Nin, that’s great news, I hope you can pull this off! I’d love to do the port but I am too busy with other projects at the moment I am afraid. In case you end up using the VUEngine, I’ll try my best to answer your questions, though!
Very cool, mmora, thank you for doing these scans and translations!
Regarding the Club Nintendo article, I am pretty sure that they’re referring to the demos shown behind closed doors at WCES ’95. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC70nSxXGH8. “Road Racer” would be the racing demo, while “Vector Blaster” would be either Red Alarm or the demo commonly referred to as the “Starfox Demo” (See, for example, 1:26).
It’s a mystery where these names come from… They’re probably made up, but I guess there’s a slight chance that these are the actual titles of the Racing and Starfox demos.
These are fine. The *.o and *.d files in the ./build/release/ folder are intermediate files for the compiler (a cache) which speed up consecutive builds, since only changed files will have to be processed the next time.
You found a bug in the default makefile! Problem is that the compiler processes the contents of the build folder along with all the actual sources and thus produces that deep nesting you encountered.
I fixed the command to ignore the build folder. Please replace {VBDE}\system\makefile with the attached makefile.
Note: I had to zip it because our forum software does not seem to like files without a file ending…
I’m glad VBDE is working well for you! Did you already manage to adjust one of your own projects to compile with it?
VBDE has no external dependencies, so you won’t need Cygwin.
To set Mednafen to 2D mode, you have to edit a few lines in {VBDE}\tools\emus\mednafen-0.9.43-win32\mednafen-09x.cfg:
;Anaglyph maximum-brightness color for left view.
vb.anaglyph.lcolor 0xff0000
;Anaglyph preset colors.
vb.anaglyph.preset disabled
;Anaglyph maximum-brightness color for right view.
vb.anaglyph.rcolor 0x000000
I don’t have time to look into the error right now and I’m about to leave for a week, but in the meantime you could try the (very old) VBDE Preview 1, which came with the GH MIDI Player as its sample project.
I hope in the future the engine allow the use of scanned images ’cause i have some pretty good ideas for some hombrew games for the VB. I’m not a coder but a artist so keep that in mind 😉
Hmm, do you mean scanned-in hand-made drawings like your avatar? Well, VBDE supports the conversion of PNG, JPG and other images, so once it’s on your PC, there shouldn’t be a problem to convert it for VB. 🙂
The VUEngine offers various OOP features like inheritance through macros.
The way I’d do such a game would be the following:
The baseMinigameState would define all the attributes and methods a mini game has to have at minimum
There’s no “primary game” running at the same time as the mini games, instead the engine would be directly executing the various minigameStates. Since these inherited from baseMinigameState, they include all the logic needed to execute themselves, start a new mini game and pass their variables over (good idea there, Twila!), etc.
The various minigameStates hold their attributes like winning message, etc. and they have the ability to overwrite their base methods to customize, for example, how the remaining time is displayed
There’s a global array that holds all the available minigameStates
That’s actually pretty similar to syncophono’s approach, but in VUEngine terms. 🙂
The idea is cool and I’d probably like to contribute a game or two. But I’d propose a different approach:
Don’t use any copyrighted material but make it an original game
Build the game framework as a VUEngine project and push it into a public code repository (preferrably Git). Instead of that struct, have a minigameBaseState which all mini games inherit from.
One more little update: we now have an automated release process, which uploads new ROMs whenever we add new features, fix bugs, etc. I have updated the news post with a link to the release folder.
BTW, the platformer demo is pretty sweet. I really like the graphics, looks really nice! Didn’t have much time last night, but I will finish it!
Cool, thanks!
@KR155E: If you’ve already an older version of VBDE installed, can you just install the newer one to the same directory or is it better to first uninstall the older one?
The best practice is to remove and replace the older version.
Huh I may have to do a little proof of concept with this. Hm
Are you talking about porting Yan’s World to the VUEngine? Yes please, it’s a match made in heaven! 😎
What’s the platform support on the new compiler? Is it only for Windows?
VBDE and the included gccvb are Windows only (though it runs nicely on VirtualBox). But with Elmer’s patches you could build gccvb for other targets, like Linux or OSX. I think he wanted to release his patches once the new VBDE is out.
I have never gotten Ending A myself, but to quote Brian Hodges’ FAQ on the game…
[…] to get Ending A, you must start at RoPE
and finish Hyde without dying. You don’t have to stay on the top path, you
just have to reach (and beat) Hyde without dying.
“ROPE” is the first level, “HYDE” the top right one.
