Well flash carts aren’t really anything new, so it’s not like with the flashboy coming out that everything changes. It still comes down to whether the owners want to dump their games and release the ROMs. Of course most people that don’t own the rare games want the dumps of the ROMs released so they can play them… but once someone pays a huge price to get their hands on the cart, they can then play it all they want, and they don’t want to devalue their cart that they paid a lot for. If you don’t think it’s going to devalue the original, you’re crazy. It’s well known that undumped/non-publicly available games sell for more than publicly available ones.

About Space Squash, Insmouse, and Virtual Fishing, IIRC they were one of the later games to be dumped, and they did go down in price… I don’t remember what Insmouse and Virtual Fishing used to go for, but IIRC Space Squash was going for around $300 before getting released (and that was even before accurate emulation and before there were many flash/EPROM carts). For other examples, look at a lot of the Dreamcast protos… Half Life, Propeller Arena, etc. They’re available for download and the originals are practically worthless (but before Prop Arena was released a friend of mine sold his for ~$1500).

I’m not saying that dumping and releasing the carts is a bad thing (I think sharing with everyone is cool actually)… I’m just saying the value of the originals will go down, and you’ll have a hard time finding someone with an original to let you dump the cart to release it to the public. I’ve said it everytime someone comes here to try to talk people into releasing the ROMs… go buy the games, dump them, and release them. Nobody has done it yet because everyone wants free ROMs for free. Very few people are willing to spend $2000+ to then devalue the games to probably less than $1000. Of course prototypes are worth even more than that and harder to get a hold of, so I really don’t see those getting dumped and released soon.

DogP

That gives me an idea though… someone should make a game similar to the Dragon’s Lair arcade game (or any other laserdisc game)… there’s virtually no gameplay, but they look nice 😉 .

DogP

Heh, everyone saw it on Ferry’s site, didn’t they? 😉 Actually, it was an April Fools favor I did for Ferry… I made a mock up cart and ROM which is just a few pre-rendered 3D graphics. Then Ferry made a few sentences which he translated to Japanese, and then back to English, and out popped Engrish 😀 . I’ve got the ROM around here somewhere, but it’s really not anything interesting.

DogP

Actually, that’s real… I’ve got the ROM around here somewhere.

DogP

That’s really cool… but yeah, what’s with that font? 😛

DogP

If you want to send me some of your rare games, I’d be glad to dump them for you 😉 .

DogP

I think the problem is that you’ve got the wrong original ROM… the actual ROM was only 512k, but there’s a 2MB ROM floating around that has the 512k ROM duplicated 4 times (works fine, but redundant).

DogP

Strange… I assume it’s this one: http://cgi.ebay.com/Nintendo-Virtual-Boy-Game-System-MIB_W0QQitemZ160134842765QQihZ006QQcategoryZ62054QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem … It looks like the regular system and box, probably used by a store to display it, but it’s weird that it came with the advertising inserts, since those came with the store displays (which weren’t shipped in a standard VB box). It looks like the inserts are the small ones, which came with the small plastic Blockbuster displays.

DogP

Thanks… I’ll try it out when I get a chance.

DogP

Cool… could you send it to me too? My email address is in my profile. Thanks,

DogP

Cool… keep us updated.

DogP

Oh… you could try manually clearing the interrupt in the PSW, or manually restoring the saved PSW from the EIPSW.

DogP

I haven’t used the setIntLevel function, so I don’t really know what it does, but it sounds like it just sets the interrupt mask. I believe reti is supposed to clear the interrupt. I thought the new gccVB was supposed to handle all the interrupt stuff for you though… is there a reason you need any inline asm? Have you tried making a simple app that just keeps causing the interrupt? Oh, and shouldn’t tim_vector() have a return; at the end? Possibly the compiler looks for the return and handles the stack and reti there, but gets confused if there’s no return… I dunno :-P.

DogP

I haven’t used the interrupts on the new gccVB, but inside the ISR there should be an add 4, sp before the reti. Does the rest of the program still run, or does it lock up? If everything else runs, you’re probably getting out of the interrupt just fine, but the interrupt flag probably isn’t being cleared (I never really looked at it for the V810, but usually you have to clear the interrupt once it occurs or it’ll never occur again). I just took a quick look at the V810 manual and it looks like it may be the EP bit in the PSW (which I thought reti was supposed to take care of). I assume you’re testing this in the emulator? If so, dump the registers and check the flags. You may also want to make sure it’s actually calling reti and not jmp or another branch.

DogP

Or install OS X on a PC. 😉

It still doesn’t work right on ViBE either though.

DogP

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I believe you need to be a member for 6 months and have 10+ posts, so you need to wait another month.

DogP

It’s possible to break a wire in the controller cord by picking it up like that, but I’ve never seen a bad cord. I guess you could try turning it on and wiggling the cord a bunch and see if it ever cuts out from it, or if it is seemingly random.

DogP

Heh, I’ve almost never played on batteries, so I dunno… but I’d suggest trying an AC adapter. I believe dead batteries should have given you a low battery warning. I have had a problem with the contacts on the controller to the power being loose and resetting if you bumped it… bending the contacts out a little seemed to fix that.

DogP

I hair dryer could probably work, but make sure you apply pressure to the cable while it’s still hot. And you’re not really looking to melt the rubber part, there’s glue holding the cable to the board, that’s what you want to melt. The rubber along the edge is sometimes attached, sometimes detached, but it doesn’t really make a difference.

DogP

There’s a couple problems with that method… one is that the VB runs very cool, so I doubt it would have gotten hot enough to melt the glue… the other is that if the glue did melt, the pressure of the cable is actually pressing outward (which is why it unglues itself in the first place)… so it would have gotten worse (which is why you should apply pressure to the cable while it’s hot, and not just heat it up).

DogP