Lester Knight wrote:

I am by no means a VB expert. From what I can recall, the version we have now was compiled from source and no actual cart has ever surfaced.

That’s right. The ROM we have was built from slightly modified source code. It was a single switch statement that had to be rewritten to work around a bug in the official C compiler (VUCC). VUCC outputs ISX files, which are binaries with added debug headers for use with the VUE-Debugger. Two separate ISX converters had been written by LameBoy and RunnerPack for this cause. I think we used RP’s to convert the final ROM that was released.

Earlier attempts to build using gccVB and VUCC produced two buggy ROMs which ran well on emulators but crapped out on hardware. I didn’t release these publically until it came to my attention that someone from the “inner circle” that were given the ROM did some shady business selling the ROM and fake prototype cartridges to people.

All in all, it took almost 7 years from obtaining the source code to finally being able to build a good ROM from it.

Lester Knight wrote:

The reason I am interested in the history is that this cart looks production ready yet it has a battery. Bound High! uses a password system. So it has me wondering, what is this cart exactly? Was it a late prototype where they were toying with battery saves? Did someone from Nintendo add to another PCB to build this proto?

The SRAM is present simply because it’s a generic development flash cart that was meant to be used for any kind of game, with or without save support. I don’t think a dev cart without SRAM even exists.

Fun fact: these carts even come with 64 KByte of SRAM (Sharp LH5264TH-L). That’s 8 times the size of retail carts’ SRAM, which had only 8 KByte.

Awesome! So this is the rare flash chip equivalent of the EPROM cartridge [1] we have all seen before! Note how the (E) or (F) part of the serial relate to the type of chips used. Looks quite different than the cart that has surfaced before (holding Space Pinball) [2], which was most likely a prototype flash cart.

Thank you for sharing, Cpt. F.! I hope you can dump the ROM so we can compare it to the version that was built from the (final) sources. For a quick classification, does the game look like the final version [3] or might it be an early version that looks like in the promo video [4]? The on-screen indicators, the title screen and menus should be the most interesting parts to look at.

[1] EPROM cart: https://www.planetvb.com/modules/hardware/?type=vue&sec=ep_rom_pcb
[2] Flash cart: https://www.planetvb.com/modules/hardware/?type=vue&sec=flash_rom_pcb
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaJ-Ak2XDqQ
[4] https://www.planetvb.com/modules/games/?u001m029

[x] Virtual Boy Classic Mini confirmed

We moved to a new server yesterday, today I am working on adding SSL.

gamiac.org is where I am building a new version of Planet VB which will be using SSL from the start.

Woah, super sweet animation and great news about the programmer! :vb:

Here’s another attempt at recreating that particular Mario Demo screenshot, based on a slightly better scan of it. I think it’s pretty much pixel perfect – the dithered areas were a pretty good reference for counting pixels. 🙂

I am not sure about the background mountains, though. The outlines seem lighter, but still very much the same color as their dither pattern as well as the mounds in front of them.

Attachments:

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   mario-demo-1.png
   

2. 

   mario-demo-1-recreation.png
   

Great to hear! I am looking forward to hear more about your project. The Mario sprites got me excited. 😀

I wrote a simple script to convert Tiled (http://www.mapeditor.org/) maps to VUEngine stages. Due to several engine changes in the past months, the script’s output is no longer compatible with the current engine version, so I need to put in some work to bring it up to date.

So yes, theoretically, there is a VUEngine level editor. 😀

BTW, someone recreated the demo’s background music:

I am not 100% sure what’s wrong there, but does it help if you move the file desactivacion.c out from the source folder to the project’s root folder?

You don’t have to worry about file sizes, the compiler will take care of choosing the right size.

The problem seems to be the whitespace in your project folder. Try renaming it to, for example, “desacivacion-3d”.

You should be able to just throw the variable at vbTextOut, instead of a fixed string. If the variable is an integer, use itoa() on it first to convert to a string.

This is definitely new and an amazing find!

Hah! Cool find, never noticed that. Since this typo has been fixed in the final version, I guess this counts as a prototype screenshot. 😀

The same screenshot can also be found in the US manual, BTW.

Attachments:

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   teleroboxer-take-a-brake.png
   

I like that story and game outlines. Good job on those screenshots as well! I would just stay more true to the original demo’s graphics and use less dither, but more solid colors.

Your approach sounds very much like Jorge’s and mine for the Mario VB demo: recreate Nintendo’s 1-level Virtual Boy Mario demo and build a full game upon that.

The old Mario VB sources are no longer useable, but they evolved into what you now know as the VUEngine Platformer Demo. It would make sense to “close the circle” and rebuild the Mario game on that foundation by replacing the graphics and re-implementing some gameplay mechanics. For such a project, I could supply all the graphical assets I did back then, edited for use in the VUEngine.

Based upon my recent experience with a similar project I have been working on, I assume it would take me about a month of on-and-off work to recreate our old demo. Make that two or three months worth of afternoons for someone who has not worked with VUEngine before and needs to find his way around first.

Thing is, besides being booked out with that other project at the moment, I would much prefer doing an original platformer. It would allow much more creative freedom and (most importantly) not cause any potential copyright problems when being released CIB.

Uh-oh, that’s a TON of misconceptions there, Matt… Let me try to resolve those.

• You’re mixing up VBDE and VUEngine.
  • VBDE is the complete development package which includes a pre-configured copy of IntelliJ IDEA, a modified copy of GCC for compiling VB ROMs, tools such as emulators to run and test your compiled ROM on a PC, as well as a bunch of code samples and more.
  • VUEngine is a game engine that comes bundled with VBDE
• All development is done in plain C. The VUEngine, however, supports object-oriented programming through the use of various macros to “simulate” the most common OOP features.
• VB ROMs basically *are* Virtual Boy (v810) machine code.
• VUEngine handles all hardware management tasks for you. You don’t have to worry about stuff like the LED’s refresh rate.

The errors you’re seeing are caused by your copy of VBDE not residing in a folder called “vbde”. To get rid of these errors and to make sure everything works fine out of the box, I recommend you grab the latest VBDE Pro from the front page and place it in C:\vbde.

You can just ignore the VCS root mapping errors. I’ll make sure they won’t pop up in the next VBDE release. To get rid of them for now, you can just delete the .vcs file from the .idea folder of the project you have currently open in IDEA.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YUU!

If I had known, I would have bundled some MPOs of birthday cakes with the new MPO sorter tool revision I sent you tonight. 😀

Anyway, that custom splash animation is beyond incredible! WOW! The screenshots looks really really good as well! Best VUE-MASTER reel to date IMHO.

Oh my, Oh my, looking gooood! Image number 9 is just gorgeous!

I wonder how some in-game shots look like on the VB. 🙂

Awesome, man, the 3D is gorgeous! I love the spinning title screen animation!

Nice! I have been looking for images of this! 🙂

Nintendo didn’t attend CES 1996, though, so I assume this flyer is from E3 1996. Probably also part of the E3 1996 press kit:

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/advertising/?r0601
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4167