I’d guess the bic pen trick would be the best option if you don’t have a dremel or grinder. That sucks that the deep ones can’t get the deepest screws either 🙁 .
You could write an NES emulator for the VB, but why? It probably wouldn’t run very fast, and with the monochrome display it’d be kinda pointless. I did port a GB emulator to the VB… it worked, but was WAY too slow and unplayable. It’d definitely require some heavy optimization.
Porting games is always possible… just find the C source code, take out the system specific things and adapt it to run on the VB. It’s not particularly difficult, but very time consuming.
Yeah, the newest gccVB doesn’t seem to like the common libgccvb.h because of those backslashes (they’re used to continue the current line with what’s on the next line). To fix it, just get rid of the backslashes and put the line below the \ on the same line as the #define (like: #define WORLD_GSET(n,gx,gp,gy) WAM[((n << 5) >> 1) + 1] = gx; WAM[((n << 5) >> 1) + 2] = gp; WAM[((n << 5) >> 1) + 3] = gy; ).
I’m sure there’s a flag you can set to allow \’s, just like some compilers allow //’s for commenting a line, and others require /* */… never really looked into it though, so not sure what it is.
Ah… like the key is being held down, except no key is being pressed. I read it at least 10 times and I was sure he forgot half of the sentence :p . It definitely doesn’t happen on my RB… gotta be something with your computer or key configuration.
It looks like if I hold down the left direction on the d pad.
What does that look like? Is there a picture of your hand pressing left on the d pad? That’s odd… never seen that before.
This happens with wario land, even using another version of Reality Boy.
Does your hand appear in other games too? How about using Red Dragon?
Do you have any idea about why the emu behaves like this?
Does it behave the same way on the real VB? It seems weird that game developers would know exactly what your hand looks like… unless there’s a camera pointing at the left d pad.
Heh, sorry… I’m just messing with you… I’ve tried reading your post several times and I don’t get what’s happening… I just booted up WL in RB and left works just fine, and holding the button works just fine. Did you forget to finish the sentence?
I haven’t looked at the new FlashBoy software, but is there an option to do a full program of the flash instead of a homebrew program (slower, but will write the file exactly like it is on the PC)?
Heh, yeah… I didn’t really do much for the Flashboy… just helped troubleshoot some of the problems and wrote a small utility or two. But yeah… it’s great that Richard got this off the ground, and that KR155E was able to help with the assembly of the carts.
Hopefully we’ll start seeing new dev’rs coming up with some cool projects and not just a bunch of kids asking OMGZ!!!! I GOTZ ME A FLAHSBOYLOLZ!! WEHRE CAN I GTE TEH RAER ROMZZ AT!?!?!?!???? 😛 .
I redumped every game except the 4 rarest Jap games. I dumped every game several times, but I know at least Insmouse was one that dumped differently every time I dumped it, so I don’t trust that one for sure. I made an app to dump carts over the link cable to the PC, with error checking, but I never got a chance to redump the one(s) that had issues… and now I think I broke my software when I tried messing with it last (and I’d have to dig up my notes again on which games were having problems).
I did write a memory viewer that runs on the VB though, so the several bytes that seem to read differently, I can actually view them on the VB side and see if they’re screwed up and actually change in the system or if it’s just a timing issue, since the VB reading it like it would in the game would definitely have the correct timing.
And although I’ve never looked at all of my labels, I’ve never seen one with an A or B… just numbers (9, 19, 22 and 23 are some of the ones on my desk right now).
Yeah, there’s definitely the 50.2Hz signal on the link port… just going from my memory, I think it’s pin 6, and the only really “unused” pin is pin 5, so if there actually is any sort of synchronization, it’s probably pin 6 to 5… but I’ve never seen any change with it connected or not.
I’ll have to read through what it talks about in the manual though… maybe knowing what it’s supposed to do I can write a test that actually shows a difference between connected and unconnected.
Synchronization shouldn’t be too bad… the link port only runs at 50KHz. And since no released games actually used the link port, it wouldn’t take much to make a game internet ready if there actually were sync problems since they’d all be homebrew.
That link I posted isn’t really a microcontroller, it’s just an ethernet controller. If you used that, then you could plug the VB directly into the network and not need to use a PC at all.
You wouldn’t need to make the flash cart able to network… you’d just need the system to. It’s doable… I’ve made a VB->PC cable, so you’d just need some software that relays that data over the internet to another VB connected to a PC. I actually grabbed one of these: http://www.circuitcellar.com/wiznet/ to do VB ethernet directly… not sure when I’ll get around to it, but I thought it looked pretty cool. Now we just need a Beowulf of VB’s (that’d be super-creepy looking) 😉 .
Well if this isn’t either made up, or just a misunderstanding, then that’d be totally cool… and no offense, but you’re a new member posting about a super-rare proto that everyone hopes is out there, but none are known outside of Nintendo. There have been plenty of hoaxes and people claiming to have “seen” them, but the best we’ve gotten are some fakes that look like: http://www.virtual-boy.org/unreleased.htm .
If you’re not making this up, did the game look like: http://www.virtual-boy.org/vbmarioland.htm ? And what did the cart itself look like? You should get your uncle to take pics and sell it on ebay, or send it to you or something.
As far as value goes… if the game is actually a complete game and not just a single level I’d say it’s worth several thousand $$$. If it’s just a very short demo I’d say it’s still worth over $1000, but much less than if it’s a whole game. I really doubt that they actually completed the game though, I’m assuming they made enough of a demo to show at tradeshows and that’s it.
Actually, I’ve worked on it a little bit in the past… it’s not too tough to find the graphics, but the level layout is kinda strange. I haven’t really figured that part out, although I haven’t really spent that much time on it. That’s one of the things I’m gonna try to get to eventually, but I’ve got other stuff that’s higher priority.
Jorgeche: I already emailed this to you, but I figured I’d copy it here too in case anyone else is interested or comes to look for info in the future, or has any other info to add to the conversation.
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I’m not totally sure that the vbwav program actually works. I don’t think I was ever able to sucessfully get it working, and if I understand it correctly I don’t really think it would work. I’ll try to explain it the way I think it works.
As you see the data is PCM, which is just a bunch of samples of the waveform, sampled at around 44KHz. The original wav file is played by outputting each sample at a constant speed (44KHz). When those samples are output to the speaker you get a waveform that actually sounds like something. The VB works by using waveform RAM, which is 32 samples, but then the frequency registers adjust the frequency that those samples are played at.
AFAIK there’s no good way to play PCM on the VB… the only real way to do it would be to use the waveform RAM to hold 32 samples at a time and play that back, refreshing the waveform RAM after every set is played. But that would sound really choppy, so you’d probably have to buffer ahead to other waveform RAM banks, and then switch and fill up the previously used one. I still don’t think that’d sound smooth.
Basically PCM isn’t meant for the VB and you should really set the waveform RAM as an “instrument” (whether it’s sine, square, sawtooth, etc). Then control the frequency, envelope, etc registers to make the music/sound. VB sounds are more similar to midi than wav… midi uses instruments and frequencies instead of just streaming samples.
If you have a wav file that you want played on the VB, the best way would be to look at the typical waveform (what one cycle looks like), set the waveform RAM to that type, then break the wav into individual notes and figure out the frequency. You could use an FFT to get the frequency components and piece together the song in frequencies (which is what the VB wants), but that’d be pretty time consuming unless you made an app to do it for you. I believe something like a wav to midi converter would do that for you though.
I’m sure there’s a bunch out there, but the first free one I came across was AmazingMIDI: http://www.pluto.dti.ne.jp/~araki/amazingmidi/ … so you may want to try that out. Of course it’s not gonna work well for speech, but for music it should split it up into notes for you. You just gotta remember you’ve only got 6 channels that can play at a time (and really only 5 normal ones), so you may need to merge notes similar in frequency together into a single note for the VB.
Fwirt: The idea of the Wiki is so anyone can add their own knowledge to it, but have it all in a centralized location. I believe KR155E put in a bunch of stuff from David Tucker’s docs to try to start it, hoping that with the Wiki started, others would add info. Unfortunately it looks like nobody has added anything, so it sits kinda useless. Of course DT’s document is a great place to start since that document alone is already a well documented centralized location of a lot of useful VB info.
I guess I’m sorta to blame… I could probably add a bunch of stuff, but I don’t really have spare time to go through all my info and post it up (which is why my website hardly gets updated :-P).
