segagamer99 wrote:
I just don’t get all this fuss. There are several examples of unreleased and released games being made into home-brews for profit, and Nintendo, Konami and sega don’t care. Boung High! was made, and yet nothing happened. Why is this a big deal? Eric won’t be able to make any profit.
You want an example of a pirated game? Super Mario Bros. 2: Lost Levels reproduction carts. Back in the day, the game was pirated from disks to carts. Now, it’s the rom to cart. Mario 2 is STILL A COMMERCIABLY AVAILABLE GAME. It is on the Wii Virtual Console. This reproduction cart is sold for profit. Nintendo has never interfered, even though it is a well known game.
Seriously, I can think of several more examples of “pirated” games that ginormous companies don’t care about.
If Dragon Hopper and G-Zero are found, will they just be a rom? No glorious cart release?
Oh well, it is for Eric to decide, but this is a long lost Virtual Boy game. It needs respect and glory…
The ROM will be released for free soon. If you’re not afraid of selling a game for which you don’t own the copyright you can just organize the CiB release yourself. Everyone can do it if he is willing to pay the initial costs and take the risk of getting sued. There is no reason Eric has to do it.
bigmak wrote:
Before this goes any further…I will NOT be releasing this game in cart for sale in any way.
I thought it would be nice for people who donate to help cover the cost of the release to get a piece of the game..a physical piece. But, I’ve had many emails/pms explaining how illegal it would be for me to gain anything from a physical release. I have been told that if i attempt a cart release of the prototype rom, emails and phone calls will be made and at that point..things get messy.
So, now what ?
I will still release the rom for free..just gimme a week or two.
I have 50 carts with the rom on them..I will devise a system to give these carts out for free.
I will accept donations to help cover the cost of the prototype release..but in no way/shape or form will it mean you will be getting a physical copy of the game.
-Eric
It doesn’t make a big difference to me. I will still support you with the same amount of money I initially planned. Having the ROM is already pretty cool.
It is sad to hear that some jerks can simply screw up the card release though. Personally, I blame Screw-Attack for this. They didn’t took the time to do proper research on their news-story. Thereby, they left their viewers with a wrong impression of what was going on. I hope they will realize at some point that they have the responsibility to check their facts because otherwise they will harm other projects as well.
KR155E wrote:
Oh, another idea that just popped into my head: wouldn’t it be cool to have a script which checks our server for updates and, in case there is a newer version, downloads and extracts it to c:/vbde, thus updating the local installation? A simple batch file calling cURL and 7-Zip should do the job.
There are actually tools that can build a web-installer including stuff like automatically download latest, create shortcuts and so on… I can’t remember the name right now… have to check when I’m at work.
OK… first of all: the .vb has nothing to do with visual basic. It is simply your compiled c file which then can be run in an emulator or on a Flashboy (.vb meaning VirtualBoy).
If you want to compile a c file you need, besides your source files, a Makefile that tells the compiler how to compile and link your sources. I attached an empty project which already includes everything you need. If you copy this to your cygwin/home/yourname directory and then execute ‘make’ in that directory it should compile the empty project. You can then include your existing code into this empty project.
I would be way easier for you to simply use vbde (The empty project is included there) though. Just extract it to C:/vbde and start the notepad++ which is included. You can compile the project from within notepad++ then.
Just wanted to let everyone know that I will take a break of about a week or so. I know everyone is overexcited about all of the Faceball related stuff right now but I feel pretty exhausted and need some time to get back to normal. So don’t worry if you don’t see updates in this thread.
I have no idea if this is technically possible. It is not like you can simply flash two VirtualBoy games on one card.
Both ROM’s together should be under 2MBytes. So, couldn’t you put in an option screen that lets you decide which version to run (when you first boot the cart) ?
I thought about that as well. I’m not sure if this would break the absolute addressing though… I guess someone smarter then may would have to do this.
Joining two ROMs into one is indeed possible, though it’s not easy and the results aren’t always perfect.
Here’s a ROM that contains GameHero and Fishbone. When it starts, both displays will be blank. Press the L button for GameHero or R for Fishbone.
You might experience some glitches because most of the code patching was done by a program I wrote, and it’s pretty much impossible for a program to guess everything correctly. Also, the games will overwrite each other’s data on the SRAM and I didn’t attempt to correct that. I also haven’t tested the ROM on hardware.
For Faceball, you’d probably have an easier job because the ROMs would be similar and probably nothing too serious would happen if one game tried to read the data from the other game.
The unasked question that I was suggesting was that since (whomever it was, the super smart guy) figured out how to mess with the original rom in order to create the “remastered” version it stood as a possibility that they could somehow be merged in a single rom wrapper before being flashed?
I don’t know if that guy is so super smart. I asked him to add online multiplayer for 64 users. He said ‘it is technically not possible’. I mean, he probably could just copy some code from a game like Battlefield. I guess he is just lazy.
DanB wrote:
Fun fact: The rom header in the Faceball proto still says “V-Tetris” and has the same game id (VTRJ) as that game, which might suggest it was developed by the same team, or even built on the same pc/using V-Tetris as a framework 🙂
I saw that as well. There is also some other stuff from V-Tetris like the credits left in the ROM. You can’t see it in the game but it is still there. I guess they reused the code base to have a faster start.
Lester Knight wrote:
Are you keeping detailed documentation of how you are doing these changes? It might be extremely beneficial to future hackers if they have access to this information.
I’m trying.
I think I’m done with basic for the ROM-Hack. I know where the necessary stuff is in the ROM and how to change it. The next step will be to build the Level Editor. It will be a simple tool at first. I will polish it before gets released.
Doing stuff like this is always rather boring so I will try do get it done as fast as possible.
I have no idea if this is technically possible. It is not like you can simply flash two VirtualBoy games on one card.
Both ROM’s together should be under 2MBytes. So, couldn’t you put in an option screen that lets you decide which version to run (when you first boot the cart) ?
I thought about that as well. I’m not sure if this would break the absolute addressing though… I guess someone smarter then may would have to do this.
shenmueso wrote:
this is all very exciting! a never before seen VB game that was intended for legit release?
you really have gone above and beyond in acquiring the prototype, but it really doesn’t sit well with me that some guy was holding on to it and then sold it for such a big amount. i mean unless that japanese guy was solely responsible for coding the entire game, it’s really not his to sell like that and is a pretty anti-gamer thing to do to hold on to it in secret, only releasing it for big bucks. Even if he was on the staff that worked on it, it wasn’t his money that financed it, it was nintendos. What would he have done with it if no one had stumped up the cash? and was he pimping it around to try and find a buyer? if no one else had ever offered the money, he would have had a worthless piece of plastic.
Leaves a sour taste in the mouth imo, anyone with a love for gaming wouldn’t do this, i expext he was a money man for nintendo and somehow got a hold of it.
Well, you have to remember. Faceball was developed by BPS, which hasn’t done anything in about 20 years.
Hmm, Mr. G seemed like a nice guy. Unlike most prototype hoarders, he gave a lot of screenshots, level descriptions and video. I do wonder where he is now.
Actually, Mr. G said that he doesn’t own the card but had the permission of the owner to publish pictures and videos. Thereby, I guess he wasn’t the one who sold the card but Mr. Gs friend. Maybe should call the original owner Mr. X.
Lester Knight wrote:
Are you keeping detailed documentation of how you are doing these changes? It might be extremely beneficial to future hackers if they have access to this information.
OK… I made some more changes to the behavior of the level menu. The original game behaves like this: You start stage 1 and lets say die at level 3. If you start stage 1 again you will continue in 1-3. If you start stage 2 instead you will continue in 2-3. This is fine for the original game as all 14 levels are the same in all of the stages.
However, the remastered edition has different levels in each stage. Meaning, I had to change this behavior. I took the “easy” solution and changed the behavior that way, that it will always set you back to level 1 if you die. This also makes the game more challenging.
Therefore, I had to figure out where the current level, and current player health is stored and extend my own maze-loading-logic. Now the logic checks if the player died (health is 0) when a new maze is loaded. In that case it sets back the current level to 0.
Sounds easy right? Guess what, it wasn’t. Please don’t ask for other solutions. I took me allot of black magic to make this one work. I tested it a couple of times and it worked fine. Further testing might be required though.
bigmak wrote:
He had to get all ‘smart’ n stuff. Change the walls..find out that he can change enemies and everything. Life sure is tough when you have smart friends :).
Actually, I think it is way easier to change the walls and stuff then fixing the typos.
Okonomiyaki wrote:
… as well as the whole digital package (original version, remixed version, whatever else) on a single VB cart.
I have no idea if this is technically possible. It is not like you can simply flash two VirtualBoy games on one card. I have never seen someone else doing this. If you know how to do something like this please share your knowledge.
Otherwise lets just wait for what the remastered edition turns out to be and then decide which versions sells how.
segagamer99 wrote:
I finally got to play this for a few minutes on the Red Dragon emulator.
Unfortunately, that meant no music, and no #D, but I still got to play the game.
Fishbone is a very nice homebrew. Virtual Ben did an awesome job with the graphics. Thunderstruck, you did very good coding, and there is a lot of variety. I like how the stage select screen is inspired by Faceball.
I didn’t expect this game to be auto-scrolling, or using only the d-pad, but it’s a nice and simple little game. Good job you guys. 🙂
I actually never tired Red Dragon. It works in Reality Boy but the sound is broken there as well due to a Bug in RealityBoy (it interprets certain sound registers backwards). However, the game runs perfectly fine in Mednafen. It is a little bit slower on Hardware then in the emulator though.
