All of them are reserved. I might make another 4-5 if enough people want one. You will have to wait a couple of weeks though.

VueFinder wrote:
Been looking into doing some VB dev myself lately (versus my usual quiet lurker status XD ) Was wondering what game board hardware you end up using when producing these? I see a few guys like Mellot have designed their own boards. Did you design your own or is there someone you’ve found to be trustworthy in this regard?

I bought 20 carts from Kevin Mellot.

unoclay wrote:
Probably going to continue to use this thread (of mine) to record my comments/thoughts on the homebrews hosted here.

Just tried out Fishbone. Wow’d again. Im just very impressed by the level of proficiency and slick presentation you people are able to eek out of this system. I actually found myself slightly addicted to Super Fish World, trying (unsuccessfully) to reach 100 score. I made it that high on one of the games, but wanted to do it on all 4. Maybe another day. In any case, i love this process of trying your imaginations and designs. Were i a programmer, i’d throw my hat in the ring. I guess instead i’ll sit it out and enjoy your genius. Thanks!

Thanks man

I decided not to continue working on Game Hero Legends. I’m finishing some translation patches right now, so every Japanese game has a full English translation.

I’m not sure what to do after that but I’m considering releasing my image converter. Maybe even making it open source.

The majority of the donor cards used for repos are Virtual League Baseball. Don’t feel bad for breaking the seal.

Just wanted to let everyone know that RetroNintendoNerd did send me a savefile. Unfortunately, it was right before the end of the first stage, not the end of the game. However, I got lucky and figured out how to manipulate the savefile into thinking it’s on the last stage.

The game did load the complete state from stage 1 but was thinking
it’s on stage 8. So killing one easy enemy was enough to trigger the credits. Gundam also stores each savestate 3 times so it can heal corrupted states. Good idea actually.

I still have to figure out how to change the credits though. It’s a bit more complicated since I can’t use realityboy or the planetvb emulator to load the savefile. Well, next weekend I guess.

I mostly use 3 emulators:
1. Reality Boy with the debug features enabled. It allows you to look at the charmem, bgmaps and so in a very convenient way.
2. Medanfen. The build in debugger allows you to read the asm rather easily and you can do stuff like changing the memory during runtime.
3 planetvb emulator. It has a very good breakpoint system and allows you to see bgmaps and so on as well. On top it will show you addresses for everything which is really handy. With a little work this could become the only emulator you would need.

There are a few other tools like David Tucker’s disassembler and Horvats MV810ASM but I rarely use them.

I often use the VB tech scroll (https://www.planetvb.com/content/downloads/documents/stsvb.html), as a reference. It pretty much contains all the information that has been collected from several sources over the lifetime of this community.

What I usually do is reverse engineering a game using the emulators I mentioned above. I write down my findings and then write specific tools for each game. I’m in the middle of writing a tool that can replace images in many virtual boy games (so far I have Innsmouth, Space Invaders, Gundam and Faceball). However, it is very hardcoded right now and could not be used without changing the actual code.

You can hit me up in discord if you have any questions. You can also see what I’m talking about if you look into the thunderstruck-projects channel on the planetvb discord.

mellott124 wrote:

brumbie13 wrote:
If I understand correctly, with this latest design update, we can use the buttons on the cart to switch between games. Is that it?

If so, I am sold. I was holding out for the MultiBoy32, but if this will let me switch between ROMS without needing to plug the cart into a computer, I’m sold.

Also, if we don’t need to plug the unit into a computer and the ROMs are stored on an SD card, what is the purpose of the USB connection?

You need USB for power. You can’t flash it while plugged into the VB.

I’m open to suggestions for powering the cart when out of the VB.

I would most likely just buy a mini powerbank. They do exist with iphone connectors: https://www.amazon.de/KOBWA-Magnetisches-Wireless-Mini-Ladeger%C3%A4t-Backup-Akku/dp/B07MJG8X58/

I just remembered this exists after being super annoyed with the tiny font. This helps allot. Thanks again.

Go me from 2013

RetroDan wrote:
This is the prototype of my solution. Seems to work pretty well.

Looks cool. Wanna trade? I send you 5 of mine and you send me 5 of yours?

Kavorit wrote:

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

Kavorit wrote:
So I’m trying to unlock Ben but no matter how I do it, nothing happens, I got the other unlock code working but not him, is there a specific speed I need to do it in? Do I only get the one try and need to restart the VB to try again?

Sorry it wasn’t clear in the original post. To get it to work, you have to press, AND HOLD, the following buttons:

LEFT (on right D-pad) + RIGHT (on left D-pad) + SELECT + A + R + L

Thus, you can use your left thumb to press and keep pressing the RIGHT button on the left D-pad as well as the SELECT button, and you can use your right thumb to press and keep pressing the the LEFT button on the right D-pad as well as the A button, and you can use your left and right pointer fingers to press and hold the L and R buttons. If you are pressing and holding all of these buttons down at the same time, the code should work, and I don’t think it matters which buttons you start to press and hold down first.

Gotcha, I was super confused too, reminded me of trying codes for Street Fighter Alpha 3, that was rough, thanks for the response though, didn’t expect that. 🙂

Also make sure you don’t have the keys mapped to close to each other on the keyboard. Windows will start ignoring keys because it thinks you are smashing your face at the keyboard.

Thanks everyone. I’m using this as an experiment to see who much work it is to distribute stuff myself (and what the costs are). So far I’ve only sent out a few but learned stuff on the way. Sadly the guy from Japan who wanted one never replied.

I can make maybe 5 more in case someone wants one.

NyTR0S96 wrote:
So how do i playback the.h file or listen to it? i was told it plays back the converted audio but im not sure how to use it. the readme didn’t help as much.

It’s a source code file. You will need a c project that includes the music player code as well and compile it.

This project is very old though. VuEngine now has sound support. They used my latest code as a template and modified my music converters to output in their format. I guess it’s way easier using that even though I have not tried it myself.

Artie schrieb:
Is the controls different from the JP version? Or was the game made harder than the JP version?? Seem to be different.

Should be exactly the same. I didn’t change or add code. Just replaced Images.

SmokeMonster wrote:
Awesome idea, Thunderstruck. I just wrote this up for RetroRGB https://www.retrorgb.com/virtualtrex-vectrex-emulator-for-virtual-boy.html

Bob will probably cover it in his Weekly Roundup next week https://www.youtube.com/RetroRGB

Thanks allot. I always appreciate the coverage.

Graham Toal wrote:
Since you need something like a 10 to 20 times speedup, optimising the emulator is not going to cut it. However there is a potential solution: pick a game and create a static binary translation (or more practically, a decompilation into C that can be recompiled for the VB) I would suggest replacing the default minestorm in the built-in rom woth a copy of Minestorm 3D, and producing an emulation of just that one game. (There are only a few 3D games on the Vectrex and they could each be handled this way)

You can read more about static binary translation at: http://gtoal.com/sbt/

The technique has been applied in the Vectrex world already to port arcade vector games to the Vectrex, running on attached ARM processors.

Hey, I appreciate that you took the time to register and point this out. I actually think the speed of the emulator can be improved drastically. It’s author himself wrote it with portability and not performance in mind. So checking where time is lost and rewriting bigger parts in asm might bring the games to a playable level. I doubt as well that you can do a perfect emulation though.

A static binary translation is basically just a fancy word for writing a dissessembler and a converter that will make the result VB conform. The fact that other games have been treated this way to be playable on the Vectrex only helps very little. If there was an Vectrex dissessembler that produces c code already, this might be an option to look into. Otherwise, for me personally this sounds like and even worse task then writing an emulator.

From what I understand 3D Vectrex games also work differently then VB games. So they won’t magically work in 3D by running them on the VB. I didn’t try but the emulator itself should be able to run every other Vectrex game right now.

VmprHntrD wrote:
Well maybe this is more complicated than necessary, but do we know if the VB follows the same design concept of previous Nintendo hardware to date (1995?)

The NES, SNES and even Gameboy used memory mappers and other extended chipsets to expand beyond the capabilities of each piece of hardware. The NES with its MMCs etc, Gameboy with MBC1-5, and SNES with DSP through SA1, FX1-2, SDD1, C4, etc chips.

Would it be possible to create a new board like mellott did for larger games such as that Hyper Fighting cart, where an expansion chip can go on it. Maybe something like a DSP that can handle more math, or even a SA1 analog to SNES where a VA1 is a faster co-processor) could handle the work in tandem? I know this is just a reach, but can the hardware take more than it was intended for through outside means? Or is it limited like the GBA to clever programming and little else?

I guess you could do something like that. I think outsourcing music to a designated chip might make sense. But at some point you will have to ask yourself what’s the point of all of this. Just run the game on more powerful hardware and use the entire VB as a display?

Levine91 wrote:
Thought maybe I’d give this thread a bump since it’s about a year old now, see if anyone else has anything that isn’t already publicly known!

Thunderstruck, how are all those projects going you previously mentioned?

I still have allot of projects going. Limited time forces them to a halt quite often which frustrates me a lot.

I did do a few simpler ROM hacks which I talked about in my original post. I still have plenty of very cool ideas for other ROM-Hacks.

I also wrote a rather advanced image converter which i hope to release open source this year. I did also integrate it into vbde. Started to do the same for music as well.

Morintari and I are still making GameHero Legends. The fact that I had to move and reoccurring health problems slowed everything down a bit. Next step here will be to write a animation system (yet again). The current one is too slow and tries to solve problems that don’t even exist for this game. So I will have to take a step back and rethink my approach.

I also spent quite some time on hardware projects, motivated by Kevin and furrtek.

I would so love to finally do more Snatcher.

Another think I want to do is do more youtube videos and twitch streams to open up VB development to a wider audience. I created the accounts and everything (you might have noticed that most of my accounts are called thunderstruckProjects now). I’m really just need more time.You can go and follow me on twitch already if you like: https://www.twitch.tv/thunderstruckProjects

I have many more ideas for projects. Not all of them being VB related though.

I will only buy a Virtual Boy book that has been done by Benjamin Stevens.

This is pretty cool. Will try it this weekend. Thanks allot

Just gave it a try and it seems to work quite good. I noticed a few things here and there in the UI that could need improvement but I don’t want to throw more work at you. Just tell me when you are up for it and I will make a short list.