Sorry for the download being broken, guys, no idea what caused this. It was probably a good thing to happen, though, and I have removed the download link now after talking to DanB.
I have been able to give this version a try, so I am most likely the only person who has played both this and the original Faceball prototype at this moment.
First of all, I have to stand up and applaud DanB for BallFace, which is REALLY a great achievement and comes surprisingly close to the original. And all that just from Mr. G’s descriptions and screenshots!
While it looks and feels great, I also have to mention that it’s still far from the original Faceball in overall completeness and polish. It is the work of only a few months after all, with hopefully many more months of work going into it in the future.
It’s also a completely different thing, psychologically, to play a real unreleased Virtual Boy game than it is to play a homebrew recreation of it. While the latter is fun, the first thing is simply not artificially reproduceable.
After all, I think that BallFace is a great thing to happen and something I look forward to, but it should absolutely no be seen as a danger for the release of Faceball. I agree that BallFace should not be released until after the original Faceball has been funded and released. Then we can all look forward to two great new games coming out this year with no stress involved.
With the original Faceball coming out anyway, maybe changing BallFace into an original first person game would be worth a thought or two. But one thing doesn’t exclude the other, as Dan just said to me on the chat. 🙂
gamesbloke wrote:
I note that VUE Snake has High Score save functionality but it does not save my scores when I switched off the VB after flashing. Do I just flash the game in the usual way or do I need to do something extra?
Many thanks!
It’s a flawed save routine in the game itself. It works on the emulators, but not on hardware. Version 1.2 will fix that. 🙂
I am glad the elves showed up, and they had a great idea with adding classic music, too. But did they forget to remove the “demo” label from the title screen?
Report Category: Copyright and trademark
Reason for Report: Counterfeit item or authenticity disclaimer
Detailed Reason: Counterfeit, fake, or replica items
Description: “Trying to sell replica as much overpriced genuine prototype.”
OK, there’s some misinformation here, partly caused by my own article on this site, which has been written a long time ago. A lot of additional light has been shed on the subject since then, though, so I think we have to rethink.
A demo called “Mario Bros. VB” was playable at Shoshinkai in 1994, when the Virtual Boy was shown to the public for the very fist time. It was a almost direct 2D port of the classic Mario Bros. game and certainly inspired the creation of Mario Clash, therefore I’d classify it as a prototype of Mario Clash.
Then there was a self-running one-level Mario sidescroller shown in video form at E3 and WCES 1995. This one level obviously was a demo to showcase what the VB can pull off, hence the short level with a Zelda-inspired top-down viewed room and the weird chronology with Mario cracking through the floor before coming out of a pipe in the background. I think this game should be classified as a technical demo rather than an unreleased game as it was only a concept and probably never playable. It seems that at least the Mario sprite was (reworked slightly and) reused for Mario Clash, though.
We managed to find extensive video footage of both demos, which you can find in the games section.
Now to speak about the two Mario homebrew efforts, in both of which I was involved.
The first one was started by DogP, who did the programming, and me, I did the graphics, like ten years ago. There was only a tiny demo before the game got cancelled.
Then there was jorgeche’s Mario game, which got a bit farther. It all started in 2006, when jorge released the first demos of his “VB Game Development Kit”, which was going to be his master thesis. These demos came in form of a side-scrolling Mario game with sprites from Super Mario RPG, in which you could freely move not only left and right, but also into and out of the screen. There was also Goombas and boxes, but those were really hard to hit because you had tobe at the exactly right spot on the z-axis. I talked to jorge a lot about his engine back then and I proposed to use the sprites I originally did for the other Mario project, lock the game to two or three layers on the z-axis and connect these via bridges. Hence… recreating the look and feel of the Mario demo that was shown by Nintendo. We did that and eventually, the engine was released as “VBJAEngine” and the Mario demo participated in the PVB Coding Competition. Jorge and I thought about developing the demo further into a full game, but then Jorge started his job in the gaming industry and, sadly, did not have much time for the VB any more. I tried to take over and enhanced the demo a little bit, added Goombas and experimented with other stuff. I noticed some bugs while doing that, like with background position calculation. This was not an easy thing to fix, though, and the rewrite of the respective parts of the engine were never finished.
That was exacty the problem. The vbPrint function worked with char and u16, which I both changed to u8 and now its working.
In addition, the font I posted is not ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), so I had to move all the extended characters around and add a bunch of new ones.
Nah, no problem. I was just reading through the dev wiki and thought that those effects would work very well on an underwater game. Fishbone is great as it is, though. 🙂
Eric, this is a huge thing to do and one of the reasons this community is as great as it is. Thank you! I just hope you can make your money back and won’t have to pay this release out of your own pockets in the end. Let me know if there’s any way I can help you with this, like featuring a fundraiser or something.
Since you’re working closely with UncleTusk, you know that a cart release of Blox is planned. Well, I don’t know what the profit is from every cart sold, but it would be great if every single cent of it would go in your direction.
Great work, Ben! Due to the large levels, this game plays a bit different than the original. Your first premise is to find the goal as fast as possible while you’re rushing through the large levels. I always tried to avoid fights with monsters because it would’ve cost too much time. Feels a bit like madness indeed. 😉
One request: could you please post the patch file itself, so I can add that to the site?
This was most likely sent by a user who was mistakenly flagged as being a spammer and deleted, because of some pattern in the username, email or signature that is typical for automatically generated spam accounts.
My apologies to whoever sent that PM! Unfortunately, we’re getting too many spam registrations to throroughly check each and every user to detect false positives before deletion.
wazzal schrieb:
I would love to be able to play the version of snake that goes with this rad birthday story; can you post the rom here for us KR155E?
🙂
Nah, I don’t really want to release Ben’s version, but I certainly will release version 1.2 soon, which will have all of the improvements found in Ben’s version, like a fixed save function working on hardware, plus maybe some more updates like additional languages. 🙂
I too experienced that quite often last week. I am pretty sure it’s not our fault but some other site that is hosted on the same server, so there’s nothing we can do.
I have just rented a quite powerful Virtual Server with root access and everything, so once I learned my stuff about setting up and running an Ubuntu server and moved the site over, things like that 500 error will no longer happen. Not only that, but the site might also load faster, plus we’ll be able to pull off crazy stuff like running a Virtual Boy homebrew GIT repository or a service for online multiplayer games via Mednafen or something. 😉
