e5frog wrote:
How about CNC:ing molds instead, to mold new cart shell halves? 😉

Hedgetrimmer wrote:

If i had access to mold facilities I would def give it a go, but i’m in metalwork engineering so all i can get done as rabbits are machined parts.
Also making molds is not something i have ever tried.
Once i got the cnc program sorted it should be fine to run off batches of cases, and indeed once i have the 3D model etc done anyone else is welcome to use it to make thier own.

It would actually be quite difficult to make a mold using CNC, given that a round cutter can’t cut square inside corners (although you might be able to get by without any on a VB cart). But, you could machine positive masters from which to cast molds, which could in turn be used to cast cart shell halves.

It’s been on my back-burner for a while. I have the stuff to make silicone molds, and plenty of wax from which to mill masters, but the only thing I have to cast in the resulting silicone molds is something called Excalibur, which is similar to plaster. It would make a nicely detailed cart (showing all the flaws produced by my cheap mill ;-)), but it would be rather more brittle than a nice thermoformed resin, e.g. ABS.

I think someone here suggested potting the cart PCB in a VB-cart-shaped blob of something. That might work with the silicone I have, if I can prevent it from sticking to a silicone mold. (I suppose I could cast the mold from Excalibur…) The only caveat would be that the silicone is a sickly pink color, and AFAIK, no paint will stick to it.

Of course, all of this requires models of the cart shell halves, so get to work! 😀

Hey, that’s a sweet looking build and an excellent write-up with great photos!

I’m kinda surprised that the connector works right, considering the real connector has two different spacings (the rows are only like 1.4mm apart). I hope you don’t damage your VB’s connector doing that…

I know nensondubois will be happy, though 😉

I hope the new one has something like FUDcode or YaBBC, because superscript, subscript, lists, and spoiler tags are handy, too. Plus, notice that YaBBC has support for embedding Flash and other plugin-based multimedia 😎

I found a promising scripting language for windows with nice GUI features. It’s called AutoIt. I’m going to investigate using it for the GUI. Only thing I’m not sure of is loading existing files. Not sure about its file I/O capabilities.

DogP wrote:
Are you trying to play in real time as it’s processing, or are you having it pre-process it all, then basically just play back the wav? I’m not sure whether it’ll keep up real time on all computers.

I was going to pre-buffer at least 576 bytes of wave data (don’t ask me; it’s a Winamp thing :-P) and then do the parsing/generating and playing in parallel.

I compiled your code with -O1 using cygwin (O2 and O3 produced a weird wav file naming bug) and it seems to go a good deal faster. I didn’t do any measuring, but I’m pretty sure it would be able to do (the example.txt file) fast enough for real-time on my “ancient” 2.4GHz P4. I may add a configuration setting for the size of the FIFO.

But feel free to work on whatever you find to be more interesting… I don’t really need a GUI, but in the long run I think there should be a GUI for it, to ease people into making VB sounds, rather then forcing them to jump into a text config file with strange names and values that don’t really mean anything.

10-4. I personally like the hands-on approach of a hand-edited text file. That’s the way I am about HTML/CSS and most other layout/formatting, too. So, I’ll keep going on the plugin, since that is most conducive to that type of work-flow. Plus, there’s always mic_’s program for “actual musicians” to use 😉 (I hope…)

[RunnerPack]

mic_ wrote:
…my MML compiler…

Hey, that looks very handy! Do you have access to the official docs? If not, I could send you just the VSU part.

A lot of it could possibly be figured out with DogP’s program; including reading its source and comparing various input data with the code (and sound) produced by it.

BTW, I’ve kinda started on a Winamp plugin. I think, because of the disconnect between the size of the file and the audio data coming out of the emulator, I need to make a “ring buffer” FIFO that the emulator can write to and that can be played from (by sending chunks of it to the Winamp output plugin). If enough people (or just DogP ;-)) would rather I work on the GUI version, I’ll put the plugin on hold. Of course, if someone else wants to write the GUI, feel free (but let me know).

• This reply was modified 16 years, 6 months ago by RunnerPack.

Maybe one of these is more efficient, more powerful, more extensible, or easier to maintain?

I don’t think it’s a good idea to have an image only on one screen, but you can still get the desired effect of forcing the player to change his focus: just put the HUD much closer to the viewer than the action. When you focus on the HUD, the game will automatically go out of focus. Of course, you still might have a lot of complaints about headaches, but far fewer than if you tried your original idea.

Also, maybe if you post the first few errors you get we can help you get GCC compiled. I’ve done it more than once on cygwin (in fact, I plan to do it again really soon), and I don’t remember having a lot of trouble. Maybe you forgot to download one or more needed packages.

@mic:

That’s basically what he’s already made. It’s just a text format rather than binary. It’s less for getting sounds from existing games and more for developing sounds to put into new games.

However, if there’s an open-source WinAmp plugin for VGMs, that would be a good starting point for a VBSG plugin.

[RunnerPack]

DogP wrote:

How do you plan on configuring the registers? Are you just wanting Winamp to play whatever is generated from a manually configured file rather than having to double click the wav file? Or maybe the plugin would look like a strange graphic equalizer and you could configure there?

Either way would work, but I was just thinking of it like an IDE kind of thing: you edit the file (in my case, in UltraEdit) and then you open the txt file in Winamp and it does what your CLI utility does, except it sends the audio straight to the soundcard. Then it can be tweaked in the editor and, to test again, just hit “Play” (assuming you have a play button on your KB, which I do).

But, there are plenty of WA plugins with their own windows. They can even be skinnable. I really like your idea for an interface. The only things I would change are: 1) Probably use tabs instead of radio buttons 2) the “frames” should be something clickable, like the scenes in a video editing app or maybe a scrolling list at the side of the dialog, and 3) maybe a text pane that shows the resulting text file as you change it with the controls.

I just thought of another kind of plugin. You can make what’s called a “URL plugin”. They work by interpreting a URL of a certain type. For example: noise:// for white noise or line:// for Line-in. (I used to have a cool signal generator plugin, but I can’t find it :-() EDIT: I found it, plus the source-code! Yay! 😀

So, you could have something like: vsu:// and then you could make a song or sound effect by stringing such URLs together in the playlist (probably have to turn gapless playback on, though). The code could be generated by saving the playlist to a file and processing it with another CLI program. Anyway, just an idea…

I have no experience w/ Winamp plugins, so I really doubt I’ll do it, but if anyone would like to, I’d be glad to help make it happen.

I haven’t really written any, but I have studied and altered the code of a few of them. The main way you could help is by releasing the source, already! 😉

If I do it, I’ll probably start with the former kind (just an input plugin for the txt files) and then probably start on a fancy interface. I’ll also probably be making 2.x plugins, since they’re still supported by Winamp5 and are also backward compatible for older machines that can’t handle 5’s overhead.

• This reply was modified 16 years, 6 months ago by RunnerPack.

De nada. 😉

(BTW, there are a couple of paragraphs swapped in the Zero Racers part.)

I’ve got the Dragon Hopper and Bomberman pages done. I’m going to skip the ads. When I’m done, I’ll bundle them up and email them back.

Hey, akumie: could you post a translation? If not, KR155E: could you send me some hi-res scans I can OCR/machine-translate? kthxbye 😉

In that case, I’d put the inner loop inside a function that returns a different value depending on where the game should go next. You can then test the return value inside your main infinite loop:

void main() {

    int next_part = 0;
    int level_num = 0;

    initialize();

    for (;;) {

        switch (next_part) {
        case 0:
            next_part = start_level(level_num);
            break;

        case 1:
            next_part = level(level_num);
            break;

        case 2:
            level_num++;
            next_part = 1;
            break;
        }
    } // Loop until power-down

}

int initialize() {
    // Stuff you have before the while(1) loop
}

int start_level(int level_num) {
    // Stuff you have between level_start: and level_reset:
    return 1;
}

int level(int level_num) {
    for (;;) {

        // Stuff you have after level_reset: (except testing the map array instead of the BGMap!)

        if (win_condition) {
            return 3;
        } else {
            return 2;
        }
    }
}

[RunnerPack]

I scanned the end of one of my carts on a flatbed at 9600 DPI (interpolated, I’m sure) and came up with a hole size of approximately 0.4339 mm (~0.01708″). The pin is probably a mite smaller than that, but that should get you in the ballpark (the only other way I know to find out is to open a VB and destroy its connector to put a pin in some calipers or a micrometer).

EDIT: Also, the approximate pin spacings are:

2.0267 mm (0.07979″) column pitch
1.6298 mm (0.06417″) row pitch

EDIT: The wire gauges closest to 0.35mm are 27 AWG and 29 SWG (British).

• This reply was modified 16 years, 6 months ago by RunnerPack.
• This reply was modified 16 years, 6 months ago by RunnerPack.
• This reply was modified 16 years, 6 months ago by RunnerPack.
• This reply was modified 16 years, 6 months ago by RunnerPack.

[RunnerPack]

Well, that only sounds moderately more difficult than the RB front-end I worked on, and that wasn’t so bad.

Hmm… maybe David Tucker and I are the only ones who’ve seen my version of the front-end… I never got a reply when I sent it to him and it doesn’t look like he posted a new RB on his site. Maybe I’m the only one who has it! 😛

Well, I guess it won’t do any harm to post it here. Maybe someone can try it on Vista/7 and I can tweak it if necessary (although it was compiled with VS2008 instead of VC6, like the old one was, so it should work better). I fixed a few bugs and added the new command-line arguments (like netplay) as well as giving it a graphical face-lift.

EDIT: What’s the deal with the length restriction on attachment filenames? 😛 It’s supposed to be “Reality Boy Front-end (Win32; EN).exe”. Maybe it’s the semicolon…

Also note that it’s a self-extracting archive including source, executable, and (HTML) help.

• This reply was modified 16 years, 6 months ago by RunnerPack.
• This reply was modified 16 years, 6 months ago by RunnerPack.

I sent you a PM, e5frog.

Here ya go:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.incompatible.php

If you ever decide to change to a new content manager, or even just the forum part, I really like the forum from the libgosu website (and yes, I know it’s written in PERL :-P).

Also, I was wrong, it actually redirects to the “lost password” screen (which you probably already knew…)

I think the idea is less to extract the sound code/data and more to delete/overwrite the non-sound code in the ROM. Basically, destroy the graphics data and the code that sends it to the VPU (and any other code, like controller input, etc.) and break down what remains into music tracks. The player is just a VB emulator that doesn’t bother with the VPU, etc.

You would have to log writes to the VSU to find out where songs are started, though (or just learn to read v810 machine code fluently :-P).

Wow, a great idea and superb execution! :thumpup:

Not only is it handy for VB game making, it can also be used to make sound effects for PC games, and such! (I definitely intend to try making some sounds for Flash games with it. 😀 In fact, if I really get bored, I might even make a Flash port…)

I could probably make a (non-Visual Basic) front-end or GUI version, but I thought of another solution: make a WinAmp input plugin. It would allow instant previewing while debugging a sound and then the C code could be generated on the clipboard, or Notepad.exe could be used as an output window. You would even get Linux (and probably OSX) support for free that way, since XMMS comes with practically every distro.