Heh… doh. I don’t have any really good ideas that I’ve come up with yet, but if I do, I’ll probably try to throw something together. I thought it’d be pretty cool if a bunch of us threw together mini demos and had another new release party like the day after the competition 🙂 .
Any plans on doing GIAD? I’ve finished my classes for the semester, so I’ll have some free time to throw something together if you’re still planning on doing it.
DanB wrote:
I voted 35 times for Bonsaido. Sorry Garrison, but imagine being able to make a bonsai tree in the shape of a virtual boy! That would be so awesome!! 😀
Not to mention learning something about Bonzai trees in the process 😛 .
LOL! WTF, Elephant to the rescue is in the lead??? There must be only 20 people voting, so when someone’s friend votes, theirs jumps way up. That, or the meter is totally random so nobody feels bad that their crappy idea isn’t getting any votes 😛 .
Cool… yours definitely sounds like the best one… although the rhythm game sounds like it could be interesting (the others sound pretty dumb IMO 😛 ). I’ll keep voting… it looks like you’re in 2nd place ATM.
Congrats… those are pretty cool displays. Not sure about insuring it for $2K though… if something happens to it, typically when you make a claim you’ll need to prove it’s value regardless of what you said it’s worth (sale of an equivalent item, or have a written appraisal from an expert, etc)… insuring it for more than it’s worth is probably just gonna cost you more in insurance premiums. Although prices do fluctuate a LOT on stuff like this, you’re not going to get much more of an expert’s opinion than that of the guy running the largest VB website.
I personally would pay about $400 for it, but I know that I’m pretty cheap. My best bet of finding one would be one popping up within driving distance on ebay. The last time I saw one for sale, it didn’t get any bids at the opening bid of $500, which I assume is mostly because of shipping (it would have been at least $300 to get it here). Something like that really has more of a local market like arcade games, but unfortunately the VB is much less popular than most arcade games. I’ve heard of so many large video game store displays being destroyed because they’re so big and nobody wants to pay shipping on them… luckily the VB is kinda an oddball and you can probably find someone at least willing to pay a few bucks plus the massive shipping for the thing.
I don’t know… but my (unverified) guess is that they changed something like the wait states on the ROM, but the mask ROMs aren’t fast enough. If they changed the wait states to 1, then the ROM would need to be 100ns or faster, where if they leave it at the default of 2, then it only needs to be 150ns or faster (which is what the mask ROMs are).
Of course it’d work fine for a while, since a 150ns ROM will be 150ns or faster, but with a wait state of 1, if it is ever slower than 100ns, it’ll fail (and depending what is being read, either crash, glitch, etc).
Not really… you can’t finish it because there’s no end :P. I played it for a couple weeks (leaving it on) and got past level 99 and it keeps going (the number gets garbled, but it keeps playing). The original cart does randomly reset on occasion, but I’ve never had that problem on my flash carts.
*cough* BS *cough*. That may be what he claims, but he actually implemented it because he was mad that people had prototypes out there but wouldn’t share with him, so if they want to play on his “superior” emulator, they’d have to send the ROM to him first. I’m sure that has got him TONS of protos :-P.
I have no idea how often he updates that, but you could send him the games you want to play, have him put it in the database, then you could play them. When he implemented it, most homebrew games were 64k, although why he didn’t raise that limit to below 512k (the smallest commercial game), I dunno… maybe there could be a 256k tech demo ROM out there.
IMO Reality Boy is a better emu now anyway… I’ll bet it could be ported to OSX pretty easily if someone had the time (and a Mac) to mess w/ it (it works on Windows, Linux, Dos, and the Allegro library that it uses has a version for OSX.
Yup… most auctions are probably using the official Nintendo pic, which they probably showed like that because it looks better (stand logo on the front, and the bright red goggle with the Virtual Boy name shown). The store display is actually reasonable, since the controller really should go in the opening of the stand (so in normal operation you “hug” the VB)… but the store display has the controller in front of the VB, so the stand has to be on backwards. It wouldn’t be very comfortable for long-term playing, but for people unfamiliar w/ the VB, having the controller in plain view is less intimidating.
Oh no… I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned goto to someone who knows Basic :-P. Using goto makes REALLY ugly code… you should really use for and while loops with if statements whenever possible… and only on the rare occasion, use goto (i.e. when you’re breaking from the normal flow, like restarting after dying in the main game loop). Even then, goto is still not really a great solution, but IMO can be cleaner than having excessive loops.
But yeah, a ROM would probably help… I tried looking at the code, but I couldn’t really follow it because all the gotos.
Did you try the latest Reality Boy (from: http://www.goliathindustries.com/vb/ ). If so, which bugs are you seeing? Most games look correct on it, except the few noted in the readme (mostly direct screen drawing games, like 3D Tetris, Red Alarm, and Golf).
Emulators are by far the best way to get screenshots, although you can get decent ones if you get a camera really still into the eyepiece, and if the image you’re trying capture doesn’t have a lot of motion.
Ah… so in the example K posted, the 4, 3, 3, and 6 pixel distance is just a difference relative to each other and neither are absolute to the screen? Hmm… lemme think about this… still not sure I totally understand the problem (seems like rounding should only be one pixel off). Does it still do the same thing if you just truncate the number (floor, as in >>9) rather than rounding?
Have you tried outputting coordinates for debugging, so you can compare the results with a hand-calculation?
Yeah, I did kinda notice that… I wasn’t sure if that’s what you were talking about (it wasn’t obvious enough to the naked eye that it was happening, just that something seemed a little weird). I’m still not sure how rounding to the nearest pixel can cause that problem though.
Assuming right is + and left is -… if you move to the right, the number should always get larger, whether fractional or not, and shouldn’t bounce between one or the other. If you have 2.3=2 and move right .2 you get 2.5=3. Move right .001 and you get 2.501=3. I don’t see how moving in the same direction can cause it to round the wrong way (especially 3px to 6px like K showed).
Can you descibe the process on how your fixed pt. numbers change, and how the rounding works? The problem doesn’t make sense to me, so I’m just trying to figure out exactly what’s happening.
Hmm… I’m not sure I understand what the problem is. Since the screen is in pixels, rounding to the nearest pixel is the best you can do. Can you describe the problem more, or explain exactly how I can see it?
There’s a couple ways you can do it… probably the least ugly way to do it would be to put a while(1) loop starting at the title screen, all the way to the end (before the } at the end of main() ). Then change the existing while(1) around your game loop to while (lives>=0).
The other way (which isn’t exactly good programming style, but is easy) would be to put inside your game loop an if(lives<0) goto start; and put start: before your title screen. Don't forget to move lives=3; and probably level=1; to somewhere before the game starts again, or it'll keep resetting to the title screen (since lives will still be less than 0).
