I use that USB one… I believe the VB USB kit is the same as the NES/SNES kit, but for some reason they just don’t sell it as a VB kit anymore. But they could probably tell you that info for sure.
You’re talking about the one with the light on top? Which power supply is broken? They just used the regular VB power supply for the system, but of course had a transformer for the fluorescent light.
Well, you could probably emulate some very old arcade games, though it’d probably be much easier to just rewrite the game for the VB. I’d be surprised if it could emulate Galaxian though (Z80, like the Gameboy, plus lots of other random hardware)… I’m thinking more along the lines of Sprint, Drag Race, Night Driver, etc. Yet those games could be rewritten for the VB very easily, and in very little ROM space (and with new cool VB 3D features). Emulation is really just very inefficient.
Yeah, I ported gnuboy and it was horribly slow… even with optimization, I’d be VERY surprized if it could run full speed. IMO if you wanted GB, or really any other emu, do it like the Super Gameboy, with hardware to run the system on the cart, and the VB for controls, display, sound, etc.
Heh… is it really such a big deal? I mean… do we have so much traffic here that we can’t just kindly redirect them to the sticky (and maybe a jab of “ehem… sticky”)? 😉
I assume there’s quite a few people that have the display problem, and most probably find the sticky (and move along with the information there without posting), but on occasion one gets by 😛 .
LOL… by you bringing that line to my attention, I just thought of something… rather than submitting multiple projects, you should make a new user to submit each crappy one, then use their votes toward your good one :D. Heheheh… j/k… and I hope/assume KR155E would catch on :P.
Ah… yeah, I assumed the M-type was referring to the maximal length sequence (many times referred to as m-sequence)… though only the first tap value (0) is actually a maximal length sequence. Options 1-7 are shorter (and IIRC option 7 is VERY short).
One question about multiple entries… is the winner of the competition the “one who wrote the entry with the most votes”, or the “person with the most votes”? i.e. if someone enters 3 projects, and they each get 30 points, but someone else enters one project and gets 31 points, who wins?
It seems like the “person with the most votes” should win the competition, though the winning project should be the one with the most votes (it’d be dumb to promote the best project as a lame demo because someone entered a bunch of projects, but their best one only got 5 points).
I was just thinking that it might be a deterrent to submitting multiple entries, since you’re creating competition for yourself (you really only want to promote your project that has the best chance of winning, like a party choosing a candidate for a political election). Or, I guess maybe it’ll cause everyone to create a “CC10 Multi-Game” with all their entries in a single entry. Of course, I was kinda thinking of a multi-game entry anyway, but not for this reason.
There are 5 waveforms, which are made up of 32 samples (6-bits). That means that the waveform output from the audio channel will be the selected waveform, repeated over and over at the selected frequency. The waveform can be completely arbitrary (triangle, sine, square, saw, pulse, random, etc), with values from 0 to 63 (or -32 to 31… it really doesn’t matter since it’s AC coupled).
Then there are 6 channels, which basically get added together to create the sound that goes to the speaker. Each channel gets to select which waveform to use, the volume, panning, and frequency… plus some special effects like interval and envelope.
The first 4 channels are plain, and just include those options. Channel 5 includes all of the features of those, plus two extra (Sweep and Modulation). This allows you to sweep through the frequency, or modulate the frequency with a sequence of 32 offsets (8-bit). That changes the frequency of the channel output at the specified interval by the value in the modulation RAM (+/- 127 values)
Channel 6 is the noise channel, which has several “random” noise sequences to select from. It’s pretty similar to channel 1-4 as far as options go, except rather than outputting a selected 32 sample waveform over and over, it outputs a noise waveform. The length of repetition on the noise waveform varies, depending which noise “tap” is selected.
I hope this info helps.
Edit:
@Runnerpack: I just looked at the wiki you linked to… why do you claim: Channel 6 uses a “Mersenne Twister” PRNG to make noise? I assume you did it, since you basically run the wiki ;). I have to disagree, since the Wikipedia link you have says the Mersenne Twister was developed in 1997, and the VB was released in 1995 :P. There’s really nothing special about the PRNG… it’s just an LFSR with taps at locations determined by the configuration bits.
Richard wrote:
It’s got nothing to do with sending us copies; we felt (and I certainly still feel) that for a dead system such as the VB it really serves no purpose not to have all known games out there for people to enjoy.
So you’re saying if someone offered you Dragon Hopper to keep private in return for adding into ViBE so they could play it, you wouldn’t accept? The only way you’d do it is if it was publicly released? Sounds like a dream world to me 😛 .
DaVince wrote:
Instead of keeping away the hacked versions it could do the same ZSNES does and show a “checksum: fail” label at the start of the game. Arbitrary code should definitely still be runnable, I think.
But that’s missing his point… he wants to make sure people can’t play prototypes on his emulator unless they give him a copy. Seems kinda pointless (and “historical”), but it’s his emulator, and if he doesn’t mind making new releases for just updating the checksum list to make a stand against ROM hording… good for him. BTW, Red Dragon has a checksum, which will tell you whether it’s a good/bad/unknown dump (but of course not block it).
But yes… of course 256K would be better, though certainly won’t cover all homebrew. It also doesn’t help those that try to run most of my pre-compiled homebrew, since I typically release 1MB ROMs, because that’s what’s convenient for my flash cart (and others do 2MB ROMs because that’s what the Flashboy uses). Of course you can shrink the ROM, but I don’t believe there’s any tools for the Mac to do that automatically.
Except most people suffer by having to wait for a new release anytime a new ROM is available.
Perhaps, though how often does that really happen in the Virtual Boy world?
As it was, I had a release out within hours of this being brought to my attention. There’s no reason why I won’t be able to do the same again if Faceball/etc show up.
I was actually referring more to homebrew… IIRC there’s a size limit that’s allowed (<64K?), but many homebrew games easily exceed that... and that seems silly to have to make a new release every time someone releases a new revision of a WIP homebrew. I'd expect that to occur a lot more often in the coming months with the competition happening again.
I don't think there's VB development tools for the Mac, so it's probably not hindering VB game development, but if anyone on a Mac wants to try a new game out, they'll need a new version (which would likely get annoying for you).
If you're really worried about it, what about hosting a key generator, where someone uploads a ROM to you and it returns a key, which is then typed into the emu?
BTW, do you have this same "protection" on any of your other emulators?
I sort of agree on the open source thing, since it’s mine, I’d like to have control of my source… though I’m not opposed to releasing the code. I actually like releasing my source code, so others can learn from it, or borrow parts of it for something else, but I usually prefer to release it when I’m done, not after some time limit. What this means to me is that whatever project I pick, I’m gonna try to make it one that I _can_ finish by the end of the time limit.
But I think what KR155E is trying to do is to jumpstart VB development a little more. If you look at the last competition, there were quite a few entries, none of which were “complete”, and most of them were closed source and have since gone unfinished. So, in the end, the competition didn’t really do much good for the community except releasing a few demos. If the source was out there, others could improve on them, borrow ideas from them, or even suggest ideas on how to make it better.
BTW, KR155E: You say it needs to be open source… do we have the option of which license to pick, or does it have to be GPL, MIT, etc?
Richard schrieb:
Yup, it does have an embedded CRC list. The reason for this is historical; we decided long ago that we did not want people who hoard unreleased prototypes for their own private reasons to be able to use ViBE to emulate them.
As I recall we had one of our beta testers early on claiming to have a copy of Faceball which apparently didn’t work, but he refused to provide us with traces (or indeed a loan of the ROM itself) which might have helped us fix it…
i like that way! 😉
Except most people suffer by having to wait for a new release anytime a new ROM is available. It’s easy enough to get around anyway, though I don’t know how many people actually care (it took almost 3 weeks for anyone to notice that this didn’t work on ViBE).
And it’s not like someone who decides to horde a ROM is gonna change their mind so they can play it on some emulator, when they obviously could just play the game on the real system or one of the other emulators. But I understand it’s the principle of it… or maybe “if I can’t have it, nobody can”… either way, it’s his emulator and he’s free to do whatever he wants.
Not really… if you turn it on without a game, you should be able to hear/feel/see the mirrors vibrate inside the system, but you won’t see anything on the screens.
If you get the official Nintendo stuff, then yes… you need an AC Adapter and Tap (and they both have to be from the same country – US or JP). The AC Adapter provides power (it’s the same adapter as the SNES adapter), and the Tap connects on the back of your controller (in place of the battery pack) to give you a spot to plug the AC Adapter in.
There’s also a 3rd party one (from Performance IIRC) which has the AC adapter and attachment all in one.
Yeah… if we’re all so lazy, why don’t you jump in and show us how it’s done?
Like mbuchman said… this is a hobby for all of us (AFAIK), and most of us have some sort of life besides VB homebrew. I personally work full time, go to grad school, plus have quite a few hobbies. During the semester (like now), I have almost no free time. During breaks, I get some time for hobbies, but I’m still working full time, and I have quite a few hobbies, and have priorities, depending what I feel like doing.
They’re hobbies because I do them for fun… when my boss says he needs something completed in a month, I make sure I give priority to that, working long hours, etc… whatever to get it done. I’m not going to do that for a hobby, because that’s not fun, and that’s how you get burned out.
And I don’t do VB homebrew for anyone else… I do it for my own enjoyment… so I personally don’t care whether anything ever gets “released”. I definitely like to share what I’ve made, and I like feedback from others… but it’s mine, made for me, on my schedule. Telling me to finish MK:VC by the end of the year with link support and more tracks isn’t going to make it happen any faster.
And yeah… competitions are cool because it gives us a deadline to have something ready by, and it gives us a chance for a little friendly competition. I don’t think the prizes were a motivating factor for anyone.
Yeah, listen for any sort of activity… you should be able to slightly hear, feel, and see (if you look carefully, or shine a flashlight into the eye) the mirrors vibrating. If they don’t move, then you’ve probably got a power problem.
I assume you’ve tried putting in a game, turning the volume up and listening for static, or pressed start a bunch of times and listening for game sounds? The most common problem is bad display cables, so you could see nothing, but the mirrors and sound should still work.
Otherwise, yeah… check the power out of the controller, and if that looks fine, you’ve probably got a dead regulator (seems to be getting more common, though more related to power abuse, like hooking up power backwards, wrong voltage, etc). You can make your own with a 7805, though I wouldn’t use that from battery (inefficient and would kill the batteries quicker).
