[RunnerPack]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

@DogP: I had never played it either, but when Matej showed me, I instantly knew it would make a great VB game.

I hope this isn’t against the spirit of the competition, but it turns out I goofed and somehow messed up the parallax calculation in the submitted version (collaboration with someone seven time-zones away has its problems, even on the Internet… or maybe because of it :-P). Here’s a fixed version.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by RunnerPack.

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HorvatM wrote:

It’s actually Alt+Shift+1.

Now, where is that documented?

Ahem…

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Mario Clash uses it as a set of directional “throw” buttons (so you can be facing left and throw right, etc).

BTW, there’s a complete set of game manuals on the site; feel free to browse them and check their button configurations.

Why ha’ ye no’ made a wee surrr-vay for us tae fill oot, ye daftie?

(Sorry… I’ve been reading a lot of Discworld books featuring the Nac Mac Feegle lately, and Rob Anybody’s speech-pattern kinda rubbed off on me ;-))

I haven’t played either game for any considerable length of time, so my opinion is probably useless…

Puzzle games are generally more my style, but 3-D Tetris didn’t seem to grab me like I thought it would, despite (or maybe due to) having played the snot out of an old shareware 3D Tetris game (the name of which totally escapes me) back in the early 90’s on Windows 3.1.

On the other hand, I can’t imagine being anything other than bored out of my gourd by video bowling (without even a trackball interface to make it semi-realistic).

I haven’t done it, but from what I know of SRAM, it’s probably as close to instant as doesn’t matter.

If you’re that worried about it, you could try to power the cart during the process (being very careful not to short anything) and let the battery manager IC keep the chip powered while the battery is out. Probably too difficult and dangerous (to the cart if not yourself) to be worth trying, though…

BTW, you’d also want to make sure the chip-select and write signals to the SRAM were disabled, otherwise spurious noise would probably scramble something, anyway. But, again, I don’t recommend it.

Search or ask around for “Silverhill Tools ATKNND”.

I was referring to ELF sections. You don’t “start new ones” as they are pre-defined for particular purposes.

If it is a compiler bug, there’s no telling when it’ll be fixed. You should probably just start looking for places where you can reduce the memory footprint of your game. Compression is worth a try. BGMaps and, to a lesser extent, Charsets are both amenable to many different compression algorithms.

VirtualChris wrote:
Please help. I am unable to make this game 8 MB. I got rid of the number in the padding section of the vbh file and it still wants to be an abnormal size. What am I doing wrong?

At least on my system, there is nothing padding-related in the VBH file, nor the build batch file. The padder is only called in the “Flash” script before the FlashBoy writing app is run.

Have you tried manually running the padder on the ROM?

I think the ROM should come out of the compiler a power of two in size. If it doesn’t, you’ve probably run into a bug in the linker script, or exceeded the size of one of the sections.

boom wrote:
Do you happen to know what he used to scrape the film near the vias?

I would say probably either a hobby knife or a fiberglass pencil.

boom wrote:
Do you happen to have the photos for the bypass surgery? The old post doesn’t have them anymore.

I knew these would come in handy 😉

Let us know how it goes (in a new thread).

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As a small addendum to Greg’s instructions, you’ll want to erase the last line in the file (“make.bat c:\gccvb\thing\ MMXVB”) before compiling. This is a command used to run the compiler, and isn’t part of the actual VB code. It will confuse the compiler and prevent it from making a working ROM (or any ROM at all, actually). You’ll probably also want the file to end with a .c extension, rather than .txt.

Welcome, Pete!

blitter pretty much covered the bases, but there are a few existing projects that you might be able to glean some info from:

First up, on the “send image data to an unmodified VB” side, there’s the “VeGL” project. This is a custom library running on a PC which is used to render stereoscopic graphics in a familiar, OpenGL-like way. The results are sent to the VB via its 2-player link port, which is connected to the PCs LPT port (remember those? ;-))

Second (and third?) are a pair of hardware projects (here and here) with the exact opposite aim: getting the video generated by the VB into a format displayable on a TV or VGA monitor. Should be lots of goodies to be had there.

Finally, Sprite(TM) recently posted this article about driving strings of RGB LEDs using the LCD header of a single-board computer (running Linux). Something similar might be a good way of generating a VB-like video signal.

Keep us informed on this. I, for one, would be very interested in seeing what you come up with! I have the mechanical parts (lenses, mirrors, servos, etc.) from a dismantled VB that I’ve been trying to find a use for (although I’m leaning toward a laser vector display…). I would be especially interested in the possibility of using it to display more than four shades of red (or, ideally, in some other color).

That’s kinda weird… I came up with a game very similar to this idea, based on my own characters! The main difference is mine is meant to be a two-player game with each player controlling one of the characters (which are both full “platformer” characters, with different skill sets).

I really like the Chalvo mini-game idea! Kinda reminds me of the GC game Wario World.

You should definitely use this idea to start learning how to code for the VB. It’s really not that hard. Just take a look at some commented examples (there should be another good batch in a couple of months! ;-)), install VBDE, and start trying things out. Put it on a public repository like Github and I’m sure people would be glad to help out.

Interesting project. If the goal is just to move the 72-pin slot up a bit, couldn’t you extend it off the back of the Genie with, e.g. ribbon cable (since all the pins and pads are in a nice straight line) and mount the Genie PCB in the Xenophobe case in place of it’s PCB? You wouldn’t even need the whole case, so you could cut it down and eliminate the jagged hole, altogether. Or am I not understanding the problem?

Of course, now that there’s solder on the Genie’s edge connector, it’ll probably make less reliable contact in a slot. I wonder if it could be chemically removed without harming the copper underneath… (I doubt the gold would cover the copper completely enough to protect it).

I guess you could still cut down the Xenophobe PCB to just the edge fingers and use the ribbon cable idea. Make sure to leave enough on the sides for mechanical retention, though (or just use a ton of hot glue ;-))

That’s my take on it, anyway…

FYI, I just replied to a PM without incident.

Two months sounds about right. I agree with TheForce81, as well.

Although many people get some time off from work/school at this time of year, most would probably prefer to spend it having fun with family and friends.

SirGuntz wrote:
I think I’ll just buy a Mario’s Tennis and make it into a Bound High, I’ve had to deal with surface mount chips before.

The problem with that plan is that there exists no “drop-in” replacement for the MaskROMs used in VB carts. Your only real options are to try to “dead-bug” some chips using lots of thin wire, or make a cart PCB from scratch and just re-use the connector/case from the MT cart. Or, you know, just get a FlashBoy… 😛

That’s because KR155E insists on using MS’ hideous “Georgia” font, for whatever reason 😛

You can use Opera’s “User CSS” feature (or the equivalent plug-in/add-on for whatever inferior browser you use) to fix it.

Is it obscured due to the photo angle, or is the VB really missing its eye-shade? I wonder if they had one to put on, but decided not to expose it to vandalism/theft (or maybe one of those two things already happened to it :-P)

According to the official docs, the status of the COMCNT pin can be read and written at any time. Writing a 0 to bit 1 of the CCSR (0x0200_0004) will cause the COMCNT pin on the port to sink current. Reading bit 0 returns the status of the pin.

To implement negotiation, just have the game check bit 0 of the CCSR; if it’s low, it will become slave. If it’s high, it will become master and pull COMCNT low.

You could perform this on first boot, in which case the order in which you power on the connected VBs determines the master/slave relationship, or you could do it each time the “start 2-player game” menu item is chosen.