Guy Perfect schrieb:
The notion of CPU-specific C code doesn’t apply, since C was designed for writing programs in an implementation-independent way. In order to run C code on ARM, it simply needs to be compiled for ARM. It can be compiled for other CPUs as well, such as x86-64 and our good friend V810. The C code itself never changes in this case: it is only compiled differently depending on the target CPU.

The C code I’ll prepare for the desktop application will also work without changes on 3DS. I don’t know what kind of performance it would have, but it should be one of the best options since it doesn’t do anything other than the barebones required for simulating a Virtual Boy.

Sounds very interesting.
Looking forward to the first version 🙂
But when it comes to the system documentary all needed infos should be available right?
Or are there still things unknown about the VUE in generell?

So far I didn’t wanted to open a thread on GBA Temp about this and wait for moe infos and so on. What do you think should we already start with the Frontend thingy?

KR155E schrieb:
I like that story and game outlines. Good job on those screenshots as well! I would just stay more true to the original demo’s graphics and use less dither, but more solid colors.

Your approach sounds very much like Jorge’s and mine for the Mario VB demo: recreate Nintendo’s 1-level Virtual Boy Mario demo and build a full game upon that.

The old Mario VB sources are no longer useable, but they evolved into what you now know as the VUEngine Platformer Demo. It would make sense to “close the circle” and rebuild the Mario game on that foundation by replacing the graphics and re-implementing some gameplay mechanics. For such a project, I could supply all the graphical assets I did back then, edited for use in the VUEngine.

Based upon my recent experience with a similar project I have been working on, I assume it would take me about a month of on-and-off work to recreate our old demo. Make that two or three months worth of afternoons for someone who has not worked with VUEngine before and needs to find his way around first.

Thing is, besides being booked out with that other project at the moment, I would much prefer doing an original platformer. It would allow much more creative freedom and (most importantly) not cause any potential copyright problems when being released CIB.

Regarding the dither. It seems that the demo used it quite a lot. I mean I can only speak about the Screenshot with the wario head since this is the only picture were you really can read something out of it.
The picture was propably scanned, croped, and also resized. Then printed, scanned again and saved as JPG. It lost a lot of information in the red space so it is hard to tell what was solid and what was dither.
But solid black was still there and that made it possible to actually recreate the GFX. It also showed that there was a lot of dithering used for warios head.
When it comes to the red colors, I had to do a lot of testing
I tried various paterns with the 3 colors to see what gives a similar brightnes level for each area. Some areas must have used dither.
But I also think I found places where you can take it out.

Regading the games scope and size and IP stuff.
Yeah I know what you mean. That is why I want to make it short.
Just 8 level until Bow… ah Warios Fortress.
I also just want to showcase a few cool level with the two layers. Would be interesting to play the first SMB level but able to walk also in the back layer.

I have the following Levels in mind which also represent the story of the game:

LV1: Level 1 from SMB1
LV2: Not sure yet Ideas?
LV3: Mushroom Platform Level from SMB1
LV4: Ghost House similar to SMW1. Here I also would like to redo this one topviw GFX where Mario breaks trough the roof.
and land in the level and must find his way out of the ghos house.
LV5: Cheep Cheep Bridge (I think SMB1 with the jumping fish. will be cool in 3D)
LV6: Under Water Level (is almost the same in every Mario game)
LV7: Not sure yet Ideas?
LV8: Bowsers/Warios Fortress

Since Mario thinks the whole Wario story is the usual job, He will only have the standard Mushroom, Fireflower and the Star.
But my idea is that the Item Block will have always a Wario Symbol on it. That can cause that not always comes a good item out of it. It should also randomly spawn a bad Item for mario similar to SMB the ost levels with the bad mushroom. If you collect it you get small or die. The usual

Regarding VUEngine.
Does it have a Editor to build such jump and run levels?
I can not code but I can use GFX tools and Editors 😉
I would like to do a lot my self.

Do we have somebody here with good animation skillz?
We need to modify the mario sprites. The are to small.
It needs to be the size like Wario in VB Wario Land

Cool!
Also the font is nice.

I really would love to play this game again 🙂

[Goemon]

Well to clarify, I am not a coder. I tried to code something once and failed. It is not my thing. I like to be more creative.
So I hope to get some help from this awesome community.

Because I know that eveybody has only limited time, the game would be a real adventure but short. Just so that Mario and Wario can meet and… well greet 😀

Also I tried to make the story so that it fits. First Wario takes the Koopa stuff and goes from there but get stopped and in SML2 he takes directly from Mario but get stopped. Then he becomes the Anti Hero.

Normaly I dont like the “Fan” game approach. It is alwas better to create something new. But the Virtual Boy is different. I would like to make an exception here. The material for a proper Mario game is there. The puzzle just needs to be completed.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Goemon.

[Goemon]

Well, which story do you want to hear?
The one with the Nintendo HQ breakin, involving fighting against ninjas until reached the secret vault with all the prototypes inside?

Or the one were I recreated the whole sceen pixel by pixel as good as possible just with the available screenshots from PlanetVB?

I wish we would have access to the real demo but this propably won’t be happening anytime soon. I am sure some japanese collector is sitting on a nice bunch of VB protos but won’t relese them just to be mean. A VB bully 😀

Anyway, the screenshot was remade by me.
When I needed a break from my current project, I wanted to do something useful and also train a little pixel art.
So I went back to PVB for the screenshot with the Wario Head.
I tried this like 15 years ago already but failed.
This time it worked. i am very proud of the Wario Head.

The available screenshots of the demo are all not in the native VB resolution. The Wario Head screenshot is also cropped.
The whole bottom area is missing.

What I did was to first try to get the screenshot back in the correct resolution.
The VB screen is 384x224px
I assumed that it is using a 8×8 grid.
I also scaled other screenshots for reference.
I even took a screenshot from the Video and cut out the screen and scaled it back to VB resolution.
This gave me a good understanding of the size for each element.
The bottom area is 32px tall. I remade this GFX by watching the VB Mario Video.
The sky area is also 32px tall
A block in VB Mario for example is 24×24

In general, the demo seems to use quite big sprites like VB Wario.
Mario for example is about 50-56px tall
The Wario Head is 72x72px
My guess is that VB Mario made it straight to VB Wario.

The sizes I was able to assume with scaling worked out with the 8×8 grid.
With all the infos I then recreated every element of the screen.
All is just made with 3 colors.

The whole picture is a tileset usable for the VB Mario Demo we have here on PVB. So even if we can not play the real demo, with the GFX we can make it as close as possible to the real one.

I also cam up with a Titlescreen.
I wanted to use the style prior to the N64 rendering stuff.
An while I was on it, I also came up with a full story for the game.

I will post the game idea along with some GFX material in a seperate thread.

Attached is a Video showing the direct compare of the source and recreation

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Goemon.

Attachments:

1. wario-recreation.mov

@Stereo Boy
Hehehe Stereo Boy is actually cool.
But I also really like VUE3DS_red-mirror.png from your earlier post. It is short, nice and clean. It reflects the VB colors and also would fit quite well on a VB game case ^^

Guy Perfect schrieb:

For the time being I won’t be doing any 3DS development. However, the C library is entirely C code (doesn’t even use the standard runtime library), so anyone can easily plug it into a 3DS project and hopefully have a little Virtual Boy up and running in no time.

It’ll be open source when it’s released, and if anyone’s interested in development in the mean time we can work something out. In the past, it’s come down to a matter of people wanting to help out but not having the corresponding skill set, so I just started up this new iteration of the project without announcing it.

@GuyPerfect
Thank you for all the answers 🙂
Now I understand better.
This C code you are doing, will it still be ARM specific or is this also up to the person who is using it?

I fully understand the problem finding persons with the right skill set. This is also why I wrote earlier, that for the UI part, we won’t need necessarily a high skilled coder. The emulator code behind is another story. We all count on you! 😀

In general, the UI part is something we could do already.

Well, according to the VB Mario screenshots here on this site, this game seems to have Wario as the opponent.
My guess is that Mario Clash and Virtual Boy Wario Land spawned all from the initial VB Mario Land idea.
So WarioCruise is also a good Subtitle.

You see I knew it. This community has basically everything we need to make a proper Compendium.

Well there are now good emulators for Desktop Systems. Mednafen is surely good. But most desktop systems have horse power so the emulator can do his work.
The 3DS (N3DS) on the other hand is not very powerful and it makes certainly no sense at all to run a Desktop Emulator on it with RetroArch on top. That is just overkill.
That is why I came up with the idea to start this thread and see what can be done.
And from what I can see, a 3DS VB Emu is long overdue 🙂

Another picture

Attachments:

1. 

   vbmariologo.jpg
   

Benjamin Stevens schrieb:
It’s oh so very exciting to see updates with this! 🙂

yeah that is very cool. Looking forward to see more.

I like your thinking! 😀

The game looks interesting but I am not sure if this would be doable on the VB this way.

About the headlines, yeah well it is hard to get attention these days 😀

Not Bad indeed!
Looking forward. 🙂

As a coding noob I need to ask, why another debugger?
Is this because it needs to be ARM specific for the 3DS?

Also why do you want to mix Java with C?

For testing will citra do for a while?

Since we talked about GBA Temp above.
Are you planning to do this project on your own or do you plan to turn it into a open source/community project?

Sorry lots of qustions 😀

The Idea with the 3D screenshots for a preview is actually very good.
I still have enough space in the bottom touch screen.
We should show 3 pictures for each game.
I will adjust the mockup very soon.

About the name.
Good idea but I was aiming for something short.
VUE|3DS is cool
VUE@3DS
But the name is actually the least problem and also a future coder for the emu should have some saying on this ^^

A video for preview would akso be nice. I have no idea what video is working on the 3DS right now.
But such a video needs to be in good quality without many artifacts. So the filesize is propably a bit gif. Therefore the clips should be only as long as needed. 20 sec maybe?

Somehow it would be cool to print the reels you do on film, glue it in that paper wheel and watch it on such a real thing. Would be a cool bonus for the Book project 😀

[Goemon]

Did a small rework of the Mockup:

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Goemon.

Attachments:

1. 

   vue3duimockup2.png
   

[Goemon]

The frontend I made the mockup for should not be very hard to do when it come to the coding. We would not need the absolute top coder for this task.
Also this UI or Frontend could be done already without the actual VB emulator behind it.
If we include all the box art and infos for the games, people could at least already switch trough the entire VB library and see whats in there. There is just no active starting button to start a emulator behind.
Once there is a emulator ready, it can be connected with the UI.
We can not put in the officiall roms. The user need to take care about it. However, the gfx inside for each official game can be done by us and also all the cool homebrew can be preinstalled.
And I think that this entire UI can be done with the Citra Emualtor at the beginning. No need for 3DS hacking at the start.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Goemon.

[Goemon]

Here is a rough mockup for the Emulator UI.
This is very similar to the SNES Mini Classic UI plus a information section on screen two.
The BG on the upper screen can be exchanged with other artwork and it should also moving.
With this layout a cool 3D effect should be possible.
Also as you can see, I did this mockup more like the japanes/proto style.
I really do not like the US style of the boxart and so on.
Some do so I would suggest to make a few skins.

Final JP
Final US
VB Prototype

In the 3DS IPL we could display a nice 3D model of the VB with controller.

We need a background music.

Edit:
We should propably move the Button functions from upper screen to lower screen and put sections up there like US Games/JP Games/Prototypes/Homebrew

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Goemon.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Goemon.

Attachments:

1. 

   vue3duimockup.png