KR155E wrote:
Thanks, RunnerPack!

My pleasure 😉

I looked at the gccvb package and was not sure what to do to compile, since there’s no make.exe. Should I modify the make.bat that came with the very first gccvb release?

It should be compatible with the old batch file, but it would be better to include some form of build tool (like make) and set up the editor(s) to run it. I’m going to study the editors’ support for “projects” and external tools and see if I can get “one-click” automatic project compiling to work. It might mean including a Win32 version of “make”. Here’s one that should be easy to add to the VBDE installer/zipfile:

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/make.htm

Make sure to read the General Installation Instructions, and let me know if you need any help.

About libgccvb, are there any advantages of having only a single h and a single c file?

For one thing, as I alluded to earlier, it could be made into a “libgccvb.a” and included in the /lib and /include directories. Using it would then be as simple as adding “-lgccvb” to the gcc command-line. Admittedly, this would only save a small fraction of a second from an already generally very short compile time, but it would also be cleaner and easier to maintain (and add to). At the very least, it might deter programmers from having a dozen modified versions spread among their various project directories 😛 Actually, maybe there should be a central repository (on github? Google code?) for the library so we could finally have One Library to Rule Them All(tm) 😉

I will look into including Programmer’s Notepad as well. Custom schemes would be great for both this and Notepad++. 🙂

I’ll work on that after I look at the actual build process. I also noticed that Programer’s Notepad has a system for “snippets” that can generate pieces of code automatically. Between this, the Python scripting, and the C++ “plugin” system, we could have a very powerful replacement for VIDE with a bit of work…

The gccVB I have (4.2.2) is about 95+MB, but compresses to ~12MB with 7zip. This is still too big for a PVB attachment, so I put it in my Dropbox:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5754740/gccvb.7z

Like I said, it still needs some testing. I seem to recall it not liking some syntax gubbins in one of the libgccvb headers. I’m also attaching the “more librarier” version of the library. I think it worked with this compiler at some point, but I added some stuff, so it hasn’t been fully tested yet. It might even be missing stuff.

If you want to do an installer, I suggest NSIS:

http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page

Also, here’s another editor you might consider including:

http://www.pnotepad.org/

I plan to make a gccVB-specific syntax file (or “scheme”) for it. If you don’t have one for N++, I could probably do one while I’m making the other.

Attachments:

1. libgccvb_runnerpack.zip

I’m not sure where all this talk about the VB’s depth rendering being limited came from, but it has to stop. I am a VB programmer (on occasion…), and I can say authoritatively that the VB can produce more parallax depth than the human eye can handle, both into and out of the screen. Besides that, if you look into a great distance (like down a long hallway) in real life, you’ll find that stereoscopic depth is limited to about 30 feet because of the distance between (and resolving power of) the human eyes. This means the VB could even take shortcuts when generating the two images and it would still look fine.

@colesonwilson, your little “finger” demonstration just shows how stereoscopic vision works. Look at any VB game and you’ll see the same effect. It doesn’t detract from the game, it’s what the VB (and other stereo-capable systems) add to the game experience! No disrespect intended, but I seriously don’t have a clue where you came up with that…

I’ve always thought the VB would be a great platform for the “point-and-click” (aka “inventory”) adventure game genre. Not only would the stereo graphics be great, but the controls would be handy, too. You could use one d-pad to control the character and the other to control a cursor for manipulating the environment. The only thing lacking would be recorded dialog, but most games of this type don’t have speech, anyway (and besides, with a large enough ROM and some LPC compression, it could probably be done).

[RunnerPack]

This is a great idea, KR155E; thanks for doing it!

I may be able to remove the cygwin dependency from your package. April of last year, I got native Win32 binaries of gccVB (based on gcc 4.4.2) to compile (I think I used M.K.’s patches from this thread). I can send you a .7z of the binaries (~12MB), and maybe even the patched source.

I know I tested them at the time and they produced working VB ROMs, but something might need updating (e.g. the crt0 or libgccvb). Speaking of libgccvb, does your copy still consist only of .h file(s)? I made a version that consists of one header and one .c file that you could look at. It may be possible to turn them into a library that can be included with the compiler, rather than in each project’s source directory.

One suggestion/request: make a version of the environment that can be installed to and used from a USB flash drive, to allow development on any computer available. I’m sure there’s already a version of Notepad++ that works like this.

• This reply was modified 14 years, 4 months ago by RunnerPack.

Well, it’s obviously impossible to tell from a photo, but there have been reports of problems with the onboard voltage regulator. This is the most likely part to be damaged by reversed input polarity, input voltage too high, etc. which can all be caused by using improper power supplies or connecting things the wrong way.

Did it stop working while you were playing, or did it work fine one day and fail to work the next? If the former, it was probably being overstressed by an out-of-spec input voltage. If the latter, it was probably inrush current (less likely). It’s also (remotely) possible that you damaged something with a static discharge due to improper handling, but the VB board seems to be pretty robust in this regard.

Searching the forum for “regulator” will locate a few threads with some good details about replacing the voltage regulator, but if you’re not experienced with this sort of thing, you should either get someone else to do it, or sell your VB “as-is” (explaining the fault) and put the proceeds toward a replacement (or two, in this case).

I hope that helps.

Hope this helps.

Apologies in advance to KR155E if this is considered an abuse of the system! 😉

(Although, I’m not sure why there’s a per-file size limit if there’s no attachment limit… I’m kinda glad there is, though. I’d hate for the upload to fail in the middle of a 16MB file and make me start over!)

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
This makes me curious. I remember hearing stories from people who were supposedly told by doctors that they could have gotten cancer as a result of a radiation leak from their microwaves.

Is there any validity to such assertions? If a microwave can leak a harmful radiation, how would one know that it is doing this?

Even if your microwave oven is leaking, it’s only leaking EM radiation, not ionizing radiation. It’s basically the same energy your Wifi and bluetooth devices put out, just a lot more of it. It’s also being bounced around inside a Faraday cage, which is neither here nor there…

BTW, the principle of the MWO (dielectric heating) was discovered when an engineer walked in front of an experimental radar dish (!) with a chocolate bar in his pocket. Notice, he observed afterward that the candy-bar had been heated, not that he had been heated. He was also probably exposed to a much higher “dose” than a leaking MWO can put out. Obviously, he also lived long enough to tell others about his discovery 😛

Here is a schematic for a leak detector. Unlike the one MineStorm posted, it includes a battery-powered amplifier. Whether that makes a difference as to its effectiveness, I couldn’t say…

morintari wrote:
… Any other takers?

Programming
1.HorvatM
2.RunnerPack
3.
4.
5.

Music
1.VirtualChris
2.
3.
4.
5.

Graphics
1.Morintari (once I finish current game)
2.RunnerPack (I’m no artist, but I can do stereo conversion and such like)
3.
4.
5.

@VirtualChris, are there any examples of your musical chops I can hear?

I doubt you’ll find a Visual Basic GBA emulator to hack on, but (the 0.9 WIP version of) Mednafen already has GBA emulation and stereoscopic display code in it. So, learn some C and get crackin’ ’cause I really want to try this! 😉

Neat find! How did you come across that?

I too believe it is a VB cart dumper (I think this is what the phrase “Expansion Board Virtual Boy sucking!” is referring to, i.e. it “sucks” the data out of the cartridge).

It looks like it could be designed for use with the debugger, but if it is homemade, it’s really high quality.

I wonder what it’s supposed to connect to with such a huge connector… It almost looks like a SCSI header, although normally it would also have some headers or DIP switches to choose address and termination settings. Maybe they’re hidden or not needed.

It would be nice to see the markings on the chips, but, since he mentions a lot more electronics on the second board, it probably wouldn’t do much good to know.

colesonwilson wrote:
I’m almost done with recreating this file. I’m doing it in Corel so it will be perfectly scalable.

I don’t have Corel, but I would love to have a vector version when you’re done. Can Corel export it to .SVG or some other open or widely-used vector format? I might be able to work with PostScript (including the Adobe Illustrator variant called .AI)…

VirtualJockey wrote:
… With the art we have, I think that weird shape at the upper left is the bottom portion of a stylized “S” that would have read space pinball had the art not been cropped from the only art we have on hand.

If you look closely, I believe you’ll find it’s the corner of one of three pinball play-field outlines (the other two being the prominent red one at the bottom, and the blue one at the upper right; a set including one each of red, green, and blue).

Is there a particular reason you want to use Reality Boy rather than Mednafen 0.9.x? Besides being more efficient, more compatible, and actively developed, the latter also has a more logical command-line interface as well as robust configuration file support. In fact, being a multi-system emulator, you could probably replace a number of your cab’s emulators with it and make the whole thing simpler (for example, it’s also my favorite GBA emulator).

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a link:

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/tech/?sec=emus&eid=mednafen

BTW, this thread is a bit off-topic for this forum…

Dan did a great job covering everything, but just to fill in more detail (which you can feel free to ignore):

The 8 palettes are “per tile” meaning that each 8×8 pixel tile (called a “character” or “char” for short) of a background can have any one of the four background palettes. Likewise, each of the 1024 8×8 pixel sprites (“objects” in VB parlance) can be assigned one of the four sprite palettes.

Also, the areas cut from one of the 14 background “sheets” (called “bgmaps”) have to be at least 8 pixels tall, but they can be 1 pixel wide. They can even be larger than, or overlap the edge of, the bgmap. You can choose how the overhanging area is shown. It can either wrap around from the other side or be filled with a single, repeated 8×8 character (one of the same 2,048 of which everything else is made).

VBmills wrote:

L___E___T wrote:
US is 110v and JP is 100v I thought, but it’s safe.

Yeah thats right. i just ment the actual plastic adapter that connects to the controller are the same i think.

Actually, they aren’t. The US one is made to work with a US SNES AC adapter, which has a proprietary barrel plug. The Japanese one uses a standard barrel jack, to match the JP and UK SFC/SNES adapters (although the voltages/rectification differ, as has already been stated).

L___E___T wrote:
I picked a 300w step-down up from Maplins earlier today, they have them for £24.99 or you can get a much smaller one (that was always fine with my famicom) for I think £14.99.

Thats a fair deal for the 300w. The small 45w one would be perfect for the VB.

This is unnecessary unless you want to use an imported OEM (i.e. Nintendo) AC adapter for some reason (rabid fanboi-ism? :-P). Just get an AC adapter for your country’s electrical system that outputs ~6-12 Volts DC at ~800 mA of current with the correct connector shape and polarity.

In fact, if you have basic soldering skills, you can skip the tap and connector altogether and just solder the wires from an AC adapter directly to the controller PCB. Just mind the polarity and check for shorts/bridges before powering it up. (And don’t blame me or the PVB staff if you mess something up ;-))

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Of course, the only repercussion is that once awareness of it is spread, the selling prices for the games and system are likely to rise on Ebay, etc. 😉

I doubt it. It seems they self-destruct even worse than VBs. The LCD suffers something called “screen rot” caused by impurities in the liquid crystal. The keypad overlays get stretched and broken, and the CPU is extremely sensitive to ESD and connected directly to exposed copper contacts (not a good combination).

I had one for a few months sometime in the late ’90’s. I don’t remember playing anything super fun on it, but it was marginally better than those cheap single-game LCD units (by Tiger et al).

It might be interesting to make an emulator for it, or try to write a new game for it. Or, on the hardware side, you could make an LED-based replacement screen for one that’s succumbed to “screen rot”…

There are also places like Shapeways that’ll print things out and ship them. There may even be one or two VB-fans on Thingiverse that might be willing to print a few for the community (at a nominal cost).

And if these don’t work out, I’ve already got most of a 3D printer in the form of a desktop CNC mill (see attached photo). All I’d need to make it go are the extruder head, some plastic filament, and (optionally) a heated build platform. Anyone want to donate a few bucks towards getting this going? (it’ll be considerably less than $500 :-D) Thanks to Hedgetrimmer, I already have a nice stable of VB-related models champing at the bit to be printed :thumpup:

Attachments:

1. 

   maxnc10.jpg
   

dasi wrote:
… Try the one I’ve attached.

Hey, dasi, could you post the source code?

Thanks!

If there are any high-res scans of Famitsu 250 available, I could OCR and (maybe) translate it (or just let Ben S. do it ;-)).