I don’t think you need to worry much about the mirror assembly… I have yet to see any of them go bad… but the cables going to the LED displays go bad all the time. It’s usually repairable, but still a pain.
Glad to help, MrX… no need to donate anything… I do this stuff because I enjoy it, and I’m not paying for webspace or anything. Thanks for the offer though 🙂 .
That is a very nice score… I haven’t played Galactic Pinball nearly enough to get anywhere near those scores, but I agree that it does seem pretty easy, and the physics are definately nowhere near that of a real pinball. I don’t necessarily think that they were shooting for a real pinball feel though…
Anyway, 6 days is lot of dedication, but I know how that goes… to find out if Virtual Lab had an ending, I played it for several hours a night for 2 weeks. I was VERY disappointed to see that there was no ending :P. Believe me, after that long, it was VERY hard for me to turn the system off.
To me, it seems like prices are starting to level out… the rare games aren’t worth as much, but the games that used to be practically worthless are becoming worth more. I think it’s that there’s less of a cult crowd wanting a complete set and more players realizing that the system was pretty decent and looking to get some games to play.
It could cycle again though… people seeing how much common games are going for, so they sell them, which puts more common games out, dropping the prices on them again, but getting more people into the system. Then some of those people might really get into collecting, and try to get a complete set, which would drive the price of the rare games up again.
But… who knows… VB game prices seem to fluctuate a lot.
There’s several things… I’m not sure about why your new version doesn’t work, I’d try compiling it on the old gccvb and see if it still doesn’t work. It may be a memory problem if your program has grown too large, or it may be a compiler problem. In general, emulators are much more forgiving than hardware. The speed issue could be a lot of things… the timing, especially loops that wait by doing nothing, isn’t accurate in the emulators.
About graphical glitches, before writing the world stuff, do a “while (VIP_REGS[XPSTTS] & XPBSYR);” That syncs with the screen write (which isn’t really important in the emulator). Also, don’t do a whole vbSetWorld, just modify what you need to change… it takes a lot longer to rewrite all the world attributes than it does to just change one or two attributes. If you download some of my source from http://www.virtual-boy.org/projectvb/dev/VBProg.htm , you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Yeah, I’m talking about making 3D programs, but manually creating the left/right images and switching the shutter glasses directly from the program. I decided to rip apart the glasses controller and add inputs, so I’ll rig up an adapter for the parallel port and see how it works. One thing I’d like to do is add shutter glasses support to a VB emulator… I’ve already added the image switching, but I need to sync the shutters to the screen. I was thinking I may be able to do it in OpenGL, but I don’t think there’s a way for me to manually control the left and right buffers, I think the shutter glasses driver recalculates the viewpoint automatically 🙁 .
Oh… sorry, that was two different discussions. I was just commenting on how some N64 games have the depth inverted (which of course doesn’t matter since it was never meant to be seen in real 3D), so the clouds are really close, and the character is sunk into the ground. The problem is that it seems like the interface (life, points, etc) is always correct, so when you make the rest of the game correct, the interface looks wrong. Pilotwings 64 looks REALLY good though 🙂 .
The second question was about actually programming something to use shutter glasses. Like I said, I’ve done OpenGL stuff, and it’s in 3D, but do you know anything about controlling the shutters manually from a program (like talking directly to the nVidia driver to control the shutters)? I think it’d be cool to be able to add 3D to some programs, but not redo them with OpenGL or DirectX. Also, I believe the driver just looks at the depth buffer and adjusts the offset of the images, so we couldn’t actually give a different image for each eye.
I think if I could manually control the DDC pin of the video card, I could do it, although I’m not sure if there’s some special sequence that controls it. I read somewhere about writing 0x3F to the CRTC register to control the DDC pin, although I haven’t looked into that yet. I do know that the glasses start flickering when I turn my monitor on, I assume that’s because the it’s sending it’s info across the DDC pin, and the glasses are picking it up.
Or, maybe I’ll just hack a cable for the parallel port since I can program that easily :p .
I recently picked up a set of shutter glasses… you weren’t kidding about needing an nVidia… the ones I got said they worked with ATI or nVidia, but winx3d is gone, so no ATI anymore >_<. Not a problem though, I just popped my nVidia card that I replaced a few months ago back in (I replaced it w/ an ATI for the TV in, but I never used it).
Anyway, yeah... they are very cool... MUCH better than the ones I used back in the early 90's with the slow refresh rates. I can't stand a computer monitor with a low refresh rate, and when most were 60-75, cutting that in half was unplayable IMO. Now games are 1280x1024 @ 100-120Hz, cutting that in half is reasonable. And playing N64 emulators in 3D is REALLY cool... it looks like some games have the depth inverted or something so I have to wear the glasses upsidedown, but it really does look cool.
Anyway, are you just a user of them, or have you ever done any programming for them? I'm wondering if there's a way to manually control the shutters without hacking the cable and making a circuit with the parallel port, or do I just have to program whatever I want with DirectX or OpenGL and let it automatically control it? I've already tried some of my OpenGL programs and they work in 3D, but that's not exactly what I'm looking to do. What I would prefer to do would be to send a signal to the nVidia driver to tell it to swap the LCDs when I'm changing the image.
Any ideas?
DogP
Yeah, if you split and merged TB, that’s already the right size for those chips. About the shorted wires, I’m not talking about just the ones next to each other… you can also get other shorts from any wires that cross the wire you’re soldering since the wire heats up, melts the plastic on it’s own wire, and then also melts through the plastic on the wire crossing it. If you just go through all the wires and make sure none are stuck together that should at least rule that out.
Hmm… if you broke traces from the original ROM, that’s no big deal as long as none of them are shorting (since there’s no SRAM on VLB). If you have SRAM, you have to be careful not to break the traces though, since they also go to the SRAM.
Anyway, the thing that I noticed when building them was that when you’re soldering wires on top of each other like that was that a lot of times the wire would get hot and melt through the sheathing and stick two wires together and short. So, you might want to go through them all and make sure none are stuck together. Also, I assume you tied /WE to VCC?
Other than that, check all your connections, and I usually check continuity between each chip on every pin on the chip socket except the 8 data lines. And make sure you have the correct chip in the correct side (or just swap them and try it).
I don’t think he ever released any source or anything… I think I’ve got a ROM image, and maybe some source, but I couldn’t give it out without his permission… try sending him an email… he might be willing to send it to you. He also browses this forum every now and then and might see this post, or you can send a PM to him (DanB).
Not really… once the code is compiled/assembled/linked from a high level language to a low level language, there’s really no good way to go back… and since the VB architecture is totally different than the SNES, there’s no real way to convert directly from SNES->VB.
If you have high level source code for a game, it’s definately possible to modify it some and recompile it for VB, but even then… Starfox used a SuperFX chip, which the VB doesn’t have… and even though the VB is probably more powerful than the SNES, VB got a Starfox type game (Red Alarm), and it must not have been powerful enough to do polygons since they used wireframe in it.
Hmm… I haven’t used DT’s gccVB build, but it definately looks like you’ve got a problem being stuck at 128KB. I don’t remember having to do anything special using the old build to make it larger… IIRC it would just expand itself, then you just had to make sure the padder was set to pad to the correct size.
I’d send DT an email and see if he can help you out. Otherwise you could try the old version and see if it makes any difference.
I uploaded a zip with all my rips in mp3 format… unfortunately I ripped them in mono, and only the games that I had at the time (long time ago), so it’s not that great, but maybe it’ll be of some use to you.
Yeah, Wario Land is pretty easy, but like you said… REALLY fun! Definately my favorite VB game. I haven’t played it in a few years, I really should pull out my collection and play through some of the games again.
