C is way easier than assembly, and with GCC you can mix C and assembly nicely. If you do decide to go with assembly use GAS not one of our home brewed assemblers. (gas is in the vb_gcc package) It has proper macro support and other nicetys.
Congradulations on your engagement. My wife and I have been married for 8 years and I would not trade it for anything.
There are several nice demos writen in C that you can use to get started. From there I think you should read all the documentation you can get your hands on, that includes the V810 hardware manual, at least one of the main patents and my programmin guide. Having a good working understanding of how computers work helps a lot, a decent computer architectures manual or a book on assembly language would be nice. Personlay I got a lot from Peter Nortons Inside the IBM PC, but it is probably long out of print.
You can’t pick the language you want wen coding on an embedded platform, you need to much access to the hardware. You have several good choices however, C, C++ (not recomended), GAS (GCC Assembler), and raw V810 assembly.
90% of embeded systems are coded in C/Assembly, some systems use a subset of C but not many. Other languages, like Fortran (wich you could use on the VB, allong with any other language that GCC supports), and Basic are two high level for this kind of work.
Look at the demo code on this site, and buy a copy of C/C++ in 28 days (etc), good luck.
I figured what the part was, but it’s probably proprietary
to Nintendo.
No, Sanyo designed this part for LED printers back when laser diods where painfuly expencive. There are several patents that cover the unit:
US 4,605,944
US 4,779,108
US 5,084,714
US 5,307,089
US 5,808,650
US 6,124,875
US 6,281,991
US 6,677,970
US 6,853,396
I have the above patents but have not had time to go over them, thats why they are not on my website yet.
I have not tried it yet but apllying som heat to the ribon cable where it meets the circuit board might reset things. Maby rub an iron on it with a pece of cloth to stop the iron from sticking to the plastic.
That cable is atached to an “LED print head”, I have not been able to source the origional part bit Im giessing it would run around $30 for a new one. Someone with more free time thain me might have more luck.
Yes, that would work great, get the 70ns chips. Most any eprom programmer should be able to handle a 32 pin flash chip, but verify it before you purchase something. Also you should get a pair of ZIF sockets to put on the cartrige. Thease are dip sockets that have a switch so you can remove the flash without bending up the pins. There between $5-$30 depending on where you get them and what style (id go for the low profile ones myself)
You would need to pick up an eprom programmer/eraser and some eproms, that would run about $100. Eproms have a slow turn around time, about 20 minuts between programming, so you should consider geting several eproms so you can shortin that cycle. I would look to pick up 10 at least, and they should cost between $2-$6 apiece.
That cart takes 32 pin, 8 bit, 5V eproms in the 4mbit-8mbit range, You can use the following part numbers:
M27C4001
M27C401 – if you can find it
M27C801
You should try to get eproms in the 80ms range but anything from 80ms-120ms should work. If the eprom is to slow you will have to run the virtual boy off of AC power in order to stabalize everything.
If you can find a flash or eeprom in a 32 pin dip package it would be a better way to go, but eeproms are VERY expensive, and flash usualy comes in a surface mount package.
See, a tripod would help with the blurry. Also the VB display refreshes 50 times a second so you need a 20ms shutter speed to capture a full frame, idealy you would keep the speed between 20 ms and 40 ms max. Play with the manual modes on your camera and force manual controlls of shutter speed and f-stop. Adjusting f-stop up and down to optimize image brightness.
Run your game in an emulator, aka reality_boy, or red dragon. Then you can hit ‘p’ at anytime to take a screen shot.
If you wan to take pics of the real VB screen get a tripod and set your camera to manual mode so the colors dont get funky. But there is no way to ‘capture’ a digital image of the VB’s screen at this time.
Well, water world doesent make my list of all time worst VB game (and in the top 10 of worst games I have ever played) on acident. I would have much rather seen a 3D asteroids game, or pinball, or anything. I should have had you ask why he did not use affine mode scaling for the characters? He only crams about 15 characters on the screen at once and his scaling is no smother thain affine mode. Maby there is more dificulty to affine than I know.
You know from a coding standpoint I like V-Tetris the best. Thoes guys knew how to make clean and elegant code. No bugs that I could find, just nice simple algorithems. Of cource it is a painfuly simple game to program. But it definently stands up a lot better than Virtual Labs!
I would have thought that artist were a dime a dozen and programmers would be scarce. But in my experience it is easy to find a coder who can write a game but almost imposible to find an artist to do the artwork (grrr). Oh well, time to go learn how to draw…
I think Water Worldt had potential but it realy was just a tech demo. i suspect that they saw the writing on the wall and rushed it out the door in an effort to recoup there investment before the VB went under.
If you look at the code there are a lot of stupid bugs in the game and there is evidence in the rom that they were planing for much more complicated levels (new enimys, etc). It’s a shame that they did not spend a little more time polishing up the game before release.
As far as I know there are only 5 flash carts, and I made 3 of them. There are afiew people who own official development carts form Nintendo but I dont think very many of thoes are being used for development.
I have found that a cheap pair of analgraph glasses (the red/blue glasses you get with comic books and low buget 3D hooror films) and a VB controller hooked into my computer are close enough to get me 90% of the sensation of playing a real VB. Sadly nothing can make the PC screen as bright or ‘focused’ as the VB is.
If programming is not your thing, I would recomend that you get together with some of the programmers out there and colaborate. Developing the artwork will not consume nearly as much time as learning how to code for a porly documented embedded system like the VB.
So anyone that wants an artist, post below…
Me personaly, I am looking to do a 3D Asteroids clone. but my own artistic skills are lacking. if you want to wip out some graphics for that I would apriciate the help.
see: http://www.goliathindustries.com/vb/VBNews.html for my own art fiasco.
The current state of VB development is still in flux and the tools are not that great. For now i would recomend that you try to develop a simple demo on one of the emulators out there and wory about the more dificult challenge of getting it to work on a real VB later.
Things to concider when developing
software:
– The compiler is limited, currently you can have only 1 .c file and there are some minor bugs, especialy with float’s
– There is no single good way to generate graphics, for now I am using V-IDE to import finished screen shots of a game, wich I then tweek as need. I am working on getting a beter graphics editor going but It is definently not top on my list.
– Otherwise we know enough to generate WarioLand style graphics on the VB, brush up on your C programming, read the VB Programming doc and or the patents and look at Parasyts demo code.
Hardware:
– It cost about $200 to get started with a flash cart and they are curently a real pain to develop on, mostly because it takes to long to reflash them.
– There are efforts underway to make a link cable that would let you download games to the VB but it will still require a flash cart for the initial boot.
– If there was a killer game out there there would be more interest in developing a low cost flash cart/link calbe combo. In quantitys of 20 I could develop a system for $50 that would let you play small games (non comercial games) but It would take some mony and effort to get it together.
With the flicker 3D images? Yea that was cool Im definently thinking of implementing that in the next round of reality boy! I have not had time to look at the rest, but i hope to get to it this week.
There are several open source codecs that can be munged down to handle low color data. For the VB it would be simplest to go with a motion jpeg style encoding scheem, except that jpeg does not work well with only 4 colors. But a tight png compression scheem on each frame and having the ability to refference the same frame multiple times would reduce the video data by at least a 4x amount.
For stereo effects you can play tricks, for example if you pan to the left on a sceen, you can take an image that you showed on the left screen 2 seconds ago and display it later on the right screen, presto instant 3D. I saw a 3D moving hologram of elvis that someone made from a video clip. The video camera had done a 360 deg sweep of elvis during a show. So to generate 3D they just staggard the frames, frame one went to the left screen, and frame 5 went to the right. Next frame 2 goes to the left, and 6 to the right… on and on… Anyway it was very convincing, and easy to do. So make lots of horizontal pans in your video shots and you will be able to virtualy eliminate the overhead of 3D.
Having played all of the ‘rare’ games I can tell you your not missing much. SDGundam is pitifuly boring, im sure even a SD Gundam fan would think so. Virtual Labs feels very unfinished, V-Bowling is 99% the same a Nesters Funky Bowling. The only game i like is space invaders, and It does not add anything to the game, other than a hoky pseudo 3D mode where the alians come at you from the horizon insted of from the top.
I understand your frustration, In an Ideal world I would think that the origional authors of the VB games would actualy want to post there games to the public, in the hopes of keeping them alive even if they were not comericaly viable. but I am a realist, there is to much greed going on in the game industry (teritorial lockouts anyone), and noone will ever bother to negotiate out of there contract with the Big N to get the rights to there games back.
I’m hoping to launch my own videogame company soon, and my goal is going to be giving the games away for free. As a revenue stream I will be offering value added features, like bundling a yo-yo with each game. And offering faster access to the games, ie. release the games to paying customers for 6 months then give them away on line after the pay perioud is over. The trick is getting your game out to a lot of people, not making a big proffit on each copy sold. If I made $10 a game and sold only 1,000 units I would be a failure but if I made $0.50 a game and shipped a million units….
The VB has a full FPU and Bitstring opcodes (and/or/xor one array of data onto another), so it should be more than capable of running one of the simpler codecs. The bigest hurdle is the low amount of memory, but you can overcome that by placing your lookup tables in the rom instead of in the memory space.
Any codec that works on the Playstation could probably be ported fairly quickly, and of cource any codec that works on the GBA, etc would be trivial to port. But the GBA does not have a FPU so these codecs would not be fully optimized for the VB.
