Bug: if you click 3D Models from the Development navigation menu, it brings you to the top Development page. You misspelled the URL. 😉

Oops, classical Chris, forgot to refresh the template cache after I fixed this. Done now, thanks for the heads-up!

Not sure why your padder was not on the site yet, RunnerPack, but I just added both yours and thunderstruck’s to the database.

Way to go! I was only able to watch a few small portions of the last stream, but I should have enough free time this Sunday to watch the entire thing. “Actual VB programming” sounds super interesting!

I am still working on this with Stereo Boy. We’ve moved on to using animations instead of transparencies, so we’re now using a single animated image with 2 animation frames which alternate every cycle, instead of two images, where one is constant, while the other is only shown every second frame.

We’re still experimenting with 10 colors, but it seems the best way is having 7 colors: the original 4 plus 3 in between, so we’re mixing every color only with its direct adjacents for minimal flickering and both a perfectly consistent palette and brightness settings.

Anyway, I have updated my LibreOffice Calc color table a little bit.

Attachments:

1. colorcalc-1.ods

Cool idea, I’d love to tune in! I won’t be able to watch before about 9 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well as every second weekend (starting with the next one). If you made these sessions available as recordings for those of us who weren’t able to watch live, that’d be awesome.

Hmm, interesting. I tried setting my monitor to 50Hz a while ago, but the Multi Color Demo blending seemingly flickered just as much as on 60Hz.

Yep, complete. I had a bunch of these.

Crosseye doesn’t work well for me, so I always use anaglyph glasses.

Man, you managed to squeeze FIFTY screenshots in there? These are super cool, great work! Some work better than others, but many of them are pretty inspiring. I want VB Metroid!!!11

And, as always, I LOVE the title screen animation. Very cool! 😀

So I just approached the topic from a different direction and found out that up to 10 colors are possible using this trick – not only 8. Previously I just used the scientifically proven method of trial and error(tm) using consistent brightness settings.

—

Now with a tiny bit of math involved:

Let two consecutive frames be our atomic unit, in which a color is generated from either a single color shown in both frames, or the blending of two different colors, each visible in one of the frames.

A “color” basically is just red with a certain brightness, that is a certain amount of photones emitted by the VB’s LEDs defined by how long the LED is on for that pixel.

For the previous demos, consistent brightness settings were used, meaning that every color is twice as bright as the previous one.

Black: 0
Dark Red: 32
Medium Red: 64
Bright Red: 128

—

Let’s have color #4 as an example, which is a blended color between dark red and medium red.

Even Frame: Overlaying image is not visible, thus you see the lower image’s dark red (32).

Odd Frame: Overlaying image is visible, thus you see it’s medium red (64).

The resulting perceived brightness is: (32 + 64) / 2 = 48

—

Following are the resulting 8 colors using consistent brightness settings:

#1: 0
#2: 16 (Blended)
#3: 32
#4: 48 (Blended)
#5: 64
#6: 80 (Blended)
#7: 96 (Blended)
#8: 128

—

Now, if we use non-consistent brightness settings, for example (0, 24, 80, 128), we can produce 10 different colors. I am currently trying to find the optimal values to produce a color palette as homogeneous as possible.

Find the LibreOffice Calc document I made for this attached to this post. If all goes well, the next ROM posted here will show a 10 color image. Fingers crossed that it won’t flicker on hardware either. 🙂

Attachments:

1. colorcalc.ods

StinkerB06 wrote:
What emulator did you use to take those screenshots?

You can only screenshot one of the two images that are combined in the player’s visual cortex, but not the resulting image. Therefore, all the 8 color images above are mocks.

Dreammary wrote:
I really want to see a game implement this layered dithering.

I definitely want to do that in future games where it makes sense. The drawbacks are:

– consumes extra char memory, which is often a bottleneck in VB dev
– consumes an additional world (of which there are 32 in total)
– flickers on emulators

So I guess that, in addition to using the additional colors only for shading and such, as STEREO BOY has shown, it would make sense to:

– use high color images economically
– implement an “emulator mode” that falls back to 4 color images.

There’s a dropdown on your username, but that is not mobile compatible.

Use these direct links:

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[KR155E]

So I got back to the multiple color topic and finally produced something remotely useful, only ten years after the original post. 😉

You have probably seen the news about the new Multi Color Demo? It contains an 8 color bar made of two images blended together (the overlapping image is only shown every second frame).

Here’s something a little bit more interesting, I quickly converted the Yoshi’s Island title screen to 8 colors using that trick. Make sure to try this on a real VB, since the image flickers heavily on emulators!

Unfortunately, as it turns out, the image flickers noticeably even on the VB. While I personally think that the hi-color image looks really good, I find the flickering a bit too annoying for the trick to be really feasible.

What yo you guys think?

EDIT: replaced the ROM. You can now toggle between 4 color and 8 color variants using L and R triggers.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by KR155E.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by KR155E.

Attachments:

1. 

   yoshis-island-8-colors.png
   

1. yoshis-island-8-colors.7z

Nes Freak wrote:
how hard could it bee to port those game to virtual console titles with enhanced 3d wide screen and if they bother to do so remaster at least wario world in full color

Remove that part about the “enhanced wide screen” and I’d say it should be trivial for them to create a Virtual Boy emulator for 3DS to bring Virtual Boy games to Virtual Console. But the technical side is not the problem, anyway – it’s simply an economical question, and I am afraid no one at Nintendo is seeing a high enough market of potential buyers for VB games on VC. On top, I guess Nintendo isn’t too keen on re-releasing games from a system they’d prefer to have never existed.

Our best bet for seeing full-color remakes of Virtual Boy games is doing it ourselves. See Super Mario Clash 3D.

I am curious about the Steam release. Are you going to use an emulator with a hardcoded ROM for that or do an actual port?

So, I finally saw the messed up logo myself and fixed it. The problem was that the site could still be loaded over http, while the custom font was loaded over https which broke things. All requests are now properly redirected to https.

This is fantastic news!

I was never able to reproduce this behaviour despite trying a bunch of different browsers on different machines. I have now reconverted the fonts using http://transfonter.org/ (and replaced the respective CSS rule). Hope this will fix it.

Hmm, I wonder if this cartridge is the one that this article in Nintendo Power 10/2005 talks about:

https://www.planetvb.com/modules/articles/?s004147001

I won’t expect too much from this, it’s probably just the final version we have with a few different bytes due to a different compiler version used to build or due to the changes we made to the source. But who knows! At least, in any case, this would be a 100% officially built, “clean” ROM. Also, the cartridge itself is already a huge find, since it’s the first (final version of an) official Virtual Boy flash cart to surface!

Levine91 wrote:
No pressure but if he has any other protos, they’d be more than welcomed here =P

Since this was once a NOA internal cartridge of Bound High it’s not totally unlikely that a Dragon Hopper cartridge is in the same hands. However, since Dragon Hopper hasn’t been around before, other than Bound High, this would probably be an even more “tricky subject”. Let’s see how the Bound High story continues and if the existence of another cartridge might eventually be revealed.

However, Cpt. F., in case your associate is willing to sell any other cartridges he might have, please PM me, I can forward you to people who would be willing to spend obscene amounts of money on those. 😉

Cpt. F. wrote:
I have read through all those old BH threads from 2010 & 2013 and do not believe the cart I have has any connection to them or jojobean. It is unclear if he even actually had access to a 100% cart, or was just bluffing.

There was never any actual cartridge involved. All versions out there were built from the final source code obtained from one of the game’s developers afaik.

Besides jojobean, I guess am not free of guilt of fueling the confusion, since I too have spoken of a cartridge once, like here: https://www.planetvb.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=202 I am not sure why I did that but I guess I was either not allowed to or unsure how to communicate having the sources at that point in time.