That’s awesome! Thanks for stopping by! It was really cool to see someone check out a lesser-loved system in a new way like that. 😀

Welcome to the forums! You should try out Bound High if you haven’t yet. 🙂

Awesome gesture! I hope some of the community take you up on your offer and make some really snazzy games.

Thank you, in advance!

MineStorm wrote:

What battery cages are being used on these?

These are the one’s I use (CR1225 version). It’s the thinnest holder, but still needs a bit of dremeling to get it to fit the thin VB cart cases.

I don’t know if you could hack it into a GB cart.

Awesome, thanks! What’s the part number on that guy? It’s worth a shot, if nothing else… and I have a cartridge ready to test, even. 🙂

Cheers!

Thanks for scanning those protos. They look super great; I’m quite jealous!

My personal preference (since I know you just *can’t wait* to hear from me) is for the English Gundams to look like NA boxes — the red & blue and awesome 90s-ness 😀 If I had a modicum of artistic merit I’d offer to help… but I really don’t.

@bigmak/Minestorm: What battery cages are being used on these? Is it remotely feasible that they could work on old GB games where size is a big problem? I’ve got good battery holders for SNES carts, but aside from one batteryless “Oracle of the Ages” for GBC, I haven’t had a need to find a cage for those… but knowing which one to start on would be a good first step. 🙂

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

jrronimo wrote:
No doubt the game’s in good condition, but Virtual Bowling it ain’t. $1,500 is ridiculous.

The thing one always must keep in mind with listings that include a “Best Offer” option, though, is that the seller himself might think that the listed price is ridiculous and that nobody will ever click the “Buy It Now” button, so he simply wants to hear out offers. Some sellers want an offer pretty close to their listed price, but others are willing to accept much, much less.

That’s true, but I still don’t think Red Alarm is worth $1500 in any form, haha. Maybe if it were a prototype on the order of difference of Space Pinball vs. Galactic Pinball. Actually, that’d probably be $5k or much, much more.

ANYWAY, for a “run of the mill” copy of Red Alarm, VGA graded or no, I wouldn’t offer more than a few hundred, personally.

…but my collection doesn’t look as nice as that guys’, probably, haha.

Are you still interested in Galactic Pinball & Red Alarm? I sent you a PM. If you aren’t, there’s another buyer for Pinball, at least.

I’d guess it’s largely display cable issues. Someone could probably do pretty good for themselves repairing them, or even just selling the solder-repaired displays themselves, but I don’t know if you could make enough money to cover the cost of purchasing the units in the first place. :/

My personal favorite is this auction up at the moment:

1. Common game? Check.
2. VGA Grading? Check.
3. Higher price than you would ever pay for #1? MEGA-CHECK:

nintendo game virtual boy RED ALARM sealed complete VGA 90+ MINT !!!!!

No doubt the game’s in good condition, but Virtual Bowling it ain’t. $1,500 is ridiculous.

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Awesome, thanks! I got my RetroUSB kits but then didn’t ever make time to try installing them. It’s still on the docket, though; maybe in a week or two. I’d love to as much confirm that it works as anything.

@Glover: Congratulations! Have a great time!

@Protoman85: I paid $450 for my Jack Bros. earlier this year, which I know is high… but the box was absolutely pristine and I was sick of waiting to complete my collection, so I don’t feel *quite* that bad.

Cart-only tend to be in the $100-$160 range. Obtainable, but pricey!

Oooh, those are quite nice. I think I’ll have to pick up a batch for protection’s sake.

I wish there were a “point in time” VGA grading. It’s nice to know how nice something is, but not if I can’t play it.

Sorry for the delayed response, but I checked this morning and I do indeed have duplicates of Red Alarm and Galactic Pinball. 😀

PM coming your way!

Excellent update! I really hope I can snag a Gundam. 😀

I’ll double-check when I get home — I think I have extra cartridges for Galactic Pinball and for Red Alarm. 😀

I *highly* recommend you pick up Bound High from Uncle Tusker, too! It’s on the pricey-end, but you get one of the best VB games never released, heh.

Welcome to the forums!

TheForce81 does display repairs for people, but there’s a chance yours might be beyond recovery. I think Runnerpack recently did a repair as well, but I don’t know if he’s “open for business”, as it were.

You might end up having to buy a broken VB on eBay (~$40, at the moment) to get the salvage parts you need. I have two VBs that have display issues, for instance, and intend to repair them some day… but haven’t yet.

So… yeah. Welcome!

HorvatM wrote:
Hold on.

RunnerPack wrote:
He was the one from whom I received the BH source code.

(“other people” had copies of the source, I later came to find out)

So who else has it? How was it obtained? From Hideyuki Nakanishi? Under what license? Who got to decide who gets access to it or not? Is there hope for getting source code of other games (released or unreleased)?

Considering the source code hasn’t been shared with The Community at large (at least, publicly), which I can only assume would result in improved homebrew programming techniques, I’m guessing Nakanishi gave it to the people in the community with programming chops on the condition it not be shared publicly.

Before I go back on-topic: re: Ben Stevens Dragon Hopper vidpro card: Totally agree that between that and the Nintendo Power stuff it was likely finished (or close). I didn’t realize that card existed (or, rather, the picture of it — it looks legit enough) and I guess I just meant to say that I wouldn’t consider Nintendo Power as a 100% accurate primary source. Or maybe I should give them a little more credit…

BACK ON TOPIC MODE: ACTIVE

I’m totally for English Gundam, but that might be my love of all things Gundam talking. Homebrew games on cartridge would be really neat as well, so long as their releases are spaced out regularly enough (maybe one a month, production times allowing?) so that I can afford them with regularity, hahaha. (Seriously, I get paid once a month, and it’d be brutal to have to buy 4 VB games at once, haha.)

Oh, and as a note for people talking about the Gundam Translation: There IS a translation patch available made by Ben Stevens & his brother, here: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/games/?r011d

It seemed like some people were talking like they didn’t know about it, so there’s that, haha. Combined with a flash cart, you can play it on real hardware!

Interesting idea for the Pause button. How does it work?

That is a super mint controller, but a bit outta my price range. I don’t have any games for my Vectrex yet, unfortunately, so it’s not too worth it. One of these days I’ll order one of those multicarts…

Ehh… I take anything Nintendo Power says with a grain of salt: Especially at that time, it was a marketing mouthpiece for Nintendo directly, so I don’t know that I’d take their word as law.

But I would wager they probably had a version of DH that was super close to completion, if it wasn’t 100% complete.

So far as I’ve been able to glean, people have essentially said: “There are prototypes you’ll never hear of” and left it at that. If anyone does have Dragon Hopper or Zero Racers or anything else, we’ll have to pry ’em from their cold, dead hands.

Or we’ll have to raise a bigmak-ian sum of cash to buy the dumps off ’em, but even if anyone has them they don’t seem to be sharing anyway… so all we can do is wait. I wouldn’t even know who to throw money at. We’d probably have to have a (minimum) 5-figure sum of money available to send to someone directly before anyone would even *talk* to us. My guess would be that DogP knows who to talk to, but it seems like he isn’t around much these days or doesn’t want to be pestered; dunno.