Jeff wrote:

speedyink wrote:
Yeah sounds like the AC adapter is working. Next in line, you’ll need to check the controller. I’m not sure which pins carry the power though..

Got something here. I checked the pins on the controller. Even though I had plenty of voltage coming out of the AC adapter, I’m getting about 4.5 volts on the controller pins. My multimeter wasn’t small enough to fit into the pin connector so I had to use bent paper clips as a go-between – I don’t think that would change anything though.

So if I’m losing voltage somewhere in the controller – what might the fix be?

Are you saying that, on pin 6 (VBat), you’re only getting 4.5V, or that the highest voltage you got from any pin on the pad was 4.5V? If the latter, which pin was it, and what did you get on pin 6? Also, where are you putting the black lead of your meter? I’m assuming, of course, that you had the switch on while testing, but I thought I’d mention it, just in case…

Another thing you might want to check for is corrosion on the power terminals and the controller plug. Your paperclips likely scraped enough away on the plug to make contact, though. If not, use it to gently scrape the insides of all the pins and try it in the VB again.

thunderstruck wrote:

RunnerPack wrote:
I just sent “Eagle Flight” by Ubisoft back to GameFly. It’s a very interesting experience, but as a game, it’s a little underwhelming. Overall, it’s about a 7/10; PSVR owners should definitely give it a try.

That one made me motion sick in some places.

I never felt sick while playing, but getting used to walking instead of flying after I stopped was weird 😀

Most VR games don’t affect me at all. I think what might have made this different was a combination of the controls (using my head instead of my hands/fingers), and the fact that the game always puts “blinders” on you when you get close to things, to block out fast-moving surfaces.

I just sent “Eagle Flight” by Ubisoft back to GameFly. It’s a very interesting experience, but as a game, it’s a little underwhelming. Overall, it’s about a 7/10; PSVR owners should definitely give it a try.

I didn’t complete the game, so I likely didn’t see every type of level, but most of the ones I played were very similar, such as A) collecting things by flying through them, B) racing by flying through rings, C) escaping a tunnel without crashing, etc. This is not surprising, given the simplicity of the controls (basically just boost, brake, and tilt your head to steer), but it could have been a lot better and more like being an eagle.

The visuals are quite sub-par, too. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess it was a PS3 launch title. While you’re actually flying, you don’t notice it as much (except for the not-at-all-subtle draw-in of distant objects), and it’s very fun. Even just navigating around to choose a “challenge” is quite relaxing and immersive. My biggest complaint is that the game constantly takes you out of the immersion to a black screen, followed by an explanation of the rules, which you have to click through to get another black screen, then finally go back to flying— usually starting exactly where you were when it stopped you! It would even be jarring in a normal game, and this is supposed to be immersive! It wasn’t a good design decision. There is a “free-fly” mode if you just want to fly around without distractions, though.

It was long enough that I sent it back without completing it (unlike Batman Arkham VR, which I platinum’d). If I can find it for a good price, I will likely buy it, just to have something cool to VR around in once in a while, or to wow visitors who haven’t tried VR before.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
…Innsmouth (officially translated into English as “Insmouse” for some reason we’ll probably never know)…

Technically, it was transliterated into インスマウス (INSUMAUSU) for the Japanese title, then incorrectly transliterated back into “Insmouse” by Nintendo fans with a smattering of Japanese but, understandably, no familiarity with the works of Lovecraft.

I’m not sure where you got the “officially” part of your above statement, since anything official would have been in Japanese, and whatever wasn’t likely used the actual English spelling “Innsmouth”. (Correct me if I’m wrong, though).

I just noticed most of the content on this site about the game uses “Insmouse”, though, so that should probably be changed at some point.

I didn’t like the original, so I probably won’t play this version, but I love it when people change console games into almost completely new games through sheer grit and determination. Bravo!

Has anyone seen this? They only do white, but maybe it could be dyed. I haven’t gotten a quote, but it sounds pretty cheap.

BTW, they also do PCBs, laser-cut acrylic, and molded cables (only using standard connectors, though).

It is a known problem, but (assuming your solder joints are good) it has nothing to do with the LED modules. It’s a problem with the mirror synchronization, likely due to dirty sensors.

First, check this post and clean out the sensors. If that doesn’t fix it (or only partially), let us know, but without being able to swap parts, it’s going to be hard to diagnose.

Oops… I was so excited by the prospect of VB chiptunes, I put SPU instead of VSU 😉

I tried it out last night and the sound quality is great for the currently-supported systems. I’m no musician, so I can’t really comment on the actual tracking process…

You could try hot air. If you’re careful, you can soften the rental sticker’s adhesive enough to remove it without affecting the label underneath. Even if you do heat the label’s adhesive a bit in that one area, it would all have to be heated to actually remove the label.

Not bad! You should be able to find a charger+protection circuit on eBay, Banggood, DX, etc.

You can get empty USB battery packs designed to hold one or two 18650s, but the charger PCB is also a boost-converter designed to output 5V, which is not enough for the VB’s regulator. You might be able to modify the charger to disable the boost-converter, or modify the controller to send its 5V to the VB instead of the battery voltage. You would just hook the controller’s switch in series with the cells and the battery input of the charger PCB, hook the boost PCBs 5V output to the VCC line in the controller, and leave the VBat line going to the VB disconnected, bypassing the VB’s own regulator. You’d want to test it first to make sure the boost box can provide enough current to run the VB, but it probably will.

I can’t wait to see your “budget enclosure that doesn’t look like trash” 😉

Welcome to the site!

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you have just a single black line on a display, it’s probably there for good 🙁

There could be a few different causes, but in your case – considering the rough treatment of the system in transit – it’s most likely that a bond wire has become detached from the LED array. It’s a fairly common problem, and one that may never have a solution. I have one display PCB (not installed in a VB) that actually has eight of these “dead pixels”, despite having been soldered. BTW, you should still get them soldered, but it won’t fix that one line.

Mednafen can record gameplay video to a file. You could play against the enemy you want to examine, then look at the video frame-by-frame. I think you can even turn layers off, in case something is blocking what you want to see.

Ah, okay, I misunderstood.

If you ever get around to it, I found some information that might be useful. On Jeff Frohwein’s “Dev’ers” site, he has a schematic of the four-player adapter (aka DMG-07) (see below), which may help you decide where to (dis)connect things.

Attachments:

1. 

   4play.gif
   

koifish wrote:
I too am trying to make Faceball 16-player a reality, but am struggling to get more than four copies to play nicely.

I’ve tried daisy-chaining 4-player adapters…

There’s your problem. As can be read in the interview you linked, 5+ players can only be done with their special, unreleased daisy-chain cable. In networking, a daisy-chain is when the transmit (Tx) line of one device connects to the second device’s receive (Rx) line, then that device’s Tx connects to a third device’s Rx, and so on until the last device’s Tx connects back to the first device’s Rx, closing the chain into a loop. The software can then detect how many devices there are in the chain by seeing how long it takes a piece of information to get all the way around.

All you have to do is get one cable for every two GBs you want to connect, cut them in half, wire all the Tx/Rx lines in the daisy-chain (pin 2 -> pin 3), wire all the clock lines (pin 5) and ground lines (pin 6) together, and try it out. If you have a couple extra 4p adapters, you could even “hollow them out” (i.e. remove the CPU and junk from the PCBs) and make an 8-player setup without splicing any cables. Easy-peasy.

Ah, that looks much better!

Two more things:

1. The size should always be a power of two. In the case of Virtual Bowling, it would be 1048576 bytes (2**20).

2. Does the game title actually need the “(J)”? The region field should cover it, right? (Especially given that there’s no “Virtual Bowling (U)” to contrast it with…)

I know you’re just generating these from how it’s stored on the PVB back-end, so if it would complicate the website code too much to remove it, that’s fine. I just thought I’d point it out.

Once you fix the size thing, I think we have a winner!

I have some comments on the JSON format:

1. I assume the “checksum” field will also allow other checksums/hashes, such as “crc32”.

2. I think the “barcode” field should be renamed “upc”. It’s less ambiguous.

3. The “msrp” field should have no special characters or thousands separators. Something like “JPY5300” or “USD29.99” would be easier to parse and localize.

4. I think the “size” field should be in bytes, with no decorations/suffixes. Also, homebrews should list their smallest size (i.e. with no Flashboy padding added).

I never want to discourage anyone from learning new skills or trying to create new things, but the title of this thread seems more and more apt as time goes on…

It sounds like you’re trying to build a house on an empty plot of land by starting with the wallpaper 😛

For one thing, the VBDE is a handy bit of kit, but if you’re not used to Windows (or even have your own copy of Windows to run), it’s going to be more of a hindrance than a help. There are a few members developing for the VB on a Mac, and they’ve shared some of what they’re doing on the forums, so maybe a thorough search of what’s already been done would be in order?

If the existing posts are too vague or outdated, maybe a new thread should be started specifically about getting started on Mac. It could point to good Mac-based tools for graphics, sound, music, tilemaps, etc. along with stuff about setting up the compiler tools and a good programmer’s editor (the one called Atom from the guys at Github is pretty good, if you don’t already have a favorite).

Besides setting up the tools on your system, it sounds like you could use a little improvement yourself. I know it’s boring, but if you really want to write computer software – including VB games – you’re going to have to knuckle down and learn at least one programming language (namely, in this case, C). Get a book, try some online tutorials, find a knowledgeable friend willing to teach, or even take classes at an actual school. Once you get started, programming is actually quite straightforward and logical, but you have to start at the beginning and pick it up gradually.

Two last pieces of advice: 1. keep asking questions (unless you can find the answers for yourself), and 2. don’t expect anyone else to do all your work for you; get in there and get your hands dirty!

I got a good deal on one as an early birthday present to myself 😎

I’ve mostly only played demos, so far, and not even of all the games I’d like to try. My favorites, so far, are: Statik Institute of Retention, the “Robot Rescue” level of “Playroom VR” (the free mini-game collection that comes with the headset), and – although I suck at it 😛 – Farpoint (it’s also the only full VR game I currently own). I also concur with Syder about racing games being pretty fun. The Trackmania Turbo demo is definitely worth a go. It has both normal 3D levels and full VR levels, and it’s more about time-trials than actual racing (or maybe that’s just the demo).

BattleZone looks cool, but it’s probably more fun in multiplayer than against AIs. I want to play a “rails shooter”, but I’m not a fan of Until Dawn’s “horror” theme. I’m probably still going to try the demo, but are there any other rails shooters out there?

GNOG is okay, but I’m probably going to wait for a sale if I ever buy it, since it seems short/repetitive/less replayable (not to mention way less immersive than Statik).

I’ve downloaded the Spiderman “VR experience”, but I had to find (and am now charging) my Move controllers, so I haven’t tried it, yet (and I need to try things like Tumble with the “Moves”, too).

For non-game stuff, there are some cool 360 videos on YouTube. Just search for “360”. I liked the Maldives one, a roller-coaster one sponsored by Gillete, and a ride to the edge of space on a weather balloon. The pacman one sucks, though 😛

I’m really excited about the fact that someone has already written a driver to use the HMD on a PC. Combine this with positional tracking of the HMD and the move controllers using the PS3 camera, and it’s probably a pretty good PC VR setup, for no extra money. The only problem is the splintered software landscape and lack of standardization. I thought the OSVR thing was the answer, but it looks like they just want to sell yet another incompatible HMD. Anyway, that’s a discussion for another thread…

Looks like a tidy piece of work, there; good job! 🙂

astro187 wrote:

So I got to thinking, how could I make it prettier. I got 2 ideas:

Option 1: Fit it in an adapter tap.

Option 2: If I could get a project box that would mate with an adapter tap (or battery pack)

I’m still confused about why you need the tap or battery box at all. You can just wire the proper AC adapter directly to the converter. If you have to have it detachable, just get an adapter with a standard 5mm barrel plug and its mating jack. There’s no need to use any VB parts at all, especially if it means modifying a “collectible” (or at least a limited resource).

I’m confused… Are you trying to make an SNES-to-VB controller adapter that connects to the back of a VB controller in place of the battery box/adapter tap? Since none of the signals you need (including +5V) are accessible from the tap slot, this isn’t going to work without modifying the controller itself. It would also end up being quite an unwieldy jumble of wires and plastic…

However, if you just want to use an adapter tap to power the VB through your custom SNES pad adapter, that would be relatively easy (since you seem to have access to a 3D printer). I actually happen to have a model of the battery pack slot (attached). I included an STL and the original SketchUp model. I’ve never printed it, so I don’t know if it’ll work as-is, but I used calipers to get the dimensions, so it should be pretty close.

Attachments:

1. adapter-tap-slot.zip

This is all assuming that the images you want are composed of BGMaps stored in the ROM. It’s entirely possible for the game to generate the contents of certain BGMaps “on-the-fly”, especially for characters with a lot of “moving parts” like Wario himself. This kind of thing will be caught by the breakpoints, but since it’s not copying anything, the code will look a bit different.

And then there are images composed of a collection of Objects. I don’t know if this technique is used in Wario, or any other commercial VB game, but it’s a possibility.