Hello, I am totally new to this forum and totally curious about Virtual Boy from a sound perspective. Does anyone know what kind of chip the VB uses and it’s capabilities?

If there’s anyone out there developing actual new VB games, I am interested in trying to score for them. Please let me know. Thank you!

This is not meant to sound rude or insult you in any way, but, have you tried looking around the site? I mean, I know you’re new, but it’s quite nicely laid-out and easy to navigate.

There is a section listing nearly every homebrew game released, so far (a search or browse of the forums will reveal ones currently in development). There is a tools section with a subsection just for audio and music utilities. There’s a documentation section with (probably) everything you want to know. There’s even a development wiki where members can post (and have posted) things they’ve found out about the VB.

The short(-ish ;-)) answer to your question is that the chip is called the VSU and is completely custom (which is not surprising for a Nintendo system). It’s an arbitrary waveform synthesizer with five channels, plus one LFSR random noise channel. The “instruments” each consist of 32 6-bit samples. There is room to store five such waveforms at once, and they cannot be changed while the VSU is actively using them. Channel 5 has additional sweep and modulation features.

Hi Runner Pack,

Thanks for the reply. I think your response is fair. After posting, I looked around the site and found a lot of information I asked for here. Being new, enthusiastic and curious has its disadvantages by making posts so eagerly I guess.

No worries. I hope you found what you were after. If you have any specific questions about how something works, be sure to ask (I’m always interested in finding areas of the docs that can use improvement).

With the exception of a small handful of talented individuals working on games, hardly anyone is making chiptunes for the VB, so I can’t wait to hear what you come up with!

Oh, yeah… welcome to the community 🙂

Hey thanks so much. I thought this website was going to be an empty wasteland, but you have proved otherwise.

Just curious, are there ever Virtual Boy game jams? Also, I’m about to hook my PC from 2002 back up to see if the VB chiptune program will work on it. Famitracker’s on there but this is more intriguing. Would you have any experience with that software or know whether or not it will run on Windows XP? I mean, if it’s Virtual Boy, my old computer should be able to handle it, right? Tomorrow I will find out, hopefully.

Okaayyy. So I took a look at the available software on PVB to download for composing and to say the least, I am absolutely confused. lol While searching for answers, I had the good opportunity to chat with a nice person by the name of DaVince who had all sorts of good recommendations and advice as far as the limitations regarding composing for the system and the available software to do so. The answers were um, how do I say- bleak. It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise considering the nature of the VB, so now I am wondering if there’s anything I can do to help with this situation. I have zero experience coding, but I’m intrigued to help try and build a proper audio engine (is that the right terminology?) for this interesting and obscure system. I mean, if there’s one already out there I don’t want to go about trying to reinvent the wheel, you know?

Thank you for reading and all the best.

IOwnMyWiiULEGIT wrote:
Okaayyy. So I took a look at the available software on PVB to download for composing and to say the least, I am absolutely confused. lol While searching for answers, I had the good opportunity to chat with a nice person by the name of DaVince who had all sorts of good recommendations and advice as far as the limitations regarding composing for the system and the available software to do so. The answers were um, how do I say- bleak. It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise considering the nature of the VB, so now I am wondering if there’s anything I can do to help with this situation. I have zero experience coding, but I’m intrigued to help try and build a proper audio engine (is that the right terminology?) for this interesting and obscure system. I mean, if there’s one already out there I don’t want to go about trying to reinvent the wheel, you know?

Thank you for reading and all the best.

There are already a few music and audio playback “engines” for the VB, both publicly released and in development. I don’t know of any music composition tools (i.e. trackers), but there are converters for both MIDI and Mod (actually, Impulse Tracker) files.

The most powerful (and, thus, most difficult to use) tool would be DogP’s VBSG, which is basically a VSU simulator that takes a script containing VSU settings (and time delays) and produces either a WAV file of (a close approximation of) the sound the VB would produce, or C source code that can be compiled and run on the VB to control the actual VSU. Using it to compose music would be tedious, at best, but it (or its source code) could be used as part of a larger tool or suite of tools.

Since the VSU is essentially a superset of the GB and NES audio hardware, it would, in theory, be possible to use any tool designed for those systems for VB music creation, given the ability to convert its output for playback on the VB. If there are any open-source tools of that nature, perhaps one could be modified for VB use.

Maybe this thread will get other chiptune composers intrigued by the VB and we can get some kind of collaboration started…

RunnerPack,

Thanks for replying. Based on what you wrote, my purist nature calls for me to explore the tedious route to compose for the VB. Not ruling out what’s available, it would be neat to see how things measure up to fully employing the VSU.

Having said that, my experience with NES and GameBoy composition tools (Famitracker and LSDJ) is severely limited, but my basic understanding of their limitations causes me to ask questions about how to go about working the Virtual Boy. In Famitracker you have a handful of chip options to choose from that cater to different periods of the NES life cycle; 2A03, VRC6 and 7, and more. I just wonder which one of these options would best represent the VB, and if there’s a way to implement stereo sound. I’m not completely sure but I think I hear some totally sweet stereo panning on the VB, which both the NES and GB can’t do. GB I believe is stereo but only hard left, hard right, and mono.

Yes, hopefully we can get a good dialogue going. If I am ever to swim in the viscious brine of code, I would prefer it to be in a weird red and black color for the sake of great music and cool games.

IOwnMyWiiULEGIT wrote:
RunnerPack,

Thanks for replying. Based on what you wrote, my purist nature calls for me to explore the tedious route to compose for the VB. Not ruling out what’s available, it would be neat to see how things measure up to fully employing the VSU.

Having said that, my experience with NES and GameBoy composition tools (Famitracker and LSDJ) is severely limited, but my basic understanding of their limitations causes me to ask questions about how to go about working the Virtual Boy. In Famitracker you have a handful of chip options to choose from that cater to different periods of the NES life cycle; 2A03, VRC6 and 7, and more. I just wonder which one of these options would best represent the VB, and if there’s a way to implement stereo sound. I’m not completely sure but I think I hear some totally sweet stereo panning on the VB, which both the NES and GB can’t do. GB I believe is stereo but only hard left, hard right, and mono.

Yes, hopefully we can get a good dialogue going. If I am ever to swim in the viscious brine of code, I would prefer it to be in a weird red and black color for the sake of great music and cool games.

Hey, I can’t really tell you the difference between the VB and other systems when it comes to the sound chip but it actually is rather easy to handle. I programmed a number of tools that allow you to convert Midi files to be played in my music engine on the VB. You can find some of the source and demos here (and all over the forum):

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=23960#forumpost23960
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=25199#forumpost25199
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=25369#forumpost25369

It is somehow based on DanBs midi player which you can find here:
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=6367#forumpost6367

HorvatM released his own SoundEngine which is great for sound effects:
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=17715#forumpost17715

There is another project by blitter which had very good sound quality but I can’t find the forum thread right now.

GuyPerfect was also working on a sound engine and tools for composing music but I think he never released any sources:
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=34159#forumpost34159
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=29673#forumpost29673
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=411
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6357&forum=2

DogP and blitter released some tools that I just now found myself but look very cool:
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5554&post_id=27679#forumpost27679
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=9560#forumpost9560

I hope this helps.

Okay cool, thanks for rounding up those links, Thunderstruck. My tools are a Macbook Pro, early 2011 model and a Dell Dimension 8200 running Windows XP. The Dell runs Famitracker perfectly.

Before I get a chance to sit behind my workstation within the next few days, would you (or anyone else) know which program works best on what system?

I’d like to fully utilize my Dell with XP for this if possible for two reasons: to remain in the spirit of obsolete hardware that’s still potentially relevant, and to keep my MacBook as the source for a more advanced DAW.

Also, it’s likely I’ll have a few questions regarding MIDI file transfers. I’ve done them before with .mid files and they translated into something totally wonky.

My VB Sound Generator app was only written for OS X, and is pretty much geared only as a sandbox for the chip itself– you can’t use it to write music or anything like that. I do indeed have a music engine in progress, but I haven’t seriously touched VB development in a long time so it just sits in a private Bitbucket repo for now. It’s being written in pure assembly and requires that you architect your engine a certain way, but I already have tools written that ultimately convert MIDI files to my own .VBM format. One of these days I’ll get back to it.

Blitter,

A while back I had this weird dream. In it I was walking around- no big deal, right? Then I came upon a vertical pool surface, kinda like the paintings in Mario 64. The substance in the “pool” was super thick and clear and didn’t hinder any breathing. The only setback was that if you entered the pool you would be suspended in super slow animation. When I woke up, I correlated the experience of being in that pool to learning code. Outside of it everything’s cool; you move about freely and easily. Enter the pool of code and wham, you’re floating around in some weird time-consuming goop where even the most basic skill takes forever to do, like scratch your neck. Is this what coding is like? I have no idea.

Checked out the sound generator which was neat but too simple obviously. Also checked out the DOS file and had no idea what to do. The rest of the links Thunderstruck rounded up I haven’t gotten to yet.

When I hear someone say things video game and coding related, this is the song that comes to mind.

Thunderstruck,

I downloaded what looks like MidiGui in my taskbar. I’m sorry- it looks like a lot of cool stuff but I have no idea how to use it, or even if my computer can run it. Could you or someone that’s used these programs before help guide me through getting something going? I’m not a major computer person to know how to get things like this up and running, but this is intriguing nonetheless. I mean, I know to click on a .exe file, which is something, right?