You cannot buy one, no. None were sold, and they won’t be sold; but maybe you will have a chance to win one. bigmak hasn’t said how he intends to distribute the cartridges that were made, so you’ll just have to reacquaint yourself with the forums and see what he says. 🙂
Holy cow that’s some awesome work. Keep at it man! Hopefully you’ll pave the way for anyone else with similar interests or provide new insight to get some more speed out of our little red boxen.
Is the Nintendo tech manual hosted somewhere? It’d be neat to browse. I’m guessing Big N isn’t too fond of that one being out in the wild… or maybe they don’t care since the VB is sort the red-headed stepchild… haha.
Doanted! Thanks again bigmak. This was a truly outstanding thing to do for the community. 🙂
Cheers!
I’m sure bigmak will come up with a good way to distribute the carts. If nothing else, he could print up all of the forum usernames and throw ’em on the floor, mailing the carts to the first XX people that he picks up. 🙂 I’m just happy that someone out there is getting a cart. I certainly wouldn’t mind if I were one of ’em, though!
mawa wrote:
Yes i whas one off this persons that whas not happy whit this release off the 4 rare games.
this whas beacouse i whas afraid off the value will go down allot ( understand it in my eyes i have payed allot off money for this 4 games )
space invaders i have buy in my own country but the other 3 i have buy in japan myself
virtual bowling in a trader store on akihabra
sd gundam at the superpatato in akihabra
virtual lab i have buy it in a store in osaka
( very happy that i have find this one brand new old stock never ever have seen a athor new one )
so i have spend allot and then the roms get realesed i whas tinking value will go down allot.
but i am happy now whit it beacouse all have come fine and the games are still worth allot so i will say now that i whas wrong
I’ve seen the thinking that dumps of rare games will decrease the value of the carts themselves many times, but I’ve never felt it to be true. The people that want the dumps are often not the ones that would be willing to buy the cartridges for exorbitant prices in the first place.
Some would, surely, but the vast majority of us who are enthusiasts just want to play every game that was released for the system but can’t afford many thousands of dollars if the super-rarities even come up in the first place.
I’m glad that you feel less bad about the releases now than you originally did. If I could afford top dollar, I’d certainly be willing to pay it to complete my collection. But as it stands, unless I win the lottery, I’ve just contented myself to never owning my own copy of Virtual Bowling. 🙂
For people with rarities, I think you’d be surprised to find out how much a community can put together to pay for the dump. That way you get your payday and get to keep your still-rare cartridge AND we get access to just a little bit more. It’s happened on other forums, for NES and Atari games mainly, but I think it could happen here, too. 🙂
segagamer99 wrote:
You should probably ask Minestorm. He has removed connectors from hundreds of carts.
This. But I almost have a feeling that the “best way” is going to end up being “desoldering it by hand”…
I’m sure someone’s looked into it before, but is there any way we could pay to have a replacement remanufactured? Surely some company out there specializes in connectors built to spec for a minimum order or something…
Does it *need* to be a FlashBoy Plus for SD Gundam and Space Squash? Or is a regular FlashBoy okay for those games? Or is there a saving feature I would be missing…? I have a non-Plus, but wouldn’t be opposed to ordering a Plus if that’s what it takes. I love all things Gundam a bit too much at times…
You can play both games just fine on a FlashBoy, but the FlashBoy Plus does have a save feature, which you may need for SD Gundam since it does give you the option to save your game, whereas Space Squash has no save option. I can beat SD Gundam in 3 to 4 hours, though, so you can play it in one long evening without having to save and quit on your regular FlashBoy. The main reason why I mentioned the FlashBoy Plus is because that is the only kind of FlashBoy that Richard makes these days, so your original FlashBoy is quite the collector’s item. 🙂
Haha, yeah. I got in at the very end of the original Flashboy run with box and everything, so I got pretty lucky. I recently discovered that I have FOUR copies of Mario Tennis at home, so I think it might be time to upgrade to a FB+. Plus I can donate a couple of carts to the cause for anyone else that might need them or for homebrew releases or whatever.
Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Of course, if you ever decide to get a FlashBoy Plus, you can play the English version of Space Squash by applying the English translation patch that my brother and I made to the ROM. We also made an English translation patch for SD Gundam Dimension War, so you can play that game in English on a FlashBoy Plus, too.
Does it *need* to be a FlashBoy Plus for SD Gundam and Space Squash? Or is a regular FlashBoy okay for those games? Or is there a saving feature I would be missing…? I have a non-Plus, but wouldn’t be opposed to ordering a Plus if that’s what it takes. I love all things Gundam a bit too much at times…
I’d been thinking for a while how cool it would be to have a VB tracker or synth or sequencer or whatever you want to call it, akin to LSDJ. It sounds like it’d be a cool coding project, and maybe even a decent one to learn on, if only I had spare time…
Well that sucks. Gotta love it when people are mean to be mean. Trolling, if you will. Will definitely donate to help cover the release anyway. I get where they’re coming from, but this feels more like people being dicks than it does them having a principled argument.
Maybe the homebrew version of Faceball will get a release… it’d be nice to have a proper cart.
Edit:// I guess I mostly just want new VB games to come out on cartridges. As someone else mentioned before, the Vectrex has more homebrew games than it does originals, and this feels like a cooler version of that, and it’s fun to be a part of.
thunderstruck wrote:
Just wanted to let everyone know that I will take a break of about a week or so. I know everyone is overexcited about all of the Faceball related stuff right now but I feel pretty exhausted and need some time to get back to normal. So don’t worry if you don’t see updates in this thread.
Thanks for the update, and *definitely* kick back and relax. Where should we send the beer? Heh.
shenmueso wrote:
this is all very exciting! a never before seen VB game that was intended for legit release?
you really have gone above and beyond in acquiring the prototype, but it really doesn’t sit well with me that some guy was holding on to it and then sold it for such a big amount. i mean unless that japanese guy was solely responsible for coding the entire game, it’s really not his to sell like that and is a pretty anti-gamer thing to do to hold on to it in secret, only releasing it for big bucks. Even if he was on the staff that worked on it, it wasn’t his money that financed it, it was nintendos. What would he have done with it if no one had stumped up the cash? and was he pimping it around to try and find a buyer? if no one else had ever offered the money, he would have had a worthless piece of plastic.
Anyone with a love for gaming wouldn’t do this, i expect he was a money man for nintendo and somehow got a hold of it.
anyway, that’s not a reflection on you bigmac, you’re a legend. now if only someone would come forward with dragon hopper. lol
Well, in the end, we don’t know how he acquired the cartridge. And when it comes to unreleased protos and rare game variants, it truly is a collector’s market. Many collectors feel that the priced value of their “only copy in the world” proto massively diminishes once the game gets dumped — that’s why some people will have a “dumping price” before they’ll let anyone touch the cart.
While I’d much prefer everyone share everything in the open, I do get it. They’re trying to keep the value in their collection on top of its intrinsic value as a pile of games… but it would be nice for them to share as well.
I found this game on a website, LEGALLY BOUGHT BY ME. (…)
Some ebayers seem to have problem with this aunction and i don’t understand but stop message me or try to cancel my aunction or i take legal procedure to solve this problem.
Kirbendo wrote:
Maybe we can start a kickstarter for raising a lot of money to help coders make a Virtual Boy game with original characters and gameplay and actualy sell it at the end. 🙂
I’m in… provided someone’s got a design doc of a game ready to go and a schedule by which to finish it, heh. Then it’s more like a job, though, so the ‘brewers here might not be too interested. Plus the rewards tiers would pretty much be: “$1, get updates and a thanks!; $100, get the game!; $120, get the game and a box!!”, which is a huge scale for a Kickstarter…
I backed a Dreamcast game kickstarter that’s taking longer than anticipated to get released and the company wasn’t being very good with updates at first… but after much complaining, they’ve become more transparent and it’s really helped me feel a lot better about the process. It’s also my lesson for kickstarters: Make sure they’re communicative!
Lester Knight wrote:
Finding ROM dumps would be great. A chance to experience something lost and forgotten. But asking someone to recode that experience for us just seem to me like a waste of efforts. Instead, I would rather entice these talented coders to concentrate on original content. The Virtual Boy has so much untapped potential and compared to other systems it has so very few completed homebrew projects. So wouldn’t asking for new games and applications outweigh the experience of a shot-in-the-dark remake of an unreleased game?
I often like to compare the Virtual Boy to the Vectrex when discussing homebrew development. Currently, the Vectrex has more completed homebrew games released for it than official games. There is no reason the Virtual Boy can’t be the same way. All it takes is a dedicated few to tackle the easy (tic-tac-toe, matching, puzzle) to the much more challenging (Virtual Boy Zelda, Virtual Boy Doom, etc).
jrronimo schrieb:
Even if there is a spot for a battery, adding one might not do anything.
Well, why wouldn´t they plan accordingly to save on money and have a unified board for all carts? From a manufacturers standpoint this would totally make sense, at least for the battery. Think of rentability in terms of lesser factory cost and usability in terms of being “upgradeable” for little to no cost in advance. Nothing unusual nowadays, even back then.
I admit that I don´t know about the programming, but who knows if the software co´s didn´t program a savegame feature into some games (that might have been dropped in hardware terms later on), that would only show up with a battery?
I completely agree that the circuit board is probably the same for battery & non-battery carts; it does make sense. But I have a feeling that there wouldn’t be a way, programatically, to “detect” a battery. Or, even if there is, I doubt any games do it. Mario Clash might be a good one to try since it has a score, but I don’t think the score’s saved anywhere…?
Or maybe just adding a battery would cause the cart to “automatically” remember the score? The theory being that the battery would supply power to the cart’s memory and it would somehow persist between plays assuming the score variable isn’t just reinitialized each time…
…the more I type words the less confident I feel about this… haha.
jrronimo schrieb:
I’ve had problems with dead SNES batteries, but never any leakage. I ended up buying a pile of sockets and CR2032 batteries so that I can make the SNES batteries replaceable… y’know, in 20 more years, when they’re dead again, haha.
I have never opened a VB cart, I only recall the pics on the site here…is there a place for sockets on each one of them (even those without savegame feature)?
I’ve also never opened a VB cart, but maybe I should try. Even if there is a spot for a battery, adding one might not do anything.
This video’s description is where I found the part for the socket itself. It definitely wouldn’t fit in a VB cart, though, due to thickness. You probably couldn’t socket a VB cart without destroying the housing.
