Hacking the functionality into a game that doesn’t have the functionality at all would be very difficult. But in a case where the game was already programmed for link support, but disabled at the last minute (i.e. by hiding a menu option) could be very easy to re-enable.

Not that I have any technical proof to back it up, but if I was to put odds on any game having link support, my best guess would be Virtual League Baseball. They had an ad that promoted link support, which probably means it was at least still in the plans as of a few months before release. Though being 3rd party, it’s possibly less likely that they would have gotten a link cable to develop with than a 1st party game.

DogP

Definitely a false rumor. I haven’t dug into the code enough to say there’s no way to put it back in, but as the stock ROM is, I watched all accesses to the link area in memory and it certainly doesn’t use it. I also ran all the games with the link cable plugged in, and none did anything differently.

I believe the reason for the rumor is because Mario’s Tennis does have graphics for 2P. It also has another character name of “Cassarin”, which I assume was actually supposed to be “Catherine”, AKA Birdo, which didn’t make it into the game.

DogP

mawa wrote:

DogP wrote:

mawa wrote:
Console Virtual Boy Nintendo Mozaic Version VUE Demo Set ( boxed )
Including the store stand japan
I have never seen one boxed this is a very nice item in my eyes

http://www.ebay.nl/itm/VB-Console-Virtual-Boy-Nintendo-Mozaic-Version-VUE-Demo-Set-B-w-2-game-13052-/131256201535?pt=FR_Jeux_Vid%C3%A9o_Consoles&hash=item1e8f7ab13f

I’ve got one. 🙂

DogP

Do you have it whit the shipping box and the stand also in box ( thats why i never seen this one for sale )

I’ve never taken it all out of the box and inventoried it, but I’m pretty sure it’s complete and never used.

DogP

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mawa wrote:
Console Virtual Boy Nintendo Mozaic Version VUE Demo Set ( boxed )
Including the store stand japan
I have never seen one boxed this is a very nice item in my eyes

http://www.ebay.nl/itm/VB-Console-Virtual-Boy-Nintendo-Mozaic-Version-VUE-Demo-Set-B-w-2-game-13052-/131256201535?pt=FR_Jeux_Vid%C3%A9o_Consoles&hash=item1e8f7ab13f

I’ve got one. 🙂

DogP

[DogP]

I also painted one of my shells years ago: http://www.projectvb.com/painting.html .

There was also someone who painted theirs white (I don’t remember exactly what the deal was, but I kinda remember someone trying to sell it as a “RARE Prototype”).

DogP

• This reply was modified 10 years, 6 months ago by DogP.

DanB wrote:
I won it! I can’t believe the debugger is mine 😀 😀 😀

So Happy! My preciooouuus!!! :vb:

Awesome… congrats! You got a pretty good deal on it IMO. I’ve seen debuggers sell for that, without a link cable and without the SCSI card.

DogP

We could certainly measure the exact dimensions of the official one to copy, though since we have what it plugs into, it’s not too difficult to figure out the dimensions of something that fits. Especially since it has to be modified a bit since the original pins don’t seem to be available (I’d assume it uses the same pins as the SNES A/V cable).

Oh, and I wish that dev kit came with some code for an unreleased game (even wrestling or some stupid horse racing game 😛 )… now that’d be REALLY cool. 🙂

DogP

As cool as that link cable and debugger is… I personally wouldn’t pay THAT much for it. Yes, it’s the first (and only) official link cable to surface, and the debugger is probably complete enough to actually work. But at the end of the day… that’s all you have.

To me, the coolest part of that whole auction is that it confirms that an official link cable was actually made. But do I REALLY care about actually owning it? Not that much. 😛 Maybe some hardcore collector does… but I’m not so sure. When you compare this to something like a cartridge of an unreleased game (Zero Racers, Dragon Hopper, etc)… this is MUCH less exciting (at least IMO).

There aren’t any games that natively use the link cable (other than a few homebrew)… and presumably the official link cable doesn’t work any better than a homebrew one. And who knows… if they actually mass produced that one cable (looks like an officially injection molded cable), there may be a whole box of them somewhere waiting to be discovered (maybe even that seller has them and will slowly auction them… like the official EPROM carts a few years back).

And while I’d love to get a look at the link cable, I’m pretty sure we’ve got the correct pinout, so it doesn’t really help us from a technical standpoint (though if anyone here gets it, and can confirm the pinout, that’d be cool).

Regarding the debugger… again, very cool piece of hardware, but the fact that you can actually plug it in and run it doesn’t really do much. Our homebrew dev tools are quite good, and given the choice, I can’t imagine actually doing dev using an official dev kit. We’re able to take official code, compile it, and output a binary, so again, it doesn’t get us any closer to anything on the technical side of things.

DogP

Yeah, definitely post what you find out (nice pic BTW, RunnerPack).

When you say shaking, do you mean a display that constantly expands and shrinks… similar to how the display looks when you first turn it on before it stabilizes? Or are you saying that there’s a shaking that makes the image bounce around like you were playing in moving car or something?

I’ve never had one do this, so I can’t speak from experience, but I’ve heard several people complain about expanding/shrinking problems in the past few years. Here’s a post I made in reply to a problem jrronimo was having: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=24681#forumpost24681 . If you have an oscilloscope, the same recommendations apply to you as well. I’m not sure whether he ever solved his problem though.

DogP

Do the mirrors still move when you turn it on? Can you hear the game play? I’d be a little bit surprised if your voltage regulator is working but everything is seemingly dead. Knowing which component smoked would definitely help figure out what happened and what will need to be done to fix it (if even possible… if one of the custom chips is dead, there’s not really much that can be done).

The original problem was almost certainly a display (cable). Sometimes baking/hair dryer doesn’t work… but if the rest of the console and one display was working, there was almost certainly nothing wrong with the console besides the bad display. It likely just needed to be soldered.

DogP

Can you give more details on what you were doing? Were you trying to fix it with the power on, and outside of the plastic case, like you have shown in the picture? Why? What was the problem in the first place? What were you touching, or what was moving and could have shorted out when it turned off? Any idea where the smell came from? Do you see any burnt components?

If you put a straw up your nose and sniff while moving the straw around the board, you may be able to narrow down exactly where the burning smell came from… though it would be easier immediately after it burns. Do you have and know how to use a multimeter? Can you check for +5V and the input voltage from the power coming out of the controller at the motherboard? Do you see a dim red light on the voltage regulator (black board sticking up at the edge of the motherboard near the right eye display)?

Does the system do anything when you turn it on? Do the mirrors move, does the game make sounds, etc?

DogP

Awesome… looks great!

DogP

Yes, the zip file for MAME ROMs is nice… but the one major change I’d make is to allow the zip to be any name. That’s annoying how MAME ROMs have to be named whatever cryptic name the devs gave the game. I wish they would have dropped a file inside the zip that told MAME which driver(s) to use, and other specifics… rather than hard-coding it by ROM name.

DogP

RunnerPack wrote:
Here’s the relevant thread: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3688

(HorvatM and 133MHz posted the visor measurements, but I posted the mounting plate dimensions).

Yep… that’s the one! I knew you had something to do with it.

If you know anyone that’s good at sewing, you could possibly make it similar to a hat brim (plastic or cardboard with a cloth cover). Or, maybe instead of sewing, spray it with a rubber material like plasti-dip. Something that’d probably be okay as-is (simply cut to shape) would be a silicone rubber mat (as long as it’s not too heavy to hold shape or too thin to stay in place on the pegs).

If you really want to get fancy, you could probably make a mold, line it with thin black cloth, and fill it with oogoo ( http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Make-Your-Own-Sugru-Substitute/ ). The cloth should stick well to the silicone, and would pretty quickly give you a cloth coated silicone eye shade. It’s probably a lot of setup for a one-off… but it’d probably work well if someone wanted to make a batch of them.

DogP

I’m not from Michigan, but welcome anyway. 🙂

lwizardl wrote:
Is there a cheap way to replace the missing rubber section or will I have to buy on of the expensive ones off ebay 🙁

I’ve seen a couple people make their own… not sure how well they work, as I’ve never used anything other than an original.

IIRC, someone posted a drawing of one flat with dimensions a while back (maybe RunnerPack?). It seems like it should be pretty easy to go to a fabric store, pick up some thin foam/cloth material, and cut one out.

The hardest part would probably be finding the right material… it’d have to be more rigid than felt, but not scratchy like a lot of foam. I’m not familiar with a lot of fabrics… maybe the cloth coated foam like the original is commonly available. Otherwise, you could cut one out of a thin plastic material, like one of those flimsy plastic binders. You’d probably want to put some rubber/foam (or maybe even just electrical/duct tape) over the edge so the sharp plastic doesn’t cut into your face though.

DogP

blitter wrote:
Just chiming in here– IMO this is solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Currently there are no games (or flash cart hardware for that matter) that make use of the expansion RAM, and until there are, we’re putting the cart before the horse by designing a file format that we don’t even know how it will be used. Like Tauwasser hinted at, VB games already know what hardware is used just by virtue of what the code does– if the code talks to SRAM, then it uses the SRAM; if the code talks to the link port, then it uses the link port; etc.

No need to overengineer a special format describing “mappers” or other capabilities when such things are merely hypothetical right now. Just stick with the straight ROM images.

I agree 100%. If you want to come up with a new format and use it in your emulator… feel free to. But please, let it assume that it’s a standard cart if no header exists, because I’m certainly not going to be adding any headers to my own dumps, since they ARE all standard carts with no need for a header.

And if I was forced to have any sort of opinion on an attached header… it’d be to add it to the end of the ROM. That way the offsets are normal when opened in a hex editor (with some crap at the end). That’d also make it easy for the emu to ignore the header, since it could just always load the largest power of 2 <= the file size. But really, if a header needed to exist, a detached header seems much more reasonable, since it's very possible that a cart that has some crazy expansion stuff will also need multiple ROMs (MCU firmware, FPGA bitfile, NVRAM initialization, etc). If you try jamming all that into some ugly single binary file... you'll need a TOC, or section delimiters, or... DogP

I had a few spare minutes tonight, so I printed HT’s models. As usual, the models are awesome, and the parts seem to work great.

Here’s a pic of the two printed parts, next to the original part:

Then I popped them into a spare stand that I had (the one with the printed medallion).

The original style:

The simplified style:

Both seem to work perfectly, and as far as I can tell, will be plenty strong to hold the VB (though of course I’d be extra careful with it until you feel comfortable with it).

The simplified style feels slightly stiffer near the “PUSH” section (there’s more plastic), but if I was to guess, I’d say the first point of failure would be either the side nubs breaking off, or the top snapping off from the layers of plastic separating.

Anyway, retronintendonerd – let me know which one you want (original or simplified style), and send me a PM w/ your address and I’ll toss it in the mail this weekend. If anyone else needs one, let me know… you’re welcome to the other one.

Oh, and I think the best way to replace this part is to remove the metal spring piece from the bottom (use something pointy to pop the bottom out), and then slide the front clip downward. If you try just prying it out, you might break the main plastic piece. To reinstall, slide the plastic piece in place, and then slide the metal spring up from the bottom until it snaps into place.

DogP

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Several of us have had good luck with Shapeways as well… and they’re very reasonably priced.

I’ll print this model when I get home though… if it works out, I’ll mail it to you (luckily all my stands are intact, so I don’t need one).

DogP

The longest time I played in one sitting was around 6 hours… playing straight through SD Gundam.

I also did around that playing Bound High, and did several hours in a row most nights for a couple weeks, playing Virtual Lab (getting to level 100). Playing straight through Wario Land took a few hours as well.

But yeah, I had no ill effects from it, other than my eyes being a little bit dry from staring so long (probably not blinking as much as I should have).

DogP

Hmm… yeah, it is pretty tight, so I’d be surprised that a large speck of dust could get in there (and that it’d be stuck to the window). Moisture definitely can (when I used to use NaOH on the cables, I’d rinse the area well, and sometimes accidentally get a bit of water in there), but I’m guessing you’ve never run that under water or anything. 😛

Like RunnerPack said… sliding an xacto knife under the edge can help (that, plus a hair dryer is what I did to get the moisture to evaporate). You can also pop the window off completely by carefully prying it with an xacto knife (if you cut/drill the melted nubs on the back, it pops off even easier).

If you’re not certain that it’s on the inside, I’d first try cleaning the front of the window with rubbing alcohol and a q-tip. It won’t hurt it, and if it is on the outside, it should get rid of it.

DogP