Plenty of money is lost in doing this as well as made across several projects.

This is very much appreciated. I know that is not always easy doing projects like this without asking for a reward.

I started converting some music and it worked fine for the first track. After that one I didn’t like the results of the conversion too much. I also discovered some Bugs in the converter which means I have to touch that code again.

However, I’m not in the mood of doing it today so I will just stop now.

OK… so I took my Midi-Player and integrated it into Fishbone. I seems to work fine so far. There are some issues but nothing that can’t be solved quickly.

When that is done I will pick some free Midi’s to add music to all of the levels an menus.

thunderstruck wrote:
I still need to fix the channel selection though. The SUSE dynamically picks a free channel while the Midi-Player assigns a channel to a specific track. Shouldn’t be to complicated to fix this.

The SU Sound Engine is now fully integrated into the Midi-Player. They seem to work great together. However, the timing of the SU sound engine is still done using the “wait for the next frame” method while the Midi-Player uses interrupts. This means that sound effects may slow down when the VB has some heavy stuff to do while the music isn’t influenced.

I could of course do the timing for the sound effects using interrupts as well. The only problem is that I change the interrupt interval to the bar length of the respective song when I load a new song. So, I guess I will leave it as it is for now.

The next thing to do is to integrate the Midi-Player into Fishbone. This shouldn’t be to complicated.

He also has a good reputation at Nintendo Age. From what I understood the first cards ship some when this week.

I started integrating the SU Sound Engine today. Switching the libgccvb was a pain but I found an acceptable way. The SUSE is now part of the Midi-Player and can be used for playing the sound effects. It now uses my methods for setting up the sound, playing notes and so on. I also added a feature so that the volume can be set within in the sound definitions.

I still need to fix the channel selection though. The SUSE dynamically picks a free channel while the Midi-Player assigns a channel to a specific track. Shouldn’t be to complicated to fix this.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
I think it technically causes some problems in the copyright law area, since Nintendo still owns the copyrights to the game and nobody got official permission from them to make and sell these things. That’s probably why it’s best to just leave it in an obscure forum section of the site and not make it more easily visible in the News section.

Well, this makes perfect sense.

I just wondered why this was never announced in the news on the main site.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Glad to hear that you’ve been making good progress with this. Do you plan to include all the original songs from the first GameHero in the new game, but with the updated sound and extra sound channels? That would be so great.

That’s the plan. However, it depends on how good the Midis convert. I will of course include new songs as well.

I cleaned up the Midi-Player today. It is now way easier to add/choose/play songs from code. I also added a feature that analyses volume changes to save some space.

I converted some other Midis to check out the results. I think the conversion went ok but it does not sound as good as the Zelda track. I think this mainly caused by the quality of the Midis I converted.

The next thing to do is to integrate the SU sound engine for sound effects. Therefore I need to switch the libgccvb which is always tedious.

UncleTusker wrote:
Check these bad boys out!!! Getting ready to ship these in the next couple days. Thanks for patiently waiting everyone. The first 25 should be out by the end of this week.

Great to see this coming to life after such a short time.

OK, I changed the Midi-Player and the Converter to use the bar length. This way the system should work for all of the other Midis as well.

The next step is to clean up the Midi player to make it easier to add new songs. At the same time I can test the conversion of some other Midis.

First of all: Thanks for all the testing. I will put you guys in the credits screen.

I have not been working on this since I released the demo as I was waiting for Virtual Ben to finish the sprites. He is done with everything now.

Right now I’m working on my sound project which I plan to use for Fishbone as well. As soon as I’m done with that I will continue on this one. As usual I will post some updates about my progress (which probably no-one ever reads).

HorvatM wrote:

Today, I found out how to edit the amount of time you get for each level, how much time you need to have left to get to the next upper level, and which music track plays on the level (there are 12 tracks in the game, I think). I also know where most of the character sets and some of the character maps are (fun fact: the ROM contains the graphics from “Sample Soft for VUE Programming”), but graphics don’t interest me because they don’t really add anything new to the game.

I’ve also made a disassembly of the code with David Tucker’s disassembler and figured out what some short routines do (this is my first encounter with assembly language on the VB), but I don’t know whether that’s even worth trying. There is a lot of code but if we figure out which parts do what, we can change how the game behaves (and also add features, because there is a lot of unused space).

Sometimes, I think about whether all of this is meaningful. The game is simple enough that a team of experienced homebrewers could recreate it. On the other hand, we can think of reverse engineering as a kind of archeology.

Sounds like you are close to figuring out how the complete game works. Would be great to be able to do a ROM hack that changes the complete game including graphics and sound and just using the game as an engine.

Ok, I figured out why the tracks are not in perfect sync when I replay a song. I didn’t really solve the problem but build a workaround that should fix the problem for now.

I also added some additional checks and features to the converter to avoid broken configurations.

The next thing to do is to calculate the tempo in a different way. Right now the converter calculates it the way that it works for the old Midi-Player. As I changed everything to a interrupt based system I now have to calculate the bar-length instead of the tempo. I simply calculated this by hand for the Zelda-Music demo so I already know how to do that… I just have to implement it.
However, I also have to change some stuff in the Midi-Player to make this more flexible.

Welcome,

if you like Wario games you will love Virtual Boy Wario Land. If you get a Virtual Boy make sure you buy a FlashBoy Plus as well. It lets you have so much more fun with the console.

Ok, I have been busy programming a GUI for the Midi converter. I just finished the first version. It is not perfect but functional. I still have to change some stuff in the converter which will result in changes to the GUI as well.

I also have to add some more checks to prohibit misconfiguration. However, I attached a screenshot so… have fun looking at it… I guess.

Attachments:

1. 

   converter.jpg
   

I’m not an expert on hardware topics but for me it sounds like the Controller-Connector of the VB has something like a loose contact.

Maybe you just need to clean the connector or bend the metal pins a little bit?

Finally the Internet is back. I started coding a simple GUI for the Midi-Converter so that is easier to use. That’s a pretty dull and boring work but it has to be done.

I also think there is still a Bug in the replay of the Midi player. If I let it run for long enough it sounds like the tracks are not in perfect sync anymore.

Great, my internet-router just died. This will definitly slow down the development.