[thunderstruck]

ElmerPCFX wrote:

Guy Perfect wrote:

thunderstruck wrote:

It would be cool to have a more advanced emulator. Mednafen and Reality Boy are ok but especially when it comes to debugging I have to hop through a lot of loops right now.

May I ask what debugging features you are missing in Mednafen and Reality Boy, and whether you’ve actually tried to do anything about it?

Well, it’s not like Mednafen and Reality Boy are bad in any way. They actually extend each other quite well. Guy already mentioned some cool features. Conditional breakpoints, pattern breakpoints, function identification, being able to map code, leaving notes along the code, stuff like that would be cool to have. What I’m missing mostly are ease of use features like seeing the bgmaps, worlds, charmem and so on (Reality Boy can do that). Just clicking a part in the visual representation of an bgmap and thereby creating a breakpoint for that address would be cool. I often do a binary search in wram which Mednafen can do, but it’s tedious. So making that easier would help allot. There’s allot more stuff like that. I guess there are many features in Mednafen that I’m not using right now though.

And no, I never tried changing Mednafen or Reality Boy. I never even considered it, to be honest.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 1 month ago by thunderstruck.
• This reply was modified 10 years, 1 month ago by thunderstruck.

pinmagic wrote:
Interesting choice of image to use with this article:
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/06/30/nintendo-secretly-researching-virtual-reality-focus-affordability-and-safety

Heh, funny that they used the Virtual Boy image without even mentioning it once. Maybe they just googled for “Nintendo VR” or something.

Guy Perfect wrote:
The purpose of this thread is to gauge interest in a collaborative Virtual Boy emulator project…

It would be cool to have a more advanced emulator. Mednafen and Reality Boy are ok but especially when it comes to debugging I have to hop through a lot of loops right now.

Guy Perfect wrote:
Open Source

Developers welcome, but even if I do the programming myself, I’m totally fine with that. Either way, the project will be open-source and a version-controlled source repository will be open to the public… well, it might be restricted to PVB members, but that’s public enough.

Open source is always great. If you really want a collaborative project, I would suggest to be completely open from the first line of code. That way people can see where you are going and share their thoughts early. And if you fail early on the wrong idea, you wasted less time working into the wrong direction.

Guy Perfect wrote:
I have made one executive decision, though: the main trunk of the project will be written in the C programming language. Not C++, but vanilla C, for the sake of simplicity. C is about as close as you can get to machine code without writing architecture-dependent programs, meaning it’ll be about as fast and memory-efficient as they come.

Additional languages are welcome as ports, and I’d love to see a Java version maintained alongside the C project, but even if it’s just C, that’s fine for now.

Do you consider writing unit tests? Projects with more then a couple of developers usually need this kind of safety net. Plus, they help keeping the code readable so that you don’t need extensive comments or documentation. Coding conventions and clean code rules also help.

Guy Perfect wrote:
Now my question to you guys: What kind of version control solutions are out there?

I would go for git.

Guy Perfect wrote:
Debugger

Anyone else with a hacking background have anything to bring to light?

There are some features I would like to see. I will make a list when I have some free time.

vbsteffel wrote:
it will be next week. the hyperkin items have not arrived yet.

Cool. I’m planning to put a vb into the the open space at work. So I need an extra stand and visor for one of my backup units. I hope shipping costs aren’t too high.

I could use a eyeshade and a couple of stands as well.

KJ4860 wrote:
was the source ever made available for this?

He released sources in his very first version. That version was still very buggy though. The later improved versions didn’t have any sources anymore.

bigmak wrote:
I’m not sure what the price would be. The nearest sale i was able to find on ebay was this one :

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-8-…

Which didn’t have hyper fighting or a virtual fall cib. Also, fishbone was loose.

Gundam and hyper fighting have gone for quite a bit so, I don’t know.

I’ve told my wife i’d cut down my collection and buy her a new fridge .

If these don’t sell in a few weeks, I’ll prob. start to take offers on individual carts.

-Eric

Hey Eric,

your link is broken, here is a working one:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/121950160984

Going by that, you should at least get one fridge or this many Chicken McNuggets.

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KR155E wrote:
Hey thunder! After a little while, I too was very annoyed with the problems you described, and disabled the C++ plugin in my copy of VBDE Pro. That plugin is an older third party plugin and obviously has its problems – like completely breaking code completion. That’s very sad, since IntelliJ is such a fantastic IDE. 🙁

I haven’t heard of CodeLite before, must be pretty new? Anyway, it looks nice! I’d like to check it out as an alternative to IntelliJ.

It has been around since 2006 in various forms. I didn’t know it either though. After giving up on IntelliJ I figured that there has to be an free IDE for c development. CodeLite is the best thing I found.
The code-completion works very well, even if you have multiple projects that contain the same files. There are more plugins that could be useful. On top, CodeLite is open source so you could just create your own vbde branch.

So far I enabled the external tools that exist in the IntelliJ version. So building, emulation and so on works.
I could easily compile and run your platformer demo (which looks amazing btw). I’m in the middle of porting the Snatcher code to the new vbde build system now.

Hey Krisse, I had a look at the pro version of vbde a while ago. VBDE certainly came a long way since I’ve sent you my batch files 4 years ago. Even though I like intellij as an IDE it just wouldn’t work right for me. The code completion often didn’t work and I had some other issues. I assume that’s because it is a java IDE after all.

However, I went ahead and made my own version of vbde pro using CodeLite as an IDE. While the code-completion an the like all work great it has some shortcomings as well. It is for example harder to ship a pre-configured version and I have some absolute paths in some of the config files. If you are interested I can tell you what I did and share the result.

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vuefinder83 wrote:
There is even random neon smoke designs on this shirt that you just cant see without a black light.

Now that’s convincing. Makes me wonder how the full hidden pattern looks like.

vuefinder83 wrote:
Yeah Nike is known for using neons on alot of their clothing, especially on their athletic wear. This is to help runners and joggers become more visible to drivers at night preventing accidents. So even though some Nike shirts can react to black light it’s probably not intentional as Nike doesn’t produce ‘club wear’ as far as I know…

Well, that makes perfect sense.

vuefinder83 wrote:
Because when normal light is hitting this shirt you don’t really notice/pay attention to the hexagons, but under black light you can see that the bigger hexagon on the bottom would be the foreground followed by the two smaller hexagons in the midground and then the last hexagon on the shoulder would be the background…

I don’t know if it’s the lighting in you photos but to me your shirt always looked a bit faded. A friend of mine used to have the shirt framed and it looked much more like the picture that ectoglow once posted. You pretty much see immediately that the colors are neon colors and they seem to pop out. Then again, if they used the neon colors on purpose they might have planned the black light effect as well. However, I would have assumed VirtualBoy logo would have popped out then.

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blowback wrote:
Here is what came in the mail today.

That’s pretty cool, how much did you pay for all of them? I assume you know that some of them are reproductions?

Hah, that does look pretty insane. Not sure if it was intended though. I remember having some Nike shirts that looked absolute crazy in black light.

Those mockups do look pretty cool. Are you planning to actually start programming or is it more a concept kind of thing?

VBRetroGamer wrote:
New to virtual boy collecting, but this post was intriguing. None of these had a U.S release as far as I know, so I am curious where the person got them.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/121950160984?ssPageName=STRK:MESINDXX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1436.l2649

He’s not very specific in his auction which bothers me a bit.

Heres what they are:

Bound High: Reproduction of an unreleased game
Space Pinball: Reproduction of an unreleased prototype
Faceball VB Prototype Edition: Reproduction of an unreleased prototype
Faceball Remastered: Rom-Hack
Space Squash: Fan translation
SD Gundam Dimension War: Fan translation
Blox: Hombrew game
Fishbone: Hombrew game

They sold for ~$80 each. So the price for all would have been ~$640.
As the are not sold anymore, their price increased a bit for some. I wouldn’t go higher then $1000 for the lot.

retronintendonerd wrote:
Maybe he will touch on it on a Mike and James Monday. 🙂

I doubt. VB games are hard to capture, especially if you play at the same time.

Dreammary wrote:
No respect… I really hate AVGN.

Well, I think there is a general problem with negative/rude game reviews. They are often lacking solid research in favor of harsh comments about the the less well designed aspects of a game. People are being very rude these days when they criticize the work of others, often in the hopes to draw attention. I know this first hand from reading comments about my games on other sites.

However, I think it is important to differentiate between a show that is designed to entertain and an actual game review. The shows of James Rolfe obviously belong to the first category. I totally understand if you don’t like them. It’s not easy to watch someone talking shit about something you like even if you know that the person is just trying to be funny.

I did sent the game to James because I like watching his shows. I didn’t expect him to play/review the game or treat it like a treasure. I actually like it when throws his stuff around because that’s the way we would treat games when I was a kid (I’m not much of a collector). Seeing him throw Faceball of that shelf was pretty funny for me.

I have to agree with Horvat. The VB isn’t that hard to handle. There are some things you need to learn first (basically how to handle graphics) but after you can get pretty far without bothering about the VB specifics.

Assembly is a good way to speed things up but if you keep it simple C will fit all your needs. libgccvb (which comes with vbde) isn’t the fastest or most convenient lib to access the VBs features but it will help you allot on your first steps.

I would recommend you to check out how Characters, Background Maps and Worlds and work. That’s the basics to display graphics on the system.

Feel free to ask questions. People are always willing to help out.

RunnerPack wrote:

speedyink wrote:
It’s like a mix between the original design and the Virtual Boy. I like it. I wonder what makes it Virtual Reality, I’m assuming the pictures are just stereoscopic 3D instead of the old 2D pictures they used to use. Then, they could have just called it View Master 3D. So maybe it is a nod to the Virtual Boy =P

I don’t know what kind of View Master you’ve been using, but they’ve always been 3D for me…

I actually remember View Master reels with 2D images as well. Maybe it was just a copycat though.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
… but sunfade causing all red places to be uniformly light blue baffles me.

It actually looks almost like a misprint. If you look at the Virtual Boy text the red didn’t turn blue but white. I have never seen sunfade completely remove one color.