If your display is at all reparable, you should fix it, rather than killing another VB to make yours work. Since it’s the most likely thing to go out, it’d be hard to find another that has working displays but some other (irreparable) problem.

Even if you’ve tried repairing it and made it worse, it still may be salvageable. Post photos or a detailed description and maybe we can figure something out.

VN10314570[7] (US, AFAIK)

Got it in trade for fixing some displays 😀

For the record, these sprites cannot be legally used in a game project. They’re from a WonderSwan game called Klonoa: Moonlight Museum. I’m not saying Ben is claiming these are his, but he didn’t make it clear that they’re copyrighted, so I am.

I don’t know where the background stuff is from. Did you draw it, Ben?

[RunnerPack]

I’ve got one to share, too!

If you have a passive 3-D monitor like the ASUS VG23AH, there’s no need to switch to “3-D mode”. The mechanism that sends each image to the correct eye (called FPR or “film-type, patterned retarder” in the VG23AH) is always active (but only visible when wearing the glasses). All you need is a source with the two images horizontally interleaved. Most (all?) VB emulators support this mode, and Mednafen is no exception. The scaling parameters do need a bit of tweaking to get a large image with the right aspect ratio, and that’s what I’ve done here. I scaled it up to the largest integer multiple that fits in 1920×1080 (full-HD). There’s a bit of “readme” stuff in the file, for the curious.

Enjoy!

• This reply was modified 13 years, 3 months ago by RunnerPack.

Virtual_Link wrote:
4. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Atari 2600)
We know it’s legendary awfulness

I’ve never played it. I also haven’t played the fixed version, but I want to!

It’s an interesting read if you’re into assembly language or game system internals. It probably helps if you know something about the Atari 2600 (or the 6502 chip in general), which I don’t, but I still liked it.

It wouldn’t be too hard to make your own replacement visor from some kind of soft foam. The page about it has images of the box you can get a pattern from.

Do you have the plastic attachment plate? If not, that will be a bit tougher to replicate, but still possible. I’ve posted a drawing with physical dimensions, and Hedgetrimmer has posted a 3D model you may be able to have 3D-printed. Otherwise, you could get some stiff plastic sheet, print out a pattern, and cut one out by hand. It won’t look good, but it should get the job done 😉

The front isn’t bad, but the back is a little much. If you wanted a similar aesthetic, maybe you could find a company on Aliexpress that would sew up some red/blue t-shirts. Then you’d just have to use vb-fan’s paint idea, or have some made at a screen-printing place.

I would personally like to see one with the background designs, but no logos at all. It would be like a secret sign between VB fans 😀

HorvatM wrote:

Also, how would I link assembly code (or code produced by another compiler) with C code and what tools do I have to use?

If you’re using GCC assembly, you can just specify the .s file as one of the input files and it should be assembled and linked automatically, depending on the options specified; e.g. it won’t work if you use -x to turn off automatic language detection.

If it’s a binary produced by another compiler (or by hand) it has to be in a format gcc understands (couldn’t find a list, but ELF, COFF and possibly a.out should work). If it’s just a raw binary, you could turn it into an array and use an asm block to jump into it, put it would have to be position-independent code (i.e. using relative jumps). What non-gcc tools do you have that produce VB (NVC/v810) machine code?

Keep in mind that the two boards are connected almost in parallel, with only one wire not shared between the two. Thus, if you have bridged pins on one, it will most likely affect the other display, even though that one is working perfectly. And, if that one separate wire is disconnected or shorted, it can cause either nothing to show up, or the display to mirror what the other is showing.

As an example of how much damage the connection can take and still be repaired, see the attached image. This is a “before” of a pair I received from another user who attempted the “mbuchman method”. I worked on the right PCB for a few minutes. So far, it produces an almost perfect display. There is a short between one or more of the BRTx lines which causes all red pixels to be full brightness, but it’s fine, otherwise. The one on the left might be fixable, but it’s going to take quite a bit of work (I’ll probably just try my hand at the “bypass” method).

SirGuntz wrote:
Thank you for the help, it encourages me to pick up this project again and wire up the displays “the hard way”, since there might be some guarantee the system is not totally screwed.

What I meant by main board damage is, can shorting lines somewhere on the display board connections, damage the main board in some way? Or no?

If you short VCC and ground, you could damage the voltage regulator, but if the mirrors and sound are working, this is not the case.

Also, can somebody show me specifically which traces have to be connected on the display board? And how they connect to the FFC connector on the main board? I just want to be sure. I think there are two traces that do the same function (probably ground). Also, it seems like there are three traces on each side of the display board edge that don’t do anything… Is this correct?

It’s just a straight-though, 1:1 cable. You’re right about the three extras on each end, and there are multiple wires for both VCC and ground. Also, I believe the outer two actual traces (i.e. the fourth from each side of the PCB) are some kind of shield. Probably best to connect everything, though.

Attachments:

1. 

   display-soldering-attempts.jpg
   

vb-fan wrote:

I hope someone can come up with a reliable, inexpensive (including the cost to get started) method for producing carts totally from scratch without using any part of an original one. It’s not that I believe they should be preserved for their own sake (does anyone even play V. Baseball, anymore? :-P). Besides the cost factor, custom carts open the door for extending the VB platform by leveraging the expansion capabilities that were built in but never tapped (commercially). While this can be (and has been) done using existing connectors with a custom case, the cost/availability factor puts volume production pretty much out of reach for anything more complex than a flash cart or reproduction.

I know where I can get a couple of “bad-display” consoles, that I would be willing to open (and perhaps fix!), but would allow investigation of appropriate replacement cart-connectors.

I’m not sure what you’re proposing, here… Why would a VB have to be experimented on to find a mating cart connector? It’s a matter of removing four screws to expose the “business end” of the cart connector (and the interior of the cart slot) with no risk at all to the rest of the VB’s components. Just stick the candidate connector in place, measure its location relative to the edges of the cart slot, CAD up a case and PCB to fit and you’re done! If I had one of the connectors here, I would have done it myself long ago.

Richard said it is feasible (and cost-effective) to make 3D printed carts. I have one as a “Flashboy”, and I’m very happy with it.

I know of (and alluded to) the 3D printed cases, but I’d like to know exactly how much one costs in materials and labor. Since extending the VB through custom carts will likely require adding more hardware than just a flash chip and small MCU, it might require an even cheaper method to produce the larger cases (such as casting them out of resin in a silicone mold made from a printed or CNC-machined master).

However, my point was less about the case and more about the use of Nintendo connectors, which is obviously a dwindling resource which will only get more expensive as time goes on.

dasi wrote:

RunnerPack wrote:
The rest of the above seems accurate…

I assume you’re refering to Krisse’s version of events. I think you need to make that clear to avoid any further confusion.

This.

dasi wrote:

RunnerPack wrote:
I had nothing to do with the “buggy” version.

To be clear, in his 15 Feb 2010 scam email, jojobean was selling both the “buggy” David Tucker version (which you had nothing to do with) *and* the broken VUCC version you compiled for him. It was the VUCC version of Bound High which jojobean was fraudulently selling as a fully working cart dump. I didn’t in any way mean to suggest you were involved in what jojobean subsequently did with that ROM.

I know you weren’t implying that it was my idea to offer it for sale. I just meant I was not the producer of the ROM, but, now that you mention it, I do recall sending him an almost working ROM that I made before all the bugs in my converter were ironed out.

dasi wrote [edited for length]:
In his 15 Feb 2010 email jojobean claimed to have…

jojobean wrote:
…a 100% fully working version of Bound High that plays flawlessly on the hardware. I have the only copy of this that I know of. It is dumped from an actual cart and not pieced together from code. So far I have spoken to nobody else who has such a thing. Just finding someone with the cart is near impossible, let alone finding someone to let you dump it.

What he was actually selling to people was a broken version of the ROM that Runnerpack had compiled for him with VUCC.

It doesn’t get any more obvious than that.

Once again, and with profuse apologies to bigmak, I must set the record straight:

I had nothing to do with the “buggy” version. I didn’t even know the BH source existed until long after it was created. Even now, I only have a ROM of this version. To my knowledge, it was David “reality_boy” Tucker, and possibly others, who worked on it, and I also believe gccVB was used (which explains the bugs) since, at that time, the VUCC tools (if they were even available to him/them) could not be used to produce raw ROM images.

The rest of the above seems accurate, although I was never approached to buy the buggy ROM. I’m likely mistaken, but I don’t believe an original, working, binary copy (which was not produced from the source by enthusiasts) has ever been located (which is a moot point for all but the most die-hard VB historians).

The only on-topic thing I have to say is that I hope someone can come up with a reliable, inexpensive (including the cost to get started) method for producing carts totally from scratch without using any part of an original one. It’s not that I believe they should be preserved for their own sake (does anyone even play V. Baseball, anymore? :-P). Besides the cost factor, custom carts open the door for extending the VB platform by leveraging the expansion capabilities that were built in but never tapped (commercially). While this can be (and has been) done using existing connectors with a custom case, the cost/availability factor puts volume production pretty much out of reach for anything more complex than a flash cart or reproduction.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
…
Note: the version of Bound High that we all enjoy today should not be attributed to jojobean; that point must be made clear.
…

Actually, he deserves at least some credit. He was the one from whom I received the BH source code. Without that, or at least the .isx file built from it, I probably wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making a utility to generate a ROM from the output of the Intelligent Systems compiler (VUCC).

Of course, I’m not the only one who made such a utility (“other people” had copies of the source, I later came to find out), so it would likely have come out anyway, eventually. Still, jojobean had something to do with it.

Chillax, dude; we can’t all check PVB every day 😛

1. Pin 5 is the (active low) write strobe for the expansion and (I believe) ROM areas.
2. No clock lines, but the chip select/output enable lines should serve as “address stable” signals, no?
3. AFAIK, there is only one VCC rail connected everywhere.
4. I think pin 7 is actually just a VCC line, but I’m not 100% sure.
5. I think DogP said that the address/data lines (at least) will float high when not driven.
6. See #4
7. I don’t have any timing diagrams, but some of these are obviously going to be based on the settings in the NVC’s on-board wait-state generator.

I have no idea about that cart PCB marking stuff. Does anyone have photos of the cart PCBs? The only ones I have are of a development flash cart, and it doesn’t use the above code system.

Now I’m interested in why you want this info! 😉

(Sorry for the double-post).

Did anything ever come of this? I still don’t see any mention of the Virtual Boy on the X2Wii page.

BTW, he’s got a new product that’s kind of interesting (though possibly not useful to the OP): it’s like the X2Wii, but it pretends to be a Classic Controller and connects to the Wiimote.

BRILLIANT!

Now, just replace the TIE fighters with Zero Racers and make a track that bends 😉

You’re welcome! It’s actually been ported to a number of other languages/platforms. There’s an ActionScript 3 (i.e. Flash) version. There’s another Java version I couldn’t find a working link to. There’s even at least one JavaScript/HTML5 port!

BTW, I realized after I posted that one would really only have to port the synthesis routines from the C(++) version to the VB, then use any of the other versions to produce the sound descriptions to feed to it. Of course, if the VB can’t handle it, we’d still need something like I originally proposed… Either way, thanks for considering working on it!

I love this little app! Also, in case you didn’t know, it’s been ported to Java (and here’s another open-source Java applet in the same vein), so, in theory, it could be modified to output VB code for the effects generated… wink, wink, nudge, nudge 🙂

I wasn’t really a fan of your choice of blue, but the quality did look pretty nice. I’m sorry to hear about the result of your experiment 🙁

Another option, besides the plastic primer, would be to use vinyl dye. It’s an aerosol product you can get from auto part stores. I’ve heard it works great on ABS plastic (like the VB’s case and buttons). An Internet search will tell you more than I can… The color selection isn’t as large as with standard spray-paint, but you may be able to find something close to what you want.