Does it look like it might be inside the cover? If so, you could try a blast of clean, dry air under the edges, perhaps with a thin hobby/razor blade gently wedged in the gap to make it wider.

KR155E wrote:
Have you been messing with ImpactJS? 🙂

Not as such… I just stumbled upon it while researching a related topic. It would be fun to try to make a game with it, though.

BTW, cool “re-mockup” :thumpup: Now just slap it together with some old BLOX code and make a full game! 😉

[RunnerPack]

These look eerily similar to “Biolab Disaster”, which I just “rediscovered” (and played through again) last night! Spoooooky!

I would *love* to play a good “mini-metroid-style” platformer, filled with tons of hand-drawn stereo environments, on the VB.

EDIT: I restored the “VALUE” image to 1:1 scale (and padded/cropped it to VB screen size).

• This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by RunnerPack.

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No apology needed; I don’t expect everyone to know as much as I do 😉

But seriously, ignorance is not a crime, especially for someone your age. However, it’s practically criminal if you’ve decided to stop learning. With access to the Internet (including yours truly ;-)) – and, apparently, unlimited free-time – there’s really no excuse for that.

You should also stop making excuses for your use of English. Other than a few common misspellings, you actually have very good usage. I can point to a few publications (both online and print) that allow worse gaffes from their “professional” writers to go uncorrected!

Definitely keep making recordings and other stuff to help the site. I only ask that you take a look at your tools and techniques, and make sure you’re using the best ones you can find – and don’t be afraid to ask questions!

blackeyedgamer wrote:

Also I would like to throw in that the songs are 8 bit. What kind of quality are you looking for?

Actually, most VB music is made of 6-bit samples, mixed at 13-bit precision, then quantized down to 10-bit precision for D/A conversion, but I think you missed my point.

First, I didn’t say “quality”, I said “fidelity”. You cannot change the quality of the music a VB produces, other than to reduce it by throwing information away (e.g. through the use of lossy compression) or by adding something that shouldn’t be there (e.g. the “tink” noises).

Fidelity is how truthfully something is reproduced. Somewhere there exists a combination of hardware which would allow for the perfect, bit-for-bit recording and reproduction of the sounds produced by a VB. I’m not saying one needs to go to such extremes, but there must be some middle-ground.

Again, I am not trying to insult or discourage you or the author(s) behind the emulator you used. However, the difference between your recordings and the sounds produced by VB hardware was noticeable to at least one person, so there is obviously room for improvement in the process.

I think the key concept here is “fidelity”. Not to knock you or the emulator authors, but maybe the work shouldn’t be put into such a project until it can be done with actual hardware (or at a point when the emulation is 99%+ accurate) and using at least “prosumer” level recording hardware/software. Just my $0.02.

I think it’s probably aimed more toward companies for advertising, trade-shows, etc. Although, no one’s stopping you from building your own and impressing the ladies at your next soirée 😉

blackeyedgamer wrote:
I recorded it with Camtasia Studio.

Should I have recorded with mednafen?

Well, it would have been easier, but I’m not sure how Camtasia gets its audio, so it may not have been any higher quality.

blackeyedgamer wrote:
Oh and on a second note RunnerPack. Why did you bring up the JPEG thing? That confused me highly.

I thought it was a pretty clear comparison of lossy versus lossless compression… Have you never zoomed in on a JPEG?

First, a word about compression: I would never save a VB screen-shot – or any other palettized image – as a JPEG, due to the lossy compression. Using a PNG makes much more sense. The same goes for music and sounds – why use MP3, when there is FLAC (among many other lossless codecs)? It’s possible that some of the distortion is caused (or exacerbated) by the lossy compression.

By comparing blackeyedgamer’s track seven to speedyink’s, I found most of the “ping” signal (which, to me, sounds more like a “tink”, but I digress…) in several 100Hz-wide bands, centered around: 1950Hz, 2450Hz, 3150Hz, 3300Hz, and 3950Hz. Using notch filters at those frequencies makes it much easier to listen to. Given FLACs of both sources (emulator and hardware) the emulated ones could probably be cleaned up much more throughly (and the analysis may even help the developers improve mednafen’s sound fidelity).

My best (not particularly well-informed) guess for the source of the “ping/tink” is a beat frequency caused by an unforeseen interaction between (whatever serves as) the PRNG for channel 6 and the various waveform sampling mechanisms in the VSU emulation code.

@blackeyedgamer: I would be curious to know exactly how you captured the sound, i.e. using mednafen’s WAV capture function, or through your sound-card’s “stereo mix” input.

For those of us with no 3DS, here’s the link from the QR code:

http://www.renegadekid.com/images/WDX.mpo

You can open it with Stereo Photo Maker, or you can extract the two (JPEG) images using a recent version of IrfanView.

I like the image, but I think it’s more than just a recolor; I think it was manually composed from one or more monoscopic VBWL screen-shots. Evidence:
1. The size – 3DS 400×240 instead of VB 384×224
2. Wario isn’t 3D – I compared it to an actual screen-shot with him in the same pose; his body and right arm are definitely supposed to be at different depths.
3. Likewise with the nearest layer of rocks – not enough depth layers

It’s a decent conversion, all the same. I don’t agree with all of the color choices, but it wouldn’t bother me enough to keep me from playing all the way through… twice (at least ;-)).

I was not fortunate enough to have conversed with “Red Metal” personally, but I have no doubt the VB community has suffered quite a loss at his passing. My thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends.

@Roli: Thanks again for the shout-out – both here and on YouTube!

I have to admit, I never had trouble with dirt on the contacts – and DogP’s trick with the LIF socket usually does the trick for me – but cleaning them is a good tip, nonetheless.

I always do my best to avoid touching the LED cover, but I’ve only ever cleaned them when accidentally touched. It would be pretty hard to get dust on one, since they’re basically “hermetically sealed” in the VB. Besides, if you could see the effect of dust on the cover at all, it would be pretty easy to tell the difference between that and an actual missing row caused by a faulty cable.

Dust on the mirrors, on the other hand, is quite visible as an odd, blurry, horizontal line which doesn’t span the width of the display, and which moves relative to the image when you move your head. It’s a lot harder to clean the mirrors, and there’s a much higher chance of messing something up in the process. They’re first-surface mirrors, which means there’s no protective glass layer over the delicate polished surface – although there may be some type of clear lacquer, so never clean them with any kind of solvent!

e5frog wrote:
I guess the 3D print is most of the cost?

It’s my understanding that the 3D prints are only being used to evaluate the fit of the connector before the design is sent to be made into a injection mold, from which the actual connectors will be made. That is going to be the bulk of the cost. Not counting that large up-front investment, the actual connectors will likely be pennies a piece, depending on the total amount made (you could certainly get hundreds – and possibly thousands – out of the mold before it’s worn out).

speedyink is banned for being a spoil-sport!

That is extremely good quality for VHS, especially given the age of the tape. It must have been played very little, if at all, before Tokyo Nerd acquired it. He must also have a top-of-the line player in great condition. Anyone feel like adding English subs to the YT video?

TheNix wrote:
Looking at some of the source code there are visualboy specific functions that are necessary to use to make a game. I was wondering if there was a dictionary that had a list of the functions and what they do or how everyone figured out what is available.
Thanks

Sadly, the library is only barely commented, and no documentation at all exists (to my knowledge). Happily, there isn’t much of it, and it’s pretty easy to understand – especially if read in conjunction with the available Virtual Boy hardware documentation.

You can find the library source in: C:\vbde\libs\libgccvb

@iMac G4: you’re banned for proposing such a silly game. 😀

TheNix wrote:
I don’t know if I should keep posting my question in here or make a new topic each time but I’ll start in here. So I’m looking through the code for the Demo2 game you can download from this site, and one question I have is how to find out what map coordinates to load into memory. Does VIDE give you the numbers or do you just learn from experience?

The coordinates are in pixels, and they depend on the image(s) you’re storing in the BGMap in question. If you’re converting an existing image, you can get pixel coordinates using the mouse in most paint programs (usually somewhere on the status bar).

It sounds like you might need a better grasp of the VB’s graphics hardware, which is difficult to obtain just by looking at a few pieces of code. If you want to know all about Worlds, BGMaps, Objects, and Chars (as well as basically every other aspect of the VB), you should look in the “Tech Scroll” and/or the wiki – both are available under the “Development” menu at the top of the page.

Here’s a little hint, though: you need to subtract one from both the width and height values of a World, as a value of zero actually means “one pixel wide (or tall)”. For example, to get a full screen image, set width to 383 and height to 223.

BTW, I would just keep asking questions here, but it’s up to you to decide whether something warrants its own thread.

That is very cool, thunder. I definitely want to give that a shot. Any idea when you’ll have it ready to share? (Not that I want to rush you…)

Aw, HorvatM beat me to the “affine mode” comment 😛

That’s a pretty cool effect, KR155E!