7805 datasheet: http://www.national.com/mpf/LM/LM78M05.html#Overview

LM1086 datasheet: http://www.national.com/mpf/LM/LM1086.html#Overview .

From reading those, it looks like you’d be fine with no capacitor on the 7805, and probably just one 10uF tantalum capacitor on the output of the LM1086. Like I said though, no capacitors may be necessary, since there’s other capacitors on the motherboard for this purpose already.

DogP

The pinout of the LM1086 is different, but it would be connected the same way (input to Vin, ground to ground, output to Vout and PowerGood).

But both regulators are linear regulators, so the LM1086 would only make less heat if you use a lower input voltage. And yes, you may need a capacitor on both the input and output.

DogP

Well… there’s really only 5 pins… pin 4 is missing. But you should connect 7805 input to pin 1, 7805 ground to pin 2 and pin 6, 7805 output to pin 5 and pin 3 (though pin 3 may need a delay, so check this if it doesn’t work).

DogP

FYI, the regulator isn’t a standard part… it’s a custom switching regulator board that Nintendo made. If you’re good with electronics, you should be able to replace it with a standard 5V regulator, like a 7805, though I’d recommend using a 9V AC adapter with that kind of regulator, because it brings the voltage down to 5V by wasting the extra power as heat.

This will kill batteries faster, and a 7805 will typically stop regulating at ~7V, so it won’t be able to suck the last of the batteries dry. Also, it’ll get really hot if you use too high voltage of an AC adapter (like 12V or more).

If you have a good electronics store, you could pick up a LDO regulator, like the LM1086, which would regulate with a lower input voltage (probably down below 6V), so you could use a 6V adapter, which would reduce the amount of heat.

I don’t know if the original caps on the motherboard are sufficient/compatible for linear regulators, so you may need to install two caps with the regulator (look at the datasheet).

Anyway, the pinout of the Nintendo regulator is:

1-Vin
2-GND
3-PowerGood
4-missing
5-Vout
6-GND

You may be able to tie PowerGood to 5V (Vout), though it may need a delay, since the purpose of it is to hold the system in reset until the power is stable.

You should also verify that the regulator is actually bad… measure the voltage at Vin with the controller on… it should be the same voltage as coming out of the controller. Then measure the voltage of Vout… it should be 5V, if it’s not, your regulator is probably bad, or something is shorted on the board and overloading the regulator. There should also be a small red LED lit on the regulator when it’s on.

DogP

The reason it probably didn’t blow the fuse in your multimeter is that the internal resistance of the batteries is kinda high, which limits the amount of current (if you short circuit the terminals, infinite current won’t flow, where theory says I=V/R, or infinity=1.5/0).

DogP

Yeah, I don’t see the connection at all (and like K said, I doubt Kemco had anything to do w/ Goldeneye).

I think the man with the gun is the second from the left (and also the small one in the middle close to the third from the right), which looks more like “wild west” than Goldeneye… and the car is kinda just a car… it doesn’t really stand out as being the same car used in the VB Goldeneye game.

DogP

There’s plenty known about it (I’ve made several games and apps that use it), but not many people use it, since there’s no link cable available (so you need to make your own), and Reality Boy supports it over the network, but it’s really slow.

DogP

Okay… just PM me your addy and I’ll mail you a copy this weekend. Don’t worry about the cost… it’ll only be ~$1 for the key and a stamp.

About your original problem of making it easier to get the games in and out… I’m not sure, without making some big changes. The best I can suggest is just flip the system all the way forward, open the back, and swap carts (like it was designed… not particularly easy, but not too difficult). I personally doubt that you’ll actually want to use that system for regular gameplay anyway though… it’s not very comfortable, since the controller is in front of the VB rather than behind, like it’s normally used.

DogP

I mean inside Reality Boy… I don’t remember if the ROM path is handled differently, but I’m pretty sure the SRAM path is 255 characters (and so is my ROM map, since I just copied a lot of the SRAM code for that).

DogP

Well… if the teeth aren’t the same, then there’s no point in trying, since the point of a key is to keep people with the wrong key out :P. But the key I scanned is from the exact same display model as you have, and it also works on both of my larger store displays.

Also, the lock itself is a standard lock… you can get a replacement at Home Depot/Lowes, which may be easier than trying to find someone with the same key, and maybe it’s different because the lock has been replaced once already.

DogP

Doh… that sucks! A lot of times if it’s that tight, you need to bend the bracket on the end of the lock, or it might have just been in a bind from the angle that the VB was putting weight on it.

Anyway, I attached a couple scans of my key… just print it out and take it to Wal*Mart and they’ll cut you a new key.

Heh, j/k… let me know if that looks like yours and I’ll get a copy made and mail it to you.

DogP

Attachments:

1. 

   key1.jpg
   

2. 

   key2.jpg
   

There could be a file name length issue… IIRC, the files are referenced by a 255 byte string, so if you’ve got a really long path, it may hit the limit. And I’m not sure why it doesn’t output command arguments (I haven’t looked at the code yet), but the debug version does output it (reality_boyD.exe). I can’t say that all the arguments are verified to be correct, but I don’t know that any are wrong.

DogP

DaVince wrote:
All of these crash on my Windows 7 system, for some reason.

Has anyone else tried this on Windows 7 (or Vista)? Did it work/not work? I’ll try to test it on my friend’s Windows 7 box, but I’m not sure when I’ll be able to.

DaVince: Was there any error message, or did it just crash. I assume you’ve got the allegro dll referenced earlier in the thread?

DogP

VBrulez wrote:
Ive been trying to email these pics to you jojobean but my email account just won’t let me so im just going to upload them here. Its the special nintendo power article about the VB and the guinness books parts about the NES there were some high scores for the NES I tried to take pictures of them and they diddn’t turn out very good at all but there still are some great parts here about the NES,I was going to take pics of the special edition nintendo power part about the NES but I forgot to,but if anyone wants me to upload them I will be more than glad to, also ive got some old Atari Ages, Numb Thumbs, and a Super Game Boy book if anyone wants to see them to ill be glad to share them.

Is there a babelfish translator to turn this into english? Or even German for that matter… I’d probably understand the German translation better than just reading that, and I don’t know German 😛 .

DogP

Yep… that’s what I’ve done so far, though I still haven’t beaten the game in Special Easy, Medium, and Hard… but if someone could do those and post the map, it’d be really helpful, because just about all the code and data would be exercised then.

DogP

I’ve looked into it several times (and again just recently), but I haven’t found anywhere that there’s actually link code in the game. It’d be very difficult to add link support if it was never in the game, but possibly pretty easy if it was coded, and then disabled before releasing the game.

DogP

Would anyone be interested in being able to make your own 3D Tetris puzzles (in puzzle mode)? I’ve got it figured out how to do it, but I’m not sure about making a proper level editor, and if nobody is really interested, I’ll probably either push it off until later, or hack something crappy together. Of course if anyone can make a decent GUI for it, let me know 🙂 .

DogP

Almost all of the coding is done in C… there’s a few rare exceptions where we choose to use ASM, but you can certainly do just about anything you’d like without ever touching ASM. V810 ASM is pretty nice though, so if you’re familiar with ASM in general, it wouldn’t be difficult to pick up.

The programmers manual is pretty out of date now though… if you’re interested in coding, you should check out the wiki: http://www.vr32.de/modules/dokuwiki/doku.php? , and download some of the examples.

DogP

Nice to see you around again. You’ve definitely got an interesting round of tests ahead of you, if you decide to go through with this. IMO though, I’d study the official dev manual and functionally emulate it all, with a placeholder for some cycle counts to be computed from real world measurements.

There’s a lot of detail in the document, which would probably be more useful than trying to track down every detail from measurements. Off hand, the things I’m pretty sure that aren’t in the document are how many clock cycles it takes to process worlds, and memory refresh timing. It does tell you the number of (NVC) waits for memory accesses, and looking at the flow chart on 5-20-1, it seems like those cases (parameterized by sizes) are what you’d want to characterize.

I’d guess that most things that could be done in one clock cycle are done in one clock cycle (like parsing parameters), and that the real delay on those are the memory read cycles.

And by server board, I assume you mean servo board? I took some high res pics of the front and back, though they’re ~4MB each, so I can’t post them here… if you PM me your email addy, I’ll send them over. I could also send some of the motherboard, though it’s not completely in tact (I’ve pulled a few chips and stuff off over the years 😉 ).

Anyway, let me know if there’s anything you need… I may be able to help.

DogP

Oops… sorry, my fault 😉 . I forgot that I started to play around with the color patch idea a while ago, but never disabled it when I started messing around with the rest of the code. These builds should be fixed.

DogP

Attachments:

1. rb_pal_fix.zip