I can confirm that the connector is the issue.
I sacrificed VLB (1 obviously 😉 ) and exchanged the connector on my Virtual Vibes opensource reprocard, which never showed a picture before with the old, unofficial connector.
And voilà, it works every time I put it into the VB 🙂 🙂
And the best thing: the FRAM seems to work here, it saves the general settings as well as the highscores.
Another release:
Pong Ultimate 1.1
New:
2nd multiplayer stage (top to bottom mode)
I tested it 15 minutes, it plays quite well in my opinion. I could not find severe communication errors or bugs.
It is still the case that the ball sometimes slows down, but gets fast again when hitting paddles and obstacles, and in very rare cases (when the ball hits the wall in a veeery flat angle) the ball passes the wall.
But looking at the small collection of multiplayer games this is nevertheless a good addition imho.
This is how the soldering of my “A Wireframe Scenery” cartridge looks like.
In my opinion everything looks fine.
But the game only one worked once out of ~10 starts, and only with severe graphic glitches and no sound.
Attachments:
Got 8 EPROMs programmed.
Only one game works 🙁 Don´t know why. The EPROMs have been programmed the same way. The ROM files have been padded by copying and pasting the code to get 16Mbits. Soldering looks also fine to me. Don´t know what to do know.
EDIT: Pong is the game which works so far.
EDIT 2: Pong is not working anymore 🙁 Now I have no working game.
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This reply was modified 11 months, 2 weeks ago by
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This reply was modified 11 months, 1 week ago by
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Thanks again for your answer.
Yes, I have encountered the problem with the screws. Couldn´t find flathead screws and need to grind them down.
In the end I got one fitting cartridge, but it was a lot of work.
Thanks for explaining the ROM things. I created some ROMs that way and will program them tomorrow.
Hopefully everything works.
No worries. Glad you shared your knowledge, let´s see if everything turns out well 😉
Thank you for your reply and the confirmation.
That is really sad. Without save feature the cards are only half the fun…
I got the shells in the meantime, they also seem not to fit very well.
How did you tighten the screws? I have M3 and they are too small to be screwed in.
Another question: can you tell my in more detail how to prepare the ROMs?
For example how to split 32Mbit ROMs?
And how to pad 512kByte ROMs? Do I need to copy and paste the code 4 times to get 16 Mbits?
Thanks for helping out!
Well, out of the box I can tell you:
– Test Chamber (amazing!) and complete
– Dragon Chopper: really good, one short demo stage
– Virtual Picross: really good, complete
– Pong: since it is by me, I´d say “okay” and fairly complete, with one working multiplayer and four singleplayer stages
– A Wireframe Scenery: again by me, I´d say quite good, complete except for background music in the main game. Propably 10 mins playtime.
– Virtual Vibes: really good, but no public release yet.
I sure miss something right now, but other members can tell you more I am sure 😉
Here it is: Pong Ultimate!
It has the four singleplayer stages implemented and one working (!) multiplayer stage (thanks to Jorgeche for updating the code on Pong tutorial in this regard).
So compared to Pong Extended there is:
– updated title screen with connection status
– updated multiplayer stage with new sprites and one play mode until 20 points
– multiplayer stage works also with one player against the cpu (but is not really balanced)
– two new winning screens for either player 1 or player 2.
Only negative point I could find is:
when playing singleplayer first and then going into the multiplayer stage the stage freezes after one point. So when someone wants to player multiplayer start the two VBs, go into the title screen and then press “RT+LT” on both VBs.
I have added an updated label, but sadly no HF32 label. The .label-file created with Thunderstruck´s Hyperstudio 1.2.0 does not really look good.
That is unfortunate. My PCBs arrive tomorrow. The connectors are already here.
So I can only build games without save function with the current design?
@8678D: you have tested Wario Land it seemed to work, can you confirm this?
And can you confirm the orientation of the FRAM? I have no pin-1-marking on mine.
EDIT:
got the PCBs, the FRAMs, the EPROMs and the connectors.
EDIT2:
got the FRAMs soldered, but have it done by one person in our company. Hopefully I can solder the other stuff by myself.
EDIT3: got three connectors soldered, and sanded down. Carts fit into the VB, although it is a bit of fiddling around.
I hope this question is not inappropriate: can you say in % how much you got back via funds of the initally paid amount so far?
If not, no worries, I am just curious 😉
And thanks again for making this possible! The VB community would not be the same without people like you and the other persons having worked in the background on this “project”.
Thank you too for posting your files in the first place 🙂
And thanks for looking at the padding topic.
It really helps me a lot. Because programming an EPROM (at work), soldering it, trying it, and then getting a fail is quite annyoing, because this means: desoldering, erasing it (at work), reprogramming it (at work) and so on.
Okay, I have ordered 5 pcs. of the shells now. I have no 3d printer, so I let them made.
Please keep me updated regarding ROM padding and splitting, thank you.
Oh, that´s new to me. I thought EPROM can store save games. Well, I have ordered 5 FRAMS.
Btw, there is spelling error in your BOM. “FW16W08” should be “FM16W08”:
Comp Desc
2mm 2x30p connector For cart-to-console connection
M27C160 16Mbit EPROM
FW16W08 Alt for SRAM