Benjamin Stevens wrote:
[…], could have possibly been released in July of 1995 around the same time as the Virtual Boy, […]

I assume that July 1995 was not the proposed release date, but the time the proposal/design document was written.

Dreammary wrote:
Do all test carts have “VUE – (E) BA3A” written on them?

Yes, they do. It’s the serial of the development cartridge.

Benjamin Stevens schrieb:

At the very least, I would like to know how the game would have played. Would it have been a one-on-one fighting game, where you see your character from the side and fight one-on-one battles similar to Ultraman’s, or would it have been a full 3D game where you look out of the eyes of your giant robot, and could you have moved around fully or would you have been stationary like with Teleroboxer? Have you tried asking her for details like that?

If I had to guess, I guess I’d go with a 3D one-on-one fighting game with play mechanics like Virtua Fighter and the use of polygons or the like, since Bloody Roar was released not too long after this one should have been, so perhaps ideas from this unreleased game made it into Bloody Roar.

The only information she could give me was that it’s a robot fighting game by Eighting.

ガガガイン　はエイティング開発のロボット格闘ゲームと言う情報くらいしか　公表出来ません

[KR155E]

It seems we’re out of luck for now, at least as long as Eighting still exists. Because of the possibility of a lawsuit against her, she is not willing to get the ROM dumped, share a video, or even more images from the design document. The fact that the game was never publicly announced doesn’t make it any easier to share anything. Her getting into legal problems doesn’t seem too far fetched, judging by how quickly her video was taken down in 2013…

At least I got to see photos of the cartridge, which I am allowed to share.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by KR155E.

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First time I ever hear of this one. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article does not provide any evidence or even proof of the claim that the game was planned for VB.

I have briefly talked to her this morning.

The video she posted was taken down by request of “stakeholders of the developer” and it’s difficult to share information about the game since Eighting does still exist and might go after her. She’s a former Hudson employee and has a development ROM in possession. It’s unclear whether it’s a dump or an actual cartridge, but I strongly assume it’s the latter. Unfortunately, she currently does not have a Virtual Boy, so she can’t shoot a new video.

I did not get another reply after asking if there was a possibility to share the ROM… Will wait for another day, but might have to play the “obscene amounts of money” card. 😉

Very cool discovery! I did a bit of research on the title and it seems the Japanese community has known about this game for some years and even got to see a 58-second video of it in action in 2013, uploaded by the same person who just tweeted the document photo! Unfortunately, the video was quickly deleted on the same day. The description is still there, though, and it is juicy! Apparently, there was a sample ROM produced and the uploader has it in her possession. I am trying to get in touch.

Link: http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm21014915

幻のバーチャルボーイ開発ソフト　鉄鋼無敵ガガガイン バーチャルボーイ発売１年が過ぎた頃発売はハドソン
企画開発エイティングで開発していた８０年代ロボット格闘ゲーム「鉄鋼無敵ガガガイン」のサンプルROMを実機の小さい覗き窓からスマホで撮影しました凄くレスポンスもよく技も出しやすく楽しいです　開発中にバーチャルボーイの寿命も尽きお蔵入りになりましたサンプルなので曲はぱにっくボンバーマンです発売していればバーチャルボーイの中では人気ソフトになれたのではないかと思います

Machine translation by Google Translate:

Phantom virtual boy development software Steel invincible Gaga Gain
Around the year after the release of the virtual boy sale was taken at the Hudson project development aid. The 80’s robot fighting game “Steel invincible Gaga Gain” sample ROM was taken with a smartphone from the small peep window of the real machine It was a very good response It is also easy to put out and fun It is a sample that has become a storage entrance since the lifetime of the virtual boy has also been exhausted during development I think that the song is a Bunberman bakuman song If it is on sale it would be a popular software in the virtual boy

Bonus – some tweets about the video: https://twitter.com/hashtag/sm21014915

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There are various ways described here: http://projectvb.com/tech/erasesram.html

Yes, Mednafen is still the go-to Virtual Boy emulator.

Let’s not forget Rustual Boy, though. It’s in very active development, release 0.2.0-alpha just came out a few days ago. Despite the “alpha” in its version number, it’s already running pretty nicely and has a high compatability, but it’s currently command line only.

If you’re interested in the development of Rustual Boy, its author, ferris, does regular live streams on Twitch (I use to watch the recorded streams on Youtube). He recently modded an old Virtual Boy with a serial port for more effective hardware fuzzing. Highly recommended watch, although I get barely half of the stuff he’s doing. 😀

vuefinder83 wrote:
I recently scored this “in box” copy of Red Alarm with everything included in the picture, and with a good buy-it-now price! 😉

Good price! Also, I don’t think I ever saw a US Virtual Boy game come with a Must See 3-D Sweepstakes leaflet before!?

mellott124 wrote:
VB controller USB adapter housing design completed. Ordering the first prototypes now. Likely to be a spin but fingers crossed. 🙂

Super sweet! Looks pretty official.

Dan, sorry for the delayed response!

The first choice to make is between using either plain libgccvb or VUEngine to build your project upon.

libgccvb is a light Virtual Boy hardware library. If you have worked with C before, you shouldn’t have problems getting used to it. But you’ll have to read up on how the Virtual Boy’s image processor (VIP) works in order to get stuff on screen. The basics (Worlds, Chars, BGmaps, etc) are pretty straight forward, so I think it will be a realtively short learning period before you can make a simple demo with this.

The other option, VUEngine, is a versatile and powerful game engine. It automates all the hardware management so you don’t have to know about the VB hardware to begin using it, at least basic knowledge will be required to max out its possibilities, though.

If you already have experience with other game engines like Unity 3D, it certainly helps to understand a lot of the concepts driving the VUEngine since they’re very similiar to modern engines. The difference to these is that the visual representation of objects is not 3D, but 2D sprites. So, levels are 3D, but visual objects in these are 2D.

The real hassle is the syntax I guess, and it may take a bit to get used to it, since the engine uses a set of macros for its OOP features.

All in all, libgccvb is probably recommended to get started. VUEngine has a much steeper learning curve than using plain libgccvb, but if you can get past that, it’s really powerful – I certainly don’t want to work without it anymore.

VBDE comes with a bunch of sample projects for both libgccv-based and VUEngine-based projects. A good way to get into it is to open one of these, compile, then modify, compile again and see what happens until you find your way around.

So, two and a half years later, the commercial is still lost… Just want to add a tiny bit of additional info I found.

According to http://top-028tw.blogspot.de/2013/04/cm-r4_15.html#1, the video is 16 seconds long. The channel was called “retrovideojapan” and located at http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOrvdBmXtIVWvI734f1P0YA.

Not that these are useful, though. 😉

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Awesome, thank you for the great scans, Ben!

Since we know from magazine articles that Coconuts were at E3 1995, and announced exactly these 5 VB games at the show, I do believe that this was handed out at E3 1995. I have often seen people confuse E3 and CES and the same is likely true for the seller of this catalog. Don’t know about the date, E3 started on May 11th. Maybe “May 1” is yet another typo and they meant to write “May 11” or the catalog was also handed out at another show that happened on May 1st. Could also be just the date the item was produced.

I too think that “War Simulation” is the same as “Star Seed”. They probably did not have a proper title (for the US market) at the time of writing.

So, I also conclude it’s “Intercept” then, not “Interceptor” as we previously referred to. Also, it seems to be “Sunday’s Point”, not “Sundays Point” (note the whitespace between “Sunday” and “s”).

What’s the timeline for vbde? I actually made a number of changes to it and libgccvb which I would like to add. Not everything is in a perfect state right now though.

VBDE 1.2.1 will be out tomorrow. Let’s merge in your changes for 1.3.0 when you’re ready. 🙂

Clear ones, huh? Looks fantastic!

Great news, you grabbing it is the best that could happen, Ben! 🙂

We’ll add a communications class to the VUEngine soon, which allows multiplayer matches. It won’t matter what talks on the other end of the cable, be it two or more VB’s connected locally, or a PC program on the other end that communicates with other VBs over the internet. At least that’s how I picture it, Jorge will do the actual implementation of the class.

I REALLY hope we can get online multiplayer to work! It would be amazing to run an online service where you can play any future multiplayer VB games against each other. We’ll need to negotiate some standards to make that possible. Besides the VUEngine implementation, there should also be one in libgccvb. I think thunderstruck already worked on getting that done.

PVB sync would be nice, so that cartridges can linked to PVB accounts, highscores can be synced, etc. Then there could be a frontend integrated right in PVB.

It would also be really cool to offer a “spectator mode”, where people can watch online matches of others, right on their VBs.

Great, thank you Robert!

[KR155E]

If this is authentic, this is a really exciting find, Robert! Not only it’s the first known mention of North American releases of these games, but also even a press release on one of those. Also, “War Simulation”? Could that be Star Seed?

But, ugh, the auction has been deleted before I could save the images and description. It also had images of a Space Squash press release and of the cover. The description mentioned this being from CES 1995. I could only find a tiny thumbnail of the cover through Google image search.

Did anyone save all that?

Also, I am wondering what you guys think about the item. The cover looked pretty authentic to me, the spelling in the press release is horrible, though. 🙂 This article seems to back its authenticity: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/articles/?s013096001

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Elrinth wrote:
if there is any simple way to:
1. build & compile
2. test in emulator

Yep, VBDE (http://vbde.planetvb.com/). 🙂