if that is the case, then it is all the more proof to show how vital of an asset jojobean was to the Virtual Boy community, since every single released game, apart from the very easy to acquire ones, can somehow trace back to him, and yet he was treated with such harshness by so many. I must say it is pretty disappointing to me.

Thank you for your excellent and informative post. It’s a tragedy that a few can ruin it for the rest; all we can hope for is that eventually at least three games will surface; the third being “Goldeneye”, which had to be carted to generate the one known screenshot.

It’s also too bad that I wasn’t frequenting these forums several years ago; I have Gundam and Space-Invaders, think I paid ~ $850 and $450 respectively. Had them since about 2005; I would have been glad to dump them without charge — would have wanted to borrow a dumper, rather than have the games out of my eyesight.

I hope jojobean will consider coming back; just for the fun of sharing something with enthusiasts.

People can be such jerks. I used to play on a Christian message board in about 1999; all these supposed loving caring people, you should have seen the fighting. Like the guy in traffic who cut me off and shot me the finger, with his “Christian” bumper-sticker. Yeah, sure you are; I wanna be like you! 🙁
(I’m afraid everyone within a half block heard my carefully worded, non-profane rebuke of his unacceptable behavior.) But not all of us are jerks, some of us just wanna have fun.

…in 3d shades of red & black… 😛

bigmak wrote:
Oki…this thread is so off topic ..i have no idea what to say..tried to put it back on track..doesn’t seem to matter. Guess I’ll start another thread to talk about reproduction news 😛

Well, I guess I’m guilty of the “sidetrack” too. Hope you’ll forgive us. But try to think of it as what it is — enthusiasm for the system!

Towards “back-on-track”, I’m still pursuing getting a couple of console-plugs, so that we can test some connectors. It would be grand if we could come up with suitable connectors with little or no modification — then (if Richard is willing) printed cart cases and new connectors would solve the “limited-donor-cart” problem. I was conversing with a manufacturer, they do free samples; so once I get a couple console-connectors, I’ll be able to evaluate possible substitute cart-connectors. I really think the 2mm spacing will work…

BTW, anyone have a non-repairable console they’d sell?

bigmak wrote:
Oki…this thread is so off topic ..i have no idea what to say..tried to put it back on track..doesn’t seem to matter. Guess I’ll start another thread to talk about reproduction news 😛

Oh… right… the topic.

English Gundam and Squash would be cool.

*cough*

Hold on.

RunnerPack wrote:
He was the one from whom I received the BH source code.

(“other people” had copies of the source, I later came to find out)

So who else has it? How was it obtained? From Hideyuki Nakanishi? Under what license? Who got to decide who gets access to it or not? Is there hope for getting source code of other games (released or unreleased)?

HorvatM wrote:
How was it obtained? From Hideyuki Nakanishi?

“In 2008, jojobean joined the scene and somehow managed to get the source from Nakanishi”

Source:
Post #18 of “Bound High ROM – buggy, can anyone help?” thread.

bigmak wrote:
Oki…this thread is so off topic ..i have no idea what to say..tried to put it back on track..doesn’t seem to matter. Guess I’ll start another thread to talk about reproduction news 😛

Do we have any tech Demos we could squeeze onto a Multi-Pack?

vb-fan wrote:
I was conversing with a manufacturer, they do free samples; so once I get a couple console-connectors, I’ll be able to evaluate possible substitute cart-connectors. I really think the 2mm spacing will work…

BTW, anyone have a non-repairable console they’d sell?

Lets make an NES Converter that will allow us to play 3D world Runner and Rad Racer!!!!! Hahaha

Broken consoles are usually under $40 on ebay these days.

HorvatM wrote:
Hold on.

RunnerPack wrote:
He was the one from whom I received the BH source code.

(“other people” had copies of the source, I later came to find out)

So who else has it? How was it obtained? From Hideyuki Nakanishi? Under what license? Who got to decide who gets access to it or not? Is there hope for getting source code of other games (released or unreleased)?

Considering the source code hasn’t been shared with The Community at large (at least, publicly), which I can only assume would result in improved homebrew programming techniques, I’m guessing Nakanishi gave it to the people in the community with programming chops on the condition it not be shared publicly.

Before I go back on-topic: re: Ben Stevens Dragon Hopper vidpro card: Totally agree that between that and the Nintendo Power stuff it was likely finished (or close). I didn’t realize that card existed (or, rather, the picture of it — it looks legit enough) and I guess I just meant to say that I wouldn’t consider Nintendo Power as a 100% accurate primary source. Or maybe I should give them a little more credit…

BACK ON TOPIC MODE: ACTIVE

I’m totally for English Gundam, but that might be my love of all things Gundam talking. Homebrew games on cartridge would be really neat as well, so long as their releases are spaced out regularly enough (maybe one a month, production times allowing?) so that I can afford them with regularity, hahaha. (Seriously, I get paid once a month, and it’d be brutal to have to buy 4 VB games at once, haha.)

Benjamin Stevens wrote [edited for length]:
However, jojobean is NOT the person who screwed things up. Jojobean is the person who was trying to get all of the unreleased Virtual Boy games eventually released…

Some time, if you feel like it, go through jojobean’s post history on this site, reading all of the connected posts, especially the ones on the thread “Bound High ROM – buggy, can anyone help?”…

…the various individuals who met him with harsh accusations and who did not follow his instructions are the ones who very likely screwed up much greater things for the rest of us.

…He continued his pursuit of trying to get more unreleased games released, and during the process, he tried to find others of the Virtual Boy community whom could be trusted and who would help him with the financial burden of acquiring all the games, since the uber-collectors who had the games demanded vast sums of money. As such, his Space Pinball and buggy Bound High were being sold and traded around, with the purpose of getting more funds for Faceball and Dragon Hopper…

What other important thing needs to be said concerning this? How about the fact that jojobean also claimed on this forum that he knew a guy who owns Dragon Hopper and that jojobean was in pursuit of the game? People charged jojobean with lying about Faceball. They didn’t believe he had any connection to it and that he was just lying to swindle people out of their money…

So am I going to think that jojobean was lying about knowing a guy who owns Dragon Hopper? Absolutely not. Did jojobean succeed in getting Dragon Hopper? I have no idea, but I sure do know that he succeeded in getting all the other games he ever mentioned, which people thought he was lying about, so it sure does cause a person to wonder. Nevertheless, what can I or anyone else do about it at this point? Probably not much at all. Why? Because jojobean has now seemingly disappeared entirely from the Virtual Boy scene. And why might that be? Most likely because he was so fed up with all the accusations thrown his way and breaches of trust from the Virtual Boy community that he no longer wants to have anything more to do with us.

I am also rather confident that it was necessary for a single individual to take the route that Jojobean took, in order to get those games available for everyone.

Ben, you’ve got the whole thing entirely wrong. I suggest that anyone who’s interested in what actually happened with jojobean and Bound High read KR155E’s summary of events.

In his 15 Feb 2010 email jojobean claimed to have…

jojobean wrote:
…a 100% fully working version of Bound High that plays flawlessly on the hardware. I have the only copy of this that I know of. It is dumped from an actual cart and not pieced together from code. So far I have spoken to nobody else who has such a thing. Just finding someone with the cart is near impossible, let alone finding someone to let you dump it.

What he was actually selling to people was a broken version of the ROM that Runnerpack had compiled for him with VUCC.

It doesn’t get any more obvious than that.

dasi wrote [edited for length]:
In his 15 Feb 2010 email jojobean claimed to have…

jojobean wrote:
…a 100% fully working version of Bound High that plays flawlessly on the hardware. I have the only copy of this that I know of. It is dumped from an actual cart and not pieced together from code. So far I have spoken to nobody else who has such a thing. Just finding someone with the cart is near impossible, let alone finding someone to let you dump it.

What he was actually selling to people was a broken version of the ROM that Runnerpack had compiled for him with VUCC.

It doesn’t get any more obvious than that.

Once again, and with profuse apologies to bigmak, I must set the record straight:

I had nothing to do with the “buggy” version. I didn’t even know the BH source existed until long after it was created. Even now, I only have a ROM of this version. To my knowledge, it was David “reality_boy” Tucker, and possibly others, who worked on it, and I also believe gccVB was used (which explains the bugs) since, at that time, the VUCC tools (if they were even available to him/them) could not be used to produce raw ROM images.

The rest of the above seems accurate, although I was never approached to buy the buggy ROM. I’m likely mistaken, but I don’t believe an original, working, binary copy (which was not produced from the source by enthusiasts) has ever been located (which is a moot point for all but the most die-hard VB historians).

The only on-topic thing I have to say is that I hope someone can come up with a reliable, inexpensive (including the cost to get started) method for producing carts totally from scratch without using any part of an original one. It’s not that I believe they should be preserved for their own sake (does anyone even play V. Baseball, anymore? :-P). Besides the cost factor, custom carts open the door for extending the VB platform by leveraging the expansion capabilities that were built in but never tapped (commercially). While this can be (and has been) done using existing connectors with a custom case, the cost/availability factor puts volume production pretty much out of reach for anything more complex than a flash cart or reproduction.

RunnerPack wrote:
I had nothing to do with the “buggy” version.

To be clear, in his 15 Feb 2010 scam email, jojobean was selling both the “buggy” David Tucker version (which you had nothing to do with) *and* the broken VUCC version you compiled for him. It was the VUCC version of Bound High which jojobean was fraudulently selling as a fully working cart dump. I didn’t in any way mean to suggest you were involved in what jojobean subsequently did with that ROM.

RunnerPack wrote:
The rest of the above seems accurate…

I assume you’re refering to Krisse’s version of events. I think you need to make that clear to avoid any further confusion.

dasi wrote:

Ben, you’ve got the whole thing entirely wrong. I suggest that anyone who’s interested in what actually happened with jojobean and Bound High read KR155E’s summary of events.

In his 15 Feb 2010 email jojobean claimed to have…

jojobean wrote:
…a 100% fully working version of Bound High that plays flawlessly on the hardware. I have the only copy of this that I know of. It is dumped from an actual cart and not pieced together from code. So far I have spoken to nobody else who has such a thing. Just finding someone with the cart is near impossible, let alone finding someone to let you dump it.

What he was actually selling to people was a broken version of the ROM that Runnerpack had compiled for him with VUCC.

It doesn’t get any more obvious than that.

I don’t know what it is that I got wrong. I wrote “his Space Pinball and buggy Bound High were being sold and traded around, with the purpose of getting more funds for Faceball and Dragon Hopper.” There is ample proof that reveals that all of that is entirely true. I mentioned nothing at all about the other things to which you refer, which appear on the forum thread which I specifically cited and which I told everyone to read for themselves, so that each one can decide for him- or herself what all on the thread is true or false information.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

I don’t know what it is that I got wrong. I wrote “his Space Pinball and buggy Bound High were being sold and traded around, with the purpose of getting more funds for Faceball and Dragon Hopper.” There is ample proof that reveals that all of that is entirely true. I mentioned nothing at all about the other things to which you refer, which appear on the forum thread which I specifically cited and which I told everyone to read for themselves, so that each one can decide for him- or herself what all on the thread is true or false information.

Getting funds for Dragon Hopper? So… Dragon hopper again. where?!