I think this is the thing I saw this year at CGE… they had the VB one there, but it was only for show, they said that I need to mail the controller to them. I didn’t know that they had a kit that you could do it yourself or I woulda bought that 😉 . I did try out the other controllers and they were pretty nice, definately worth the small price. I’ll probably order the kit one of these days.
Oh, and you’re right, I’ll be loving me some 1337 R@R3 R0MZ0RRZ!!!!!11 in the emulator playing w/ my new controller 😛 .
I’ve replied to LOTS of questions about this over the past few years and I’ve been working on making a tutorial for fixing it on my website, but I haven’t gotten the time to update my site, and it’s down completely ATM.
The problem is usually the connection between the cable and the LED bar PCB, although one that I fixed was just the cable had come a little loose in the connector on the motherboard.
I’ve found that rubbing your finger across the cable on the LED bar side that it fixes it temporarily (usually a few months). I haven’t tried yet, but I’d like to try a heat gun, although I’ve completely ripped the cable off, and the glue isn’t a gooey glue, so I doubt that it’ll help much more than just pressing on it with no heat.
desert_fan_club: Are you saying to rub pencil on the side that connects to the motherboard? I don’t see how that could help since that side isn’t usually the problem (although maybe that was your problem).
How I’ve fixed it in the past and it’s still holding now is rub the connection to make sure it’s tight, then take a narrow strip of electrical tape and wrap VERY tightly around the cable on the LED bar, and make sure that the end is right by the screw so when you tighten it, the tape can’t come loose. I haven’t tried it yet, but I was thinking later that the clear packing tape might work better, since it doesn’t stretch as much as electrical tape, so you might want to give that a try.
Oh, and have you guys looked at the PCB? There’s no solder on it to resolder… it appears to be just a physical contact between the cable and the PCB, held together by some glue.
Fire: Yeah, I know that they’re all first gen games… that’s why all games that were released are pretty simple compared to how advanced they could be. I just mean that third party companies (like Ocean) had an even harder time since they only had several programmers on one project instead of a place like Nintendo who had lots of programmers on many different projects, so they could collaborate.
David: A couple of years ago I asked Steve about the graphics engine used on the game… here’s what he said:
The hardware Affine stuff was used for the Atoll walls. A partical system that we made was used for the water & shots & explosions & stuff…..The jet skies/drowing people were software scaled & rendered out to the VB sprites.
Hahah! I talked to Steve last weekend, he seemed offended by your reviews of Waterworld 😛 . Anyway, I asked him a few things about it, he said when he started, he really wanted to make a pinball game (since he just got done working on Sonic Spinball), but they told him no (I don’t know if this was before they knew Galactic Pinball was being made or not)… so then he wanted to make a 3D Asteroids game, which I guess is what this started out as… but then Ocean bought the rights to use Waterworld in games (which they did make a few different versions of), so Asteroids turned into Waterworld.
Throughout the show, lots of the programmers were talking about why they hated doing licensed titles, like E.T. for the 2600, and a bunch of other games based on movies… they said that it causes the games to be rushed to get done to come out at the same time as the movie, and then the game has to somehow be based on the movie. But I asked Steve if he felt the game was rushed and said not really (the movie was already out before the VB was even released, so it wasn’t rushed because of that)… so I don’t know that they actually had many other plans for the game… I’m also not so sure that it was rushed because they could tell the VB was gonna flop… it was released in December, and from what I’ve read/heard, games usually take at least 3-4 months to get manufactured, meaning they were probably done programming it around the time the VB was released. If I was to guess, I’d say it was just a first generation VB game from a third party group that didn’t have any previous experience working with the VB.
Hmm… I’m going to be seeing one of the creators of the game this weekend at CGE, I’ll ask him to see if that was the case with this… it could also be that this game was created entirely by two people, instead of the large teams that other games had (except probably Virtual Lab, I think that was one guy in a basement somewhere 😉 )
Yeah, there’s not really an easy way to get art to the VB quickly or easily… when I make any graphics, I usually end up tweaking the picture 10-20 times before it comes out right (because of the limitation of the chars and the shade thresholds of VIDE). Even when you have the graphics converted, it’s still not an easy process for someone without any programming experience to get it displayed. And David is totally right about everything being tougher since the system is so undocumented.
BTW, I do about half of my development on my flash cart (early stuff in the emu, then after it gets more complete I use the cart)… for most of my stuff, it takes less than 30 seconds to burn and swap the chips (using the 2 PLCC’s). Oh, and there’s LOTS more than 5 homemade carts out there… I’ve made at least 20 (for friends, other VB dev’rs, etc), and I’ve got 3 or 4 for myself (testing link cable stuff, and a few extras), and I know of a few other people that have made carts themselves. I’ve also retired my original EPROM cart since I now have an official dev cart, and it’s much nicer and more reliable than having all of those wires hanging everywhere, but I only really use that for 16mbit stuff.
I personally like the game… it’s not one that I go back and play all the time, but it is pretty fun to pick up and play for a short while. I just think it’s a little too repetitive. It is pretty cool that it’s one of the few games that actually uses the 3D of the system in a sort of first person style game.
Yeah, that’s the way I wish group ROM buys would work… a group pays for the immediate dump, then they sit on the ROM (maybe even a rom w/ a signature that doesn’t affect gameplay, but is tracable in case someone releases it early), then the ROM becomes public after the set time period is up (6 months or so).
But instead, it seems like either the few people that pay money get screwed, by them donating $20 toward the dump, then everyone gets the ROM, or only the donors get the dump, and they keep it private.
BTW, there’s a few groups that do similarly to what you’re wanting to do… http://www.oldergames.com buys the rights to a bunch of old stuff that was never released, then they release it, or sometimes even fix it up or complete the game, then release it, although it seems like they do a lot of CD based stuff, probably because it’s a lot cheaper to make the discs to sell. Also, some of the people from http://www.lostlevels.org get ahold of protos to release the ROMs for free.
The thing I’ve noticed about collectors is that they ALWAYS want carts/discs with nice labels and cases that they can play in their system, then put on their shelf. You can send a collector a ROM of some super-rare game and they won’t even know what an emulator is, but if you tell them you’ve got a copy of a proto cart that looks nice, it’s worth it’s weight in gold. That’s what’s nice about a lot of the homebrew for older systems (2600, Vectrex, etc), the carts have become mass reproduced, so making professional looking carts is easy, so now at video game conventions people can’t wait to get their hands on the latest homebrews! I guess it also helps that a homebrewer can make a game that is comparable with other games released for the system in their spare time too, unlike some of the newer systems.
So, all I’m saying is that if you’re looking to make some money to stay in business and get more protos, I’d aim for the collector market and not the Leech/ROMs/Warez people… the collectors have the money, and the ROMs will make their way to the internet in their own way 😉 .
Heh… if you still need these, let me know… I’ve got a bunch of 27C080’s (which IIRC work in these carts)… you could also get some 27C4001’s, or 27C040’s on ebay or some place like that.
I just looked back at my notes on what pin 5 does, it’s connected to a pin on the PSRAM and CPU, and sometimes causes the system to lock up, so that won’t help you for a reset. There’s probably some other tricks you could do, but I’d vote for the interrupt.
Yeah, I agree that it should be processed by the PC, but I just don’t know about reading the display data directly with software. It goes so fast, and with the brightness controlled by the pulse width, I think the low priority of the parallel port would be too slow/inaccurate. If we could read it realtime with a microcontroller that then sends the data to the PC during the blanking period, I think that’d be the way to go. Of course, that’s more hardware/complexity, and software is so much easier to write, but I can’t see it working well :/ .
Or, we could just get our hands on a Video Boy and copy their design 😀 .
Well… yeah, you have to write the interrupt to the ROM, but since he’s making a ROM emulator, that wouldn’t be much of a problem, since he’s got complete control over the ROM. It’d just be a simple copy/paste of 16 bytes to another location (and since an unmodified gccVB ROM has only the reset vector defined, grounding pin 9 will cause a reset).
Yeah, I’d really like to build a signal converter so we could watch the VB stuff on a TV, but that’s pretty complicated. I don’t know exactly how the whole thing works either, but if I spent a little more time on it, I’m sure I could figure that out. Then I just need time to actually design/build the converter.
I think it’d be easiest to make an interface for the PC, then have the software display the screen though, since it would be easiest to read the screen data, store it into some sort of memory, then just dump the memory to the PC over the parallel port or something, instead of having to then convert to some sort of video signal.
Yup, I built a test setup with it, but I never got around to building a whole system with a cable going between headsets… it does work though, it’d just be a pain to have about 30 wires running between systems.
There is no /reset pin on the VB cart edge. I assume you’re looking for a pin to reset the system from the cart edge? If so, what you can do is use an interrupt, like pin 9, and have the ROM’s interrupt vector do the same as the reset vector, then the interrupt will reset the game.
Yeah, that sounds a lot like the problems I’ve had when I’ve overflowed my memory… BTW, are you the same Robert that worked on a few games (Space Invaders, a platformer, and Pac Man I think?) back when we only had VECC (Bluefish I think the name was)?
Are you working on the GB emu that you talked about then? If so, I’ve got a (very slowly) working one based off of gnuboy that I’ll send you if you want to look at it (it works thanks to Parasyte fixing the memory problem by rewriting the graphics part, along w/ a few other things). I did start to rewrite the CPU core in ASM, but I screwed something up and it didn’t work, then the project got put on hold 😛 .
Probably not, you’ll probably have to open the system up and realign the lens manually. You can get the alignment screen by pressing left, B, down, A, up on the right control pad while at the title screen.
