IIRC there’s two torx screws that you can loosen to move the plastic piece that the displays attach to. In this pic, not the small phillips screws, but the bigger torx ones: . That’s the only easy adjustment for alignment that I know about… if somehow the mirrors are out of alignment, there’s a few other screws on the assembly, but you might need to remove the entire mirror assembly to get to them.

DogP

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I think this was asked a while ago, and I believe the reason some can and others can’t be reviewed is because some are actually substantial enough to get a review, while there’s no point in reviewing the really simple ones (something like “moving dot”… it does what it claims, and it does it well, but it’s a moving dot :-P). But the scene is small enough that even though it’s basically a worthless demo, it’s nice to have a complete list of what’s out there, and if the source is available, the source may be useful for other beginners.

BTW, I think posts like this should be under the PVB section, as it relates to this website rather than the Virtual Boy in general.

DogP

I agree it’s dead… but IMO that’s good. I find wading through stupid posts like “LOLZ!!!1 Teh Virtula Boyeee iiss TEH BOMMM!!!” to be annoying. If there’s nothing to talk about, why talk? I really like how this forum is… usually when there’s a new post, it’s actually worth reading, unlike most forums I visit where only a few posts out of several hundred interest me, and maybe one is actually worth replying to.

DogP

Aha! I thought I remembered someone building one before: http://www.vr32.de/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=5537#forumpost5537 . You might want to check that out… it looks like it turned out pretty nice.

DogP

Hmm… well I believe the options for frameskip are 0-9, so 10 may not do anything (or might be read as 1)… I don’t think there’s any way to speed it up besides run in 2D mode or frameskip. I don’t think it should run that slow on your hardware if you’ve got frameskip going though, unless maybe you’ve got lots of other stuff running too. You could try -nothrtl just to make sure it’s not artificially throttling it that slow for some reason. Are you running it in a regular size window, or stretched in any way? I don’t know for sure, but stretched may slow it down.

Like I said… Reality Boy is VERY unoptimized… if you go w/ one of the popular N64 or GBA emus, they’ve been optimized to run well. The VB just gets no love 🙁 . Future updates could fix it, but you’ll probably have a faster computer before Reality Boy gets optimized (unless David is working on rewriting the CPU core in ASM like he said he may do).

DogP

Hmm… upgrade, or start optimizing Reality Boy 😉 . 2D runs fine on my Core2Duo 2GHz w/ 2GB RAM laptop, but 3D Wario Land is still somewhat slow motion. I assume a faster CPU would speed things up, although there’s no multithreaded processing, so it wouldn’t run any faster with more cores, other than the ability to dedicate an entire core’s processing to Reality Boy.

If you just want it to play at full speed and don’t mind some of the annoying effects, you could use the frameskip option (-frmskp (0-9) )… on my laptop a -frmskp 1 runs full speed, but you get the problem of flashing graphics (single frame) disappearing or not flashing, depending which frame is skipped (if you get injured, sometimes you’ll be invisible, other times you’ll be solid like nothing happened). At -frmskp 2, you don’t have the single frame flashing problem, but screens that have animations of 3 frames look to stand still… like the propeller on the main Wario Land screen. It also starts to look kinda choppy after a couple frame skips.

You can see how many FPS it’s running at by pressing 0. I don’t know if there’s a problem with the frame counter or the throttle, but on my laptop it seems to report 46FPS when it’s running full speed, even though it should be running at 50FPS.

DogP

What speed is your PC? Running some games in 3D mode takes a lot of juice… nothing really wrong with the emu except that it’s not optimized very well.

About joystick support, a utility like joytokey works well.

DogP

There’s several reasons for me… emulation is FAR from perfect… and although I’ve done some work on Reality Boy, making the emulator perfect isn’t my strong point. I’m much better at doing hardware to display an existing VB to the TV (or VGA monitor). It’s also much more fun for me, and there’s just something cool about the original hardware playing on a TV rather than just playing an emulator (I think the original hardware should have had a TV out, so others could watch while you play).

And maybe you and some others have a computer hooked to a TV, but none of my computers are conveniently hooked to a TV… while on the other hand, I have 15 or more VB systems, which gives me a great testbed to work with. And about the eye strain… the TV/VGA adapter would get rid of that as much as playing it through your computer, although I don’t have any problems w/ eye strain on the real system (I find red/blue glasses and shutter glasses to strain my eyes more), and I prefer to play real hardware MUCH more than an emulator. It could be part nostalgia, or it could be the immersive environment from the eyeshade and speakers… but it’s just more fun IMO.

DogP

Huh?

DogP

Those won’t work (unless you get a special expensive 3D LCD monitor)… they’re circularly polarized, which a normal monitor can’t do. Red/Blue are the cheapest, and really, since the VB is monochrome, it’s really not that bad.

DogP

Thanks for the encouragement… unfortunately it’s on the back burner until I either finish Mario Kart, or get sick of working on it and decide to jump back to this :-P. My top 3 projects (in order) are Mario Kart, VB TV/VGA adapter (Hardware design), and Mario VB.

Things are finally starting to come together in the VB scene, so hopefully I’ll have the tools I need to get these projects together. Of course Jorgeche’s Mario game looks promising too, so I wouldn’t be surprized if that turns into a complete game sooner than mine.

Luckily we also have Wario Land, which is a great game… so at least we have a good Mario style game, but IMO you can’t have too many Mario games (“New Super Mario Bros” for the DS was amazing… that’d be really cool on the VB).

DogP

IIRC the newest gcc warns that you’ve allocated RAM outside of the memory space… but I don’t remember for sure. I know the older gcc didn’t, and would just flake out.

But yeah, the emu has caught up pretty well in the last couple years… a few years ago I was doing most of the testing on actual hardware (the emu wasn’t accurate enough for a lot of stuff)… now it supports pretty much everything, at least to some extent.

Heh… that’s funny that you mention demoing this for a job interview… when I switched jobs last year, I put this stuff on my resume, and most of the stuff I talked about in the interviews were these projects. One of the guys said after the interview w/ my current boss he said “This guy programs video games in his spare time… lets hire him!” 😀

DogP

You should also check out Reality Boy (especially the newest version)… I rarely use my flash carts when developing anymore, since the emulator is MUCH more convenient, and pretty accurate.

DogP

1mbit (128KByte) is the amount of DRAM… for things like Char RAM, Affine tables, etc… 512kbit (64Kbyte) is the amount of work RAM (PSRAM) available for the user to use (variables and stuff).

DogP

The one you linked to is for the cartridge… it appears their 4.5mm is the same as all the rest, and not deep enough to reach the 4 deepest screws on the VB.

DogP

AFAIK nobody has g++ working for VB… if you haven’t checked it out already, you may want to try VBJAENGINE (http://www.vr32.de/modules/news/article.php?storyid=252 and http://www.vr32.de/modules/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=vbjaengine_programmer_s_guide ), which according to the wiki supports some object oriented programming. Personally, I prefer C to C++, but everyone’s entitled to their own opinion and coding styles. Even if you did have dynamic memory, there’s only 64KB of work RAM, so the size of the heap would be pretty limited (and you could just allocate a large chunk of memory in C, then manage your own memory). The system isn’t that fast either, so the extra overhead of other C++ stuff would reduce the performance, although for simple stuff, it may not matter (although C++ is really most convenient for larger apps).

DogP

Heh… FINALLY someone else had this problem. AFAIK Galactic Pinball doesn’t have any option to erase. I made a page on this: http://home.comcast.net/~virtual.boy/projectvb/tech/erasesram.html . I’d recommend doing the 3rd option, since it’s really easy to do and you don’t need to open the cart. I’ve never had any problem damaging the cart doing this, but just do it quickly, since it’s probably possible to damage it. The other options aren’t particularly safe either… if you heat the lithium battery too much (by desoldering it), it can explode… and if you short the battery, you can also damage the battery (and shorten the life of the battery).

DogP

It’s actually a different pen than shown in the first picture… the plastic on those is too soft… you want the hard plastic pens, like this one:

That tutorial that you linked to should explain everything though.

I’ve never tried one of the pens, but if you bought a real bit (that of course wouldn’t reach to the bottom on the deep ones), I’d use that to remove all but the 4 deepest ones, since the pens seem to wear out, and have to be remade. I’d also recommend pressing hard when you try to first turn the screw, as they take some pressure to initially break free.

I assume you’ve also seen the modified flathead screwdriver: http://home.comcast.net/~virtual.boy/projectvb/dissect.html , and modified security bit: http://home.comcast.net/~virtual.boy/projectvb/tech/securitybit.html … if you have the tools to make those, they work really well.

DogP

Nice job… it’s great to see you’re getting the hang of it.

DogP

Well… the best time to cancel a project is before you waste any time on it… so it’s good that you did the research first.

DogP