I’ve cleaned the windows with rubbing alcohol and a q-tip, and never had any problems… if you lightly run your fingernail across it, do you feel it?

In a pinch, you could also completely remove the clear plastic cover… the bonding wires underneath are very fragile, so you’d need to be VERY careful not to touch anything under it, but once it’s mounted back in the VB, it should be sufficiently protected.

DogP

If it’s just a single black line, it’s most likely not the cable. A bad cable should cause repeating lines.

Is it a complete lack of one line, or a dark smudge looking line over part of the screen? If it’s that the line just isn’t there, then yeah… bad LED, bonding wire, etc. (not easily repairable). If it’s a dark line, then your display probably has a speck of dust or something and needs to be cleaned.

DogP

geoflcl wrote:
Howdy! Sorry for the silly question, but I’ve been having some display issues, and I’m wondering if someone could confirm whether or not a loosey-goosey ribbon cable is to blame. It most likely is, but since I couldn’t find many visual examples to go by, I wanted to make sure.

Yep… looks like the intermittent cable issue to me.

DogP

SirGuntz wrote:
Make sure you didn’t smudge the clear cover on the LED display board.

Yes, I’ve noticed that minor gunk on the clear LED cover show up as dark streaks in the image, which move when you move your head. As soon as I clean them, they go away.

DogP

I’ve got a DC store display like: http://www.videogamemuseum.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Dreamcast-Sega-DC-Store-Display-Promo-Kiosk.jpg . A friend of mine got it brand new… but eventually got sick of the wasted space and small screen, and took the Dreamcast and gave me the display. 🙂

DogP

I remember looking at that a while back from a thread over at ASSEMbler:
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?32580-New-kind-of-N64-cart-found!-What-is-it

IIRC, I came to the conclusion that it is actually the VB pinout, but the cart is meant for the N64. If you follow some of those traces, you’ll see that the power, ground, and audio jumpers match… and though I can’t trace all the pins (I don’t have a virtual continuity tracer for JPGs 😉 ), if you take pin 37 (D0) for example… you can trace it to pin 33 on a flash chip, which is also D0. Also, note that the VB is 5V, and N64 is 3.3V… and those flash chips support 5V and 3.3V operation. You’ll also note that all VB address line pins are used (has traces to pin 10 – A22), which corresponds to all 128mbits of chips present (16x 8mbit chips).

My guess is that they were early N64 dev carts using VB dev kits to program the N64 carts. It probably would actually work with a VB, other than obviously not fitting in a standard system (connector section is too short for the system cart slot)… but it would fit in a VB dev kit or gang programmer cart slot.

DogP

Well… the image is image, so clearly it’s Eggplant, right?

😉

DogP

I think we are really close. Real life just keeps getting in the way. It seems like when Hedgetrimmer has free time, I’m swamped… and vice versa. I think we’ve been through ~25 revisions (though we’ve probably only actually made 5 or 6 of those).

I don’t see any reason that we wouldn’t make both a VB<->VB and PC<->VB cable. I have cables, pins, and PCBs… we just need a final connector shell.

DogP

Yep, I agree… some of the old vector games would make cool VB games. And the VB has the right controls for Battlezone. Some other vector games that I think would translate well would be Star Wars, Red Baron, Speed Freak, Tailgunner, and Starhawk. Those are the more immersive of the vector games… of course we could do something like Asteroids, but it’d just be another Asteroids clone… not really immersive, nor really benefit from the 3D.

I don’t really like sticking with vectors on the VB though… I’d much rather have polygons. The vector arcade games were drawn that way due to the monitor. There’s no reason the VB would need to stick with vectors, other than to reduce the processing load. But with good code, the VB should be able to do polygons for a game like that just fine. The vectors don’t bother me, but if Red Alarm was polygon rather than wireframe, it’d probably be more highly regarded, rather than being compared to a 15 year old (at that time) arcade game.

DogP

Lester Knight wrote:
i do recall reading a reply from dogp on this site where he said he has never been asked to dump dragon hopper.

Heh, I’ve been asked to dump Dragon Hopper many times… just never by anyone that had the cart. 😉

Obviously I’d love to see any unreleased VB game dumped and released, though if I could choose any game, I’d personally go for Zero Racers. Dragon Hopper just didn’t look that exciting to me (my opinion could certainly change after playing it though 🙂 ). It does seem like Dragon Hopper was likely closer to release though.

I wonder whether they ever sent out to get the mask ROMs manufactured, or if they pulled the plug just before then. Timeframes are kinda hard to gauge, since the games are reviewed and articles written well ahead of time. I don’t know exact mask ROM lead times that Nintendo would have had, but it’s usually somewhere around a couple months. Then the ROMs have to be installed on the PCBs and given a final test, plus retail packaging and distribution. So, if they were planning for a late August release, they would have probably started the process in May. If they pulled the plug in May, the July Nintendo Power (which usually arrived in the mail in June, so probably written in May, or earlier) would still have the article printed.

I’d guess that it’s very likely that these still exist somewhere, but I’d be a bit surprised if they were actually in a private collector’s hands. If Nintendo still has all the VB protos (or possibly no hardware, but still the source code/ROMs), I don’t see them getting out, unless they go under (look at all the crazy Atari stuff that has appeared from them closing).

I think 3rd party protos are more likely to be released… probably just sitting in a box somewhere, or maybe backed up by one of the programmers… not even realizing that anyone would want that stuff, or not releasing the stuff since it’s technically “owned” by the company.

DogP

Just play the game through to the end and write down all the names in the credits… then contact each of them and see if any of them can help. 😉

DogP

GasMasksOfThePast wrote:
It’s disheartening to inform you, but Red Metal passed a way in late December. Thank you guys for expressing interest in his project. It brought him a lot of excitement and he talked about it with me a lot.

Oh, wow… very sorry to hear that. 🙁 I was very much looking forward to this… it seemed like he was too.

DogP

Like Lester Knight… in magazines in 94-95 (I had been a subscriber to Nintendo Power for years). I was a huge fan of VR, 3D, etc. (my friends and I used to play a lot of simulators on the PC, trying to make them as real as possible)… so when I heard Nintendo was coming out with a 3D system, I was really excited.

I was only 11 when it launched, so I didn’t have much money, so my friend and I split the $10 Blockbuster rental when it launched. Then every chance we could, we’d get our parents to take us to Toys R Us, Electronics Boutique, and Blockbuster, and we’d play it there (Electronics Boutique just had a system on the counter, playing Mario’s Tennis… Toys R Us had Wario Land on the big countertop display, and Blockbuster had Red Alarm on the small countertop display). We both were blown away by it, but the $180 price tag was too much (I figured I’d wait for a price drop, then ask for it for Christmas, like every other system).

Well… then we got the price drop… down to $25… so we both bought a system (though we were disappointed when the guy at Electronics Boutique told us at there was no link cable 🙁 ) and went around to all the Toys R Us, Electronics Boutiqe, Best Buy, and Blockbuster stores and bought up as many cheap games as possible. The ones that I never found price dropped were Jack Bros, Waterworld, and Virtual League Baseball (any stores that still had them, had them at regular price… maybe because they were 3rd party games). There were also a few games that I never found (3D Tetris and Nesters Funky Bowling, that I remember). Strangely enough, Electronics Boutique had stacks of Japanese games for 99 cents (Vertical Force, Panic Bomber, V-Tetris, Golf, and Baseball were ones that I remember getting).

Then a few years later when ebay became big, and I got a job, I started collecting the rest of the games that I hadn’t already gotten. I would mostly buy up lots with one or two games I needed, take them, and resell the rest… so I did it on the cheap. That job is also the one where I had TONS of free time, so I spent it reading through David Tucker’s, Alberto Covarrubias’, and Ferry Groenendijk’s webpages (and posting on the vgchat board). Heh, now that I think about it… there are probably a lot of you who don’t know any of those people. 😉

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. 🙂

DogP

HorvatM wrote:
Is your use of a present tense implying that the V810 is still being produced?

Heh, I doubt it… but I’m sure they can be found or harvested from old hardware. I was just pointing out that the V810 is/was the commercial chip… the NVC is a customized V810 built for Nintendo.

HorvatM wrote:
The V810 has an invalid instruction interrupt, so you could emulate them. It would be slower, but only MPYHW has a defined cycle count, so it would be mostly compatible.

The PIR would be different though, but I doubt that would cause many compatibility issues. 🙂

Yep… you could emulate the extra instructions, though IMO, that’d only be partially compatible, certainly not a “remake”. There are 6 extra instructions, and even though the manual only specifies MPYHW, they all have specific cycle counts (I assume the others are single cycle instructions). IIRC, Red Alarm uses MPYHW extensively, and emulating that instruction would likely make it unplayable. And yeah, I doubt the PIR would cause problems, but you never know. 😉

HorvatM wrote:
Aren’t emulators proof that our current understanding of the hardware is sufficient for most games?

Not at all, at least in my opinion. The emulators loosely recreate what the components of the VB do. To my knowledge, there are no cycle accurate VB emulators. Sure, we could make a system that simply runs a VB emulator (might as well just run an emulator on a Raspberry Pi with 3D glasses), but if we want a true “remake”, I think we’d need to be running the CPU, VIP, VSU, etc. cycle accurately… with true interconnects. Stuff like how many cycles it takes the VIP to render things is very much unknown to my knowledge. Simply rastering an image based on register contents and displaying it on a screen 50 times per second is much different than what the VB actually does.

But I guess it just depends what you call a remake, vs. an emulator. And I’m not saying it can’t be done… just that our current understanding isn’t there yet, and even if it was… it certainly wouldn’t be “easy”. 😉

DogP

Hmm… I don’t remember saying that remaking the VB would be easy. But yes, there are commercial V810 chips… that’s what a V810 chip is. The VB CPU is a like the commercial V810, but customized for Nintendo. And because it’s modified, unfortunately you couldn’t really remake the VB with a commercial V810, because it’d be missing the modifications (new instructions and stuff).

And the CPU is hardly the difficult part of remaking the VB. I’d say the VIP would be the most complex… and since it’s a completely custom Nintendo chip, there’s less information about the exact inner workings.

You could easily fit all the digital stuff of a VB inside a modern FPGA… but I think there’d be a LOT of reverse engineering left to do to get accurate timing and operation of all the parts, which would be necessary to remake the VB.

DogP

I think Richard has printed some cartridge shells… and maybe even sent out some Flashboys with printed shells?

DogP

BigFred wrote:
I’d be happy if you could do pictures of all games you checked.

Sure… I’ll try to do that this weekend.

DogP

BigFred wrote:
Do you have a complete list of all games you dumped with the USB-linker? Would not hurt to include all dumps – why waste your hard work? As I understand you also did Virtual Bowling and now you just don’t have the cart anymore. So I’ll add that as a verification as well. I think we can easily count you as a trustworthy dumper 🙂

I dumped the complete US and JP collection with my USB link dumper, and I checked all of my dumps against your database, and all ROMs match. I’d be glad to recheck/photograph any, except SD Gundam or Virtual Bowling, which I no longer own (though it sounds like Tauwasser confirmed the SD Gundam dump, and M.K. confirmed the Virtual Bowling dump, so you shouldn’t need confirmation from me for those).

Tauwasser wrote:
I guess now we know that they also did the weird (K) code for VUE-AA-01(K). Do you have any idea what that means? It’s there for one Game Boy PCB, too. However, the PCBs definitely match, so I wonder if that’s an indicator for… anything, really 🙂

Heh, I really have no idea. I looked at a few other carts, but didn’t find another (K). I also have a stack of opened JP Panic Bomber carts (waiting in the connector donor queue 😉 ), and they are all non-(K). The only difference I’ve seen with them is the number (I assume is which board it was on the PCB panel or something), and a marking in the soldermask on the back (some are circled I, others circled N). On the (K) PCB, it has RB circled in the copper. The (K) PCB also looks to be lower quality… you can see the ‘E’ in VUE and ‘G’ in GND didn’t etch properly. But the PCB design looks to be pretty much identical.

Unfortunately, I thinned the herd (er… maybe hoard) a few years back, so I no longer own several copies of every game. Maybe someone else with a US Jack Bros can check whether they have a (K) or non-(K). It looks like the PCB pic on this site is non-(K). I checked my JP Jack Bros cart, and it had a non-(K) PCB, though it had the circled N in the copper, rather than in the silkscreen like the JP Panic Bomber carts had.

I also checked for another Virtual Fishing here, and I didn’t find one… so I’ll see about borrowing my friend’s copy. Not sure when that’ll be though.

DogP

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I saw the compo results were posted… congrats on taking first place! Definitely well deserved.

DogP

Tauwasser wrote:
So it’s preferable to have someone knowledgeable check the dumps out.

Yep… no doubt we need knowledgeable people dumping/verifying ROMs… my point was just that by checking the CRC32 of my cart again (quick and easy to do), I could tell with very high confidence that the cart still matched the dump I had previously made (so I don’t question whether my dumper was faulty)… which I can compare with the database. If the cart CRC32 didn’t match my dump, I would have said my dump was suspect. Of course I could add automatic size detection, md5, and sha1 code to the app so the database entry could be generated directly from the cart in the system, but that’d be much more complex, take forever to compute, and probably not fit in RAM. 😉

Anyway, attached are pics of the opened carts, and the numbers stamped on the label are below:
3-D Tetris -22
Jack Bros US – 22
Mario Clash – 12
Nester’s Funky Bowling – 22
Panic Bomber US – 12
Virtual Fishing – 22
Virtual Lab – 22

DogP

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