Hmm, I’ve obtained a couple new systems in the last few years so I guess it’s time to update the list.
SNES (Model 1 and 2)
NES (Model 1)
Gamecube
Sega Genesis (Model 1 and 2)
Sega CD
Dreamcast
N64
Virtual Boy
Game Boy
Game Boy Color
PSP-1000
DS Lite
Sega Game Gear
Atari 2600
Commodore 64
Huh, looks like a lot of people use Amazon. I’m not much of a collector, and I’ve always found Amazon really pricey. I’ve gotten almost all of my stuff from eBay, but because of the way prices shot up in the last couple years, I haven’t bought anything recently. When I bought my first VB, I paid $20 shipped, and it came with the foam eyeshield, an unbroken stand, a controller with battery box, Teleroboxer and Mario’s Tennis. A couple weeks later I got a set of 5 boxed Japanese games for $25 shipped. NOw it seems like you can’t even find an incomplete system for less than $50…
The weirdest place I ever got VB stuff was a free box that a friend found at a garage sale and brought to me. It had a copy of VB Wario Land and a controller with a chewed up cord in it. It also had a Dreamcast arcade stick and 4 regular controllers… I kinda wonder if the rest of those systems were at the garage sale. >:(
Thanks for the heads-up, but we already have a thread for noteworthy auctions. Appropriately, it’s called “THE NOTEWORTHY AUCTION THREAD™“. That’s probably the best place to post this kind of thing.
Ah, so you want a way to dump directly to the SD card. I thought you just meant some way to dump an image that you could move to an SD later. Personally, I think that would be the more useful option, since you’re probably going to be wanting to move stuff from PC to SD (or vice versa) more often than wanting to make copies of your cartridges, although that’s just my option.
Also, could you post the part number of the male connector you have to connect to VB games? I’m just curious about the specs in case I want to build something later.
On a final note, I forgot it was a RAM cart… my bad. Well, VBSD still holds then. 😀
The main problem with removing that bottom cover is that you remove the stand grip, which means you would have to set the VB on top of something in order to play it, and then you might bend the PCB or something…
As far as cartridge dumping, I know DogP has tried several methods over the years. I recently noticed that somebody managed to interface one with a Retrode, but the original prototype of the Retrode was just an ATmega168 with V-USB pretending to be a read-only mass storage device. The main issue with all of the solutions over the years has been that getting a cartridge connector either meant destroying a Virtual Boy to get one 🙁 or building your own… The guy who interfaced his Retrode actually built a connector out of PCMCIA pins. 😯 Is there a male counterpart to that connector you decided on? If so, that would be a fantastic thing for the community.
I actually don’t mind the name VBoot, but if you’re looking for more names, how about VBSD (since it loads from an SD card)? Or, since FlashBoy is taken, what about VirtualFlash? 😛
Also, I just wanted to say that what you’re doing is really cool… I wish I had the skills to design stuff like VBoot… Keep up the good work!
I wonder how companies come up with their logos. Somehow I doubt it’s red because of the VB (since even Nintendo seems to hate the VB on some level) but I guess we’ll all keep dreaming that it’s true. 😛 On a side note, I’ve always thought the base DS logo was dumb. It doesn’t even say “Nintendo DS”, it says “Nintendoods” (or now I guess it says “Nintendoo3ds”.)
Here’s a question: Is that switch on the PCB reachable when the cover is on, or is the current revision too short? It doesn’t look like you would be able to reach it, but I might just be miscalculating the size of the cartridge slot.
As far as the way it looks, I love the look of bare PCBs. 😀 Any way you could get them to fabricate boards with the etch resist in red?
Also, where did you get your boards fabbed? Was it BatchPCB or someplace like that? I actually found this place recently, they charge more per square inch than BatchPCB but they send you three copies of your board, shipping is free, and near as I can tell there’s no setup fee, so it’s a way better deal. Just something to think about when you get the design worked out if you decide to go into “mass” production.
That one from Digi-Key would probably be your best bet. I’ve never ordered from them because their prices are generally higher than mouser’s (at least as far as I’ve found) and their catalog isn’t as intuitive to browse, but I think they gouge you less for shipping.
Nope, that one is the wrong size. It’s too wide and too thick. I’m actually 99% sure it’s a CR1616, as I just found out yesterday that the numbers correspond to the size (derr :-P) so I got out my calipers, and it seems to be around 16mm across and 1.6mm thick. I checked around, and $5 seems to be about the cheapest you can get them. All the eBay listings here in the US only have the ones without tabs. (If you’re a soldering ninja you actually can use those, but it’s not a good idea and the game might not fit back together…) It sure is hard to find the ones with tabs on them. >:(
It’s highly likely that the save battery is dead. Old video game carts that had a save function used a small amount of RAM instead of non-volatile storage because it was cheaper. To keep the RAM working while the cart was out of the system, a small battery was put in the cart. Of course, after 15 years or so, the battery dies, your data is lost, and your game won’t save anymore. I have a copy of Landstalker for Genesis that I got about a week ago that’s having the same issue…
I cracked my spare copy of Teleroboxer open to check what kind of battery you’ll need… Unfortunately it’s not labeled, but I’m fairly sure it’s a CR1616, the same kind of battery used in some Gameboy games. You’ll need to find a battery that has tabs mounted on it to solder to, then you’ll need to de-solder the old battery and solder new one in. Hope you have gamebits and a soldering iron… (If not, there are a number of repair services for Gameboy carts, you could always ask one if they’d be willing to do a Virtual Boy cart, seeing as it has the same battery and opens the same way.)
It’s odd that we haven’t seen more carts with this issue, although I suppose the community is small, and the carts are newer than a lot of NES/GB carts, which have this issue quite frequently.
DogP wrote:
Well… anyone is welcome to start anytime, but I’ve been putting some effort into libraries, so we can have a good consistent base to start from.
Hey, cool. It’ll be really nice to work with a more finished set of libraries. One thing: I think pretty much all of us in the programming community have made tweaks to libgccvb at one time or another, so maybe we should get a GitHub project set up specifically for libraries. (Maybe that should read as, “maybe I should set a GitHub project up”… :-P)
DogP wrote:
I also tried setting up the compiler with the latest gcc and patches, but I think I failed 😛 . I haven’t gotten a chance to jump back into that 🙁 . It would be very nice if we got it set up so it could just be downloaded, rather than built (then everyone would be set up the same, and it would be easy to just make it work).
Part of me really wants to make some snide Linux remark about this… 😎 Hope you get it working!
DaVince wrote:
Have you ever made a game, as a hobbyist? It takes a lot of dedication to start and finish a game, without knowing if you’ll still be interested in a year. Besides that, releasing a demo helps you get feedback and motivation to keep working on it a little longer.
That’s exactly how I feel. I am working on a game (VB Gradius clone), but I have other projects I want to move on to, and I know I won’t finish this one if I do, so I keep telling myself to finish it, but I’m almost finding it boring at this point… 😛 It’ll probably get done eventually, but in the meantime I’ve got school and other hobbies, not to mention that I still enjoy playing games more than making them… 😀
I had this problem, but it actually was the glasses. I bought a pair of cheapo plastic frame ones on eBay, but the blue was so thin you could see the whole spectrum through it… To solve the problem, I ended up taking a pair of cardboard glasses that did work, cutting the blue lens out and taping it over the blue lens in my glasses. It’s a pretty kludgey solution, but it works…
Since the goal of anaglyph glasses is to eliminate a given color, to figure out if the problem is with the glasses, fire up any decent color picker and see if there are any shades that appear completely black through the blue side. If you can see color on every hue, then it’s probably the glasses. I’ve heard the purpose of the thin blue is to allow you to see color in the anaglyph, but that doesn’t matter for Virtual Boy, and it just ends up making me see double anyway…
Hey, it’s nice to see a new face around here! Double nice to see that you’re interested in development!
Are you using the precompiled version of gccVB or are you compiling from source? If I remember correctly, I could never get it to compile correctly from source, but the precompiled version seemed to work well for me out of the box. (I’m primarily a Linux user, so I don’t remember all of the ins and outs of getting gccVB to work on Windows.) I would guess that the errors you’re getting have something to do with the binaries being screwed up/not in the right location. All of the errors you posted look like they’re located in libgccvb, but I’ll bet that’s not where the problem lies… Keep tweaking with it and let us know what happens!
And don’t be afraid to ask “stupid” questions… We’ve all been there, and I think that most of the posts in the development forum would classify as such. 😀
VirtualJockey wrote:
Am I the only person that would have bought this?
Red & Black > Color
I’d pay a premium for a 3DS with only a Red & Black display. 😛
Umm….. I wouldn’t go that far. The $250 price tag is bad enough… 😀
Looks like I’ll have to wait until kids start jamming keys into 3DS cartridge slots and repair parts become readily available on eBay… (Plus, I could combine Red and Black 3DSes to get a VB themed one that way!)
Actually, I have 1 broken stand and one that is still holding. To fix the broken one, I just hot-glued the piece back together and then tightly wrapped a zip-tie around the whole assembly for extra strength.
Really, since it’s a fairly common problem, that might be another candidate for custom part fabrication. 😀
I think that mainstream low-budget games have been dead on consoles for a while now. What that market has sort of transformed into is the overly broad genre of “indie games”, which are gaining a lot of popularity on the PC. As of late, I’ve been doing a lot more PC gaming than I used to… Of course, I don’t even have a console from this generation, so I’ve also been having fun sifting through older console libraries looking for hidden gems. At any rate, I don’t think the 3DS is going to “kill” that market when it’s already been dead for a while in my opinion.
I didn’t read the article too intensively, but I don’t find it that offensive. I get that feeling that a lot of gamers (myself included) disagree with Miyamoto’s latent views about what a game console should be. (I also agree with VirtualJockey’s comment about Nintendo going downhill after the SNES, but the SNES is my favorite console so I may be biased. :-D) In fact, what I was most shocked about was the fact that Gamecubes have stereoscopic capabilities built-in… I wonder how that works.
DanB wrote:
I’m betting on black and white at launch, like the recent DS releases. Too bad, because I like the red/black one myself…
Modders like to use this magical substance called vinyl dye to solve problems like that. 😉
Sorry for double posting, but I was playing around and answered my own question… I forgot to set bit 5 in SxINT. With bit 5 on, my sound gets chopped off after a different period of time depending on how I set bits 4-0.
