Wow, that looks incredible! I can’t believe can watch VB footage captured from an actual VB in HD on YouTube! What a time to be alive! 😀 Now all you have to do is film complete walkthroughs for all of the games in the library! 😉 Seriously though, excellent work.

donhonk wrote:

VGA version of the VirtualTap -> OSSC -> Magewell HDMI Capture Card -> 800×600 recording in OBS -> Upscaled to 4k in After Effects with integer scaling (4x) -> Exported at 4k / Very High Bitrate.

For what it’s worth, I second the endorsement of thunderstruck. I think it is fair to say that he is very well respected within this community and clearly knows his way around a VB ROM, what with all of his successful homebrew projects and tools. He also just seems like a decent, trustworthy person in my interactions with him. There are certainly others who would be great too, but since he was “nominated” via a mention, I thought I would give a second to that.

Lester Knight wrote:
I would 100% trust ThunderStruck to compare your ROM with what we have. He has done some amazing things for this community already (hacks, translation work, homebrew, applications, coding, etc). He also works in computers and is very knowledgeable about the VB.

Just my 2 cents!~

Bumping this thread as a last attempt before I starting thinking more seriously about paying eBay prices for this game :\ If anyone has any leads, please let me know.

Thanks for all the ideas and I’d love to hear more if anyone else hasn’t chimed in yet. I am thinking I personally might prefer something similar to TerryJ’s box design, assuming I can’t find a good magazine option like I have for my GB/GBA carts.

Incidentally, I contacted a fellow on Twitter who it is probably fair to say is a 3D printing enthusiast and does designs with practical retro gaming uses (he is the guy that designed the Hi-Def NES no cut mod parts (for toploader NES systems) along with some brackets that allow you to use off-the-shelf fans on a few retro systems, so no don’t need hard-to-find OEM fans, just to name a few). He exrpessed interest in designing a VB cart storage solution, but said he is backed-up up with projects right now and to get back to him in a few months. So if anything becomes of that I’ll post it here on this thread.

Ok, well this is strange. I have a saved search for the game, so eBay emails me when a new item is listed. When I look at the saved search on my eBay app (logged in), it only shows a couple of Waterworld ads, but when I look at the exact same saved search on my PC browser (logged in) I get several results for the cart. Never had that happen before, that I know of :\

lest wrote:
Depending on your budget, I’ve noticed a couple on ebay this week.

Weird. I didn’t see any on eBay and only one that was part of a lot in the recently ended. Maybe my search is flawed.

thunderstruck wrote:
It’s actually the same format. Both are simple binary dumps. Mednafen expects the files to be 64kb though. So I simply made the file bigger by appending zeros. You can flash your mednafen saves to your carts as well if you reduce them in size.

That is good to know! So do you have a mini-padder/deflater that you use to convert back and forth?

I’ve also been meaning to report back about the issues I had getting my PC to recognize the Programmer, in case anyone else was having similar issues.

So to summarize, I am running Windows 7 64-bit and when I plugged in the programmer Windows would try and fail to install the device drivers. A quick Google search found that this is not uncommon for these Arduino boards when connected to Win 7 64-bit. So the fix was just to download the latest version of the Arduino software (in my case v1.8.7) from the official site:

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software/

After that, I just installed the software and the next time I plugged in the VB Programmer it was recognized, no problem. There were not tricks and I didn’t need to even run the Arduino software or anything. From reading forum posts, it was looking like I might have to manually update the driver but that wasn’t necessary… installing the software also installed the necessary drivers with it.

Another note to anyone out there playing with these: Kevin has said that the external power supply for the Programmer might not be necessary unless your USB ports couldn’t supply enough power. Well my Windows machine is quite old and so far no external supply has not been needed. The Programmer has been able to get everything it needs from the USB port, apparently, and that includes dumping and writing to both his larger and smaller programmable carts. So if my machine, which doesn’t even have any USB 3.0 port, can supply enough power, probably most could I would suspect.

astro187 wrote:
Ah, so it should be as plug-n-play as most other devices are these day even thought my Device Manager doesn’t already show any Ports (COM or LPT)? Maybe I need to use the extra power supply, but it seems the system is getting power. I’ll try that and another USB cord and report back. Thanks for the info!

Very awesome, man! I’ll try this out in the next couple of days. Thanks for fixing the direct dump feature. And you read my mind about the Mednafen save conversion feature. I was thinking it was nice to dump my RAM to have as a backup and to clone my games onto programmable carts but I was planning to ask how difficult it would be to take a RAM dump and convert it into something that Mednafen can use since I know nothing of the details of that file format… but apparently it wasn’t too difficult for Thunderstruck to tackle! I’ll give it a try on my couple of games that still have battery life and report back.

thunderstruck wrote:

I also added a feature to receive the SRAM directly to mednavens sav format. So you can simply extract your savfiles from your games and continue playing in the emulator.

If anyone is on the fence about getting one, I say get one while you can. I’m very happy with mine and Thunderstruck’s GUI makes it easy to use if you aren’t as familiar with terminal interfaces or don’t have a good terminal application program installed. You can also use the programmer to backup your VB game saves. I successfully cloned my Galactic Pinball game onto one of Kevin’s 16 Mbit carts complete with my high scores! Plus, is just so damn cute on the shelf 🙂

Ah, so it should be as plug-n-play as most other devices are these day even thought my Device Manager doesn’t already show any Ports (COM or LPT)? Maybe I need to use the extra power supply, but it seems the system is getting power. I’ll try that and another USB cord and report back. Thanks for the info!

thunderstruck wrote:

astro187 wrote:
Ok, so I finally got to trying this out tonight and I’m stuck on step one :\ My programmer starts up and I get the “VB Cartridge Programmer” message on the unit’s screen but when I start Thunderstruck’s program, nothing is in the drop-down (i.e. no “COM3”) so I can’t connect. What do I need to setup in advance? I noticed that it is shown as an unrecognized device and failed to install any drivers when I plugged it in. I’m running Windows 7 if that matters in the troubleshooting. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: So I open up Device Manager and see that I have no COM ports shown at all. So I install a default one and try to set the settings you suggest, but it has pre-set bit rates and you specify the terminal program uses 500000 Baud. And I’m too dumb to get a clear answer on how to convert 500000 Baud to a bit rate so I’m dead in the water again. Or maybe I was barking up the wrong tree in the first place with this approach.

You shouldn’t need to set anything up. It should aromatically detect it. As soon as you connect it there should be an entry called “Ports (COM & LPT)” and “Arduino Mega 2560” underneath. If it doesn’t show up maybe try a different USB cable or USB Port.

[astro187]

Ok, so I finally got to trying this out tonight and I’m stuck on step one :\ My programmer starts up and I get the “VB Cartridge Programmer” message on the unit’s screen but when I start Thunderstruck’s program, nothing is in the drop-down (i.e. no “COM3”) so I can’t connect. What do I need to setup in advance? I noticed that it is shown as an unrecognized device and failed to install any drivers when I plugged it in. I’m running Windows 7 if that matters in the troubleshooting. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: So I open up Device Manager and see that I have no COM ports shown at all. So I install a default one and try to set the settings you suggest, but it has pre-set bit rates and you specify the terminal program uses 500000 Baud. And I’m too dumb to get a clear answer on how to convert 500000 Baud to a bit rate so I’m dead in the water again. Or maybe I was barking up the wrong tree in the first place with this approach.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by astro187.

Thanks so much for making this! It looks like it will be super useful to the more terminal ignorant among us. So I poked around in the source code and it looks like this program will act in lieu of a separate terminal program (as opposed to being a GUI frontend for a terminal program that one must first launch or install)? My question itself probably exposes my ignorance about how this interface works, so thanks for bearing with me.

thunderstruck wrote:
Hey everyone,

yesterday I went on Twitch and programmed a simple UI interface for Kevins cart programmer. Sources and binaries are attached to this post.

Cheers

It’s not that you were critical. Few creator’s have an ego that is so fragile that they can’t take constructive criticism. It’s that you were crass by calling it “pretty crappy” then when someone called you out on it maturely laid down a “sorry not sorry” and then felt the need to twist the knife. It’s an individual that made that game and put a lot of work into it, not Nintendo R&D1. No, it’s not as good as Wario Land. He already knows that. Being rude about it and cutting it apart is uncalled for. We *generally* have such civil discourse on this website, which is one thing I love about this community.

NR20 wrote:
Well, I am sorry, to insult someone’s work, but apparently noone dares to speak it out. Creators also have to live with criticism. Yes, a general “the game is bad” is probably no good way to criticse a work.

I could also go more into details:
In my opinion:

The graphics are bad
The controls are super simple, no big variety in characters or in gameplay.
After 2 minutes the game went to my shelf and will not exit so fast from there.

Here is another question about this setup: could 2 player games be supported? I have only played Hyper Fighting 2player so I don’t have many data points. . It seems like if both players see the same screen for the game it might be more easily doable, but if each player has a different view split screen would be required which I would imagine is more difficult to emulate?. Just spitballing thoughts since I don’t know the technical details of all of this.

Very interesting! I know where you are going with this, but who would have ever guessed there would be a development in the VB community requiring extension cords?!?! I love that this is a no donor design!

This looks great! Dumb question just to make sure I’m not missing something… I assume you need a jailbroken phone to install this app, yes?

I’ll post this question for @mellott124 here in case it is of general interest to folks that have these.

Regarding the external power supply, if I understood it correctly, you have said that you don’t personally use one and one may not be required if the PC USBs supply enough power. So, how would you know if you needed to use a power supply? Random shutdowns/reboots of the programmer, I would presume? If so, is there any danger of corrupting anything with the programmer or carts if it shuts down midstream?

I’d rather not bother with it if I don’t need one, but if there is some consequence to be avoided I’d rather be safe than sorry.

One more cool feature would be Bluetooth, I think. That would open up the Wii U Pro, Switch controllers, and 8bitdo products as controller options that lots of people already have, among others.

mellott124 wrote:
Wondering what people think about this and if there is more interest now that I’ve shown 3D works? I’m not 100% sure I’m going to do it yet but I’ve obviously started testing and it looks like it can all work. The entire thing would be built from new parts and using no donor parts.

What do people think?

I’m sure it is 0% surprising to you that I would be interested in this project! I’ve had a similar notional idea… basically a Pi-based “VB Classic” for lack of a better term. A dedicated device that is setup, loaded, and configured solely for VB games (and sits on my shelf in a cute little VB enclosure when not in use).

As for my thoughts, I would personally just be using it for with anaglyph glasses since I don’t have a 3D TV. I have played Mednafen in anaglyph mode for years and it works pretty well for me. I can get the ghosting to an acceptable level for most games and have several different color combinations of glasses I bought for this purpose (although most of the time I go with the classic dark blue/red (not cyan)). I see the benefits of the NFC feature, particularly if game-wise config files make for a better experience, but if the same can be done with GUI-based launching, it probably wouldn’t be worth too much hassle in my case since I don’t have a 3D TV.

I like the idea of having USB ports for the controllers rather than integrated sockets. I think the cord length would be prohibitive. Luckily, I have one of your adapters and I know some folks on here have hardwired USB cords onto their VB controllers, so I personally think that is the best USB poarts are the best option. And some folks could probably even get by with other more common USB adapters available for SNES controllers or Wii Classic controllers, for example, since many of the games don’t require the RHS dpad. It might be useful to have at least 2 USB ports intended for input devices so the second one can be another input device that could be used for emulator functions like save state save/load, game reset, etc.

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts, but I’ll be quite interested in how this develops!