Sweet find!

Once you get the touch controllers working post an APK! I’d love to play some VB games.

Guy Perfect wrote:
I haven’t been bothering with version control so far since I’m the only one working on the project.

Ha, I know how this story ends just from experience. Jokes aside, a place to formally submit bugs would be nice

Finally got to play around with this last night. This is a GODSEND for VB devs. You’re the bomb Guy.

Do you plan on getting this up on Github? I think that would be a great place to host builds/report issues/make pull requests.

I appreciate the enthusiasm!

The non-Maiden homebrew will be ready before May. If the VB Tracker is out it will also probably include music, but I’ll release it regardless. As for Maiden itself, there have been some changes made to how it will play, all for the sake of a more enjoyable experience. I know that sounds awfully vague but I’m really intent on making Maiden a 3D game and not just a 2D game with parallax.

Not dead!

I’ve been writing tools to help with VB development (specifically debugging) and changed jobs. I’ll have a non-Maiden homebrew game out in the next month or two showcasing what I’ve been up to.

Sweet! Does it display VB games at full resolution?

Hey Everyone,

Sorry to keep you waiting on MAIDEN related news. As you can already tell we’re running a bit behind on the crowdfunding campaign. Part of this is because we have some work to finish up on other projects and the other part is related to the scope of the game. We’re interested in making the best technical showcase on the Virtual Boy and at the Virtual Boy’s full 50FPS.

To accomplish this we’ve decided to rely heavily on prerendered 3D assets as these not only look great but we’re able to render out multiple angles as needed, which is a big plus when you want to produce a true 3D image and not just the basic parallax. We’ve got more announcements coming soon, but rest assured we’re working hard and this game is far from development hell. Next time we talk will be when we’re ready to announce the date of the crowdfunding campaign.

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Looks great! Really like the thin cabinet you went for.

I’m in Dallas if you need another VB + Flashboy for a setup, been at Let’s Play the past few years and always enjoyed your Hyper Fighting setup

MAIDEN will be a single player game, I think it’d be neat if the ext port was used more though.

@KR155E I’m looking into the legal side of things. If it is allowed it will be the VB Rom with an emulator, otherwise we’re prepared to have a native windows port.

@Quaze You’ll definitely be able to purchase a physical copy!

Devlopment update #2! I have good news and even better news.

Let’s start with the good news: You’ll be able to order a MAIDEN cart, regardless if the game ends up over/under 16Mbit. This of course is a bit of a luxury item, as I’ve come to learn that the making of these cartridges is quite the process.

While learning about how these carts get made, it left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The choice to be made was between super expensive and often inferior 3D printed parts or ripping parts from actual Virtual Boy games and re-purposing them.

Which brings me to the better news, the effort to fund mellott124’s cartridge molds is now part of MAIDEN’s crowdfunding campaign. We hope to bring an end to the era of pulling parts from games whose prices have risen several times over the past decade or so. These new carts will be more affordable than the alternatives (past the initial cost of course) and also will be able to come in a variety of colors. Mellott124 and I both see a pretty healthy homebrew community in the Virtual Boy’s future and we hope to make it easier to play games on actual hardware.

More info coming soon, but this was important enough to announce now!

Here’s development update #1! I’d like to remove any doubt about my credentials for developing games, as I know lots of people tend to start neat projects then leave them to fizzle out over time. We’re working with multiple partners to make sure that people can play MAIDEN on Steam, Virtual Boy, and maybe even 3DS. MAIDEN is being published by Triverske who will oversee the release on both Steam and Virtual Boy.

Today I’d like to talk about the underlying tech of MAIDEN, as we tested a couple different ideas before we reached the current engine. We tested wireframes and voxel-based renderer but we found that drawing directly to the framebuffer was a bit slower than we were hoping for. At that point we looked to the VIP’s object worlds to help with graphics processing. When we tested this it was much more performant and in-line with the experience we wanted. Although it’s pretty impressive I ended up making the decision to go with something a bit more visually appealing and a bit less technically appealing.

I thought that the tech was a bit too cool to just give up so I’ve prepared a little tech demo to mess around with. (it works really well in 3D) This isn’t the game demo, so please don’t confuse it with that, merely a bit of engine that probably won’t get a lot of use. Enjoy!

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Thanks for the posts guys. Again I don’t want to alienate those who want to play on a flashboy, but my hunch is that between map/graphics data there will not be a lot of room left over. I am working on sorting out the cartridge situation, so just be patient while I figure out what that’s going to look like.

Regarding music and what I’m trying to do on that front, I’d really like to create something similar to what GEMS for the Genesis was purposed for. Something where you could write/edit on your PC and listen to it via hardware (or emulation). I don’t know if that’s in the scope of this project yet but I do have some experience in the area. If this is something people really want I might include this as a part of the crowdfunding, just judging off the samples included with VBDE I know that music production has been pretty difficult/limited in the past and there’s a lot of improvement to be had.

Part of the campaign is for the actual game itself, but most of the time is going to be me building the tools so that’s what I meant by that.

There will be a $1 tier on the Kickstarter as an “official” way to obtain the ROM, and all tiers above that will include the ROM. I expect it to be leaked pretty quickly and I don’t really have a problem with that.

As for a Flashboy+ compatible ROM, I don’t know if it’s going to fit or not. (I have my suspicions) At the very least I know the demo and beta builds will fit on a Flashboy. I’m currently making efforts to make sure the full game can be played on a Virtual Boy via cartridge and will update the thread when I have more details on what that looks like.