An interesting question. I hope the scenario never arises, but suffice it to say that if someone did send the ROM to me without a concrete plan for it “getting out there” then other arrangements might well be made.

Thanks for the replies folks – both the level headed and the rants – all worthwhile 🙂

In terms of removing the restriction outright, that’s not a decision I can make on my own; I’d need to reestablish contact with Gil Pedersen who wrote much of the core, and who I’ve not spoken to in many years.

However, I have to say that I’m not terribly fond of the idea. As I said, we didn’t want people hoarding private dumps to be able to play them with ViBE, and that hasn’t changed. It’s got nothing to do with sending us copies; we felt (and I certainly still feel) that for a dead system such as the VB it really serves no purpose not to have all known games out there for people to enjoy.

I’ll consider the situation over the next few days and we’ll see.

No, ViBE is the only one that restricts file loading – as I said, it was done historically because of people hoarding prototypes.

I’ve just spotted that a good Bound High dump is out and I’ve added a CRC for that which will be in the next release. Before I upload though, how big do homebrew titles get these days? Would bumping the CRC-free limit to 256K be sufficient?

Except most people suffer by having to wait for a new release anytime a new ROM is available.

Perhaps, though how often does that really happen in the Virtual Boy world?

As it was, I had a release out within hours of this being brought to my attention. There’s no reason why I won’t be able to do the same again if Faceball/etc show up.

Oops! It’ll have to stay like that now I fear. The about box is right anyway.

…and that’s done now; get the new version at http://www.bannister.org/software/.

I just spent five minutes playing, and now I have a headache. I guess the emulation accuracy in ViBE is better than I thought 🙂

Yup, it does have an embedded CRC list. The reason for this is historical; we decided long ago that we did not want people who hoard unreleased prototypes for their own private reasons to be able to use ViBE to emulate them.

As I recall we had one of our beta testers early on claiming to have a copy of Faceball which apparently didn’t work, but he refused to provide us with traces (or indeed a loan of the ROM itself) which might have helped us fix it…

I’ve just added the two Bound High CRCs to ViBE, and will be uploading a new build to my web page in the next hour. Thanks for the heads up.