Virtual Boy Multicart?

[Richard H.]

Sorry to keep you all waiting...

 

Pat (from projectvb) has kindly offered to wire the cart up to his logic analyser to see what's happening. I sent it out to him today.

 

I'm confident, that with his better test equipment, he'll soon spot the fault.

[KR155E]

yay, good news! there's quite some excitement on the pvb forums about the flashboy, i can tell you. it will have its impact.

[jimid2]

I just read through this entire thread - very exciting! I'm relatively new to the Virtual Boy scene, and I'm thrilled to discover a Flash Cart in the works! I'm up for one as soon as they're ready for purchase - I'll go scrounge Ebay for a donor cart now!

[Richard H.]

IT'S FINISHED

 

It seems to be working 100% OK now. The testing I've done indicates it's very stable (I've yet to see a download error)

 

Can't believe it took me a year

 

 

I'm sending one to Chris at Planet Virtual Boy he's going to do some testing and an unbiased review of it.

[bones]

Three cheers! Looking forward to ordering one!!!

[PsychedelicShaman]

Great news, nice work!

[+remowilliams]

IT'S FINISHED

Awesome!

 

Can't wait to get my hands on one!

[christianscott27]

Congrats!!! I'm already looking forward to spending some long overdue time with the virtual boy. I really appreciate your dedication to the project.

[godslabrat]

I am so ordering one of these...

[jimid2]

IT'S FINISHED

 

It seems to be working 100% OK now. The testing I've done indicates it's very stable (I've yet to see a download error)

 

Can't believe it took me a year

 

Wow! "Thank You" hardly seems sufficient. I can't wait to order one of these carts!

[Video]

AWESOME!! When can we order them?

[Richard H.]

I've teamed up with Chris, he's going to do the connector removal / re-soldering and casing. It's good, because the actual soldering of the boards components is time consuming enough (hand-soldered surface mount chips), and also means we can get carts made more quickly.

 

BTW all ROM's used on the FlashBoy have to be padded to 2Mbyte (which is unavoidable). To simplify this process, Pat has written a cool utility which detects the method required and patches all your ROM's in one go. This is just a one-off thing you have to do (and takes only a few seconds).

 

The downside of having to pad, is that all downloads take about 2 minutes (with verify). I'm tweaking the firmware to ignore $FF writes (blank flash=$FF) which should speed it up a little.

 

The cart will be available from Planet Virtual Boy

[bones]

Way cool. If you would, drop a note in this thread when the cart is available for sale. That way I can rush over there and purchase

[Richard H.]

If you would, drop a note in this thread when the cart is available for sale

Yes, definitely

 

 

I'm tweaking the firmware to ignore $FF writes

That worked better than expected, some download times are now half what they were before.

[Richard H.]

Here's a couple of pics of the final version label / board

 

(I re-worked the routing to make it a bit more efficient)

[darthkur]

That looks very nice. Can't wait to get one into my possession.

[+SpiceWare]

Slick - time to dust off my VB

[KR155E]

got the review sample yesterday. so, here's the review.

http://www.vr32.de/modules/hardware/index....hcarts&v=fb

Edited September 24, 2007 by KR155E

[bones]

got the review sample yesterday. so, here's the review.

http://www.vr32.de/modules/hardware/index....hcarts&v=fb

Excellent, thanks for the review. So are Galactic Pinball and Wario Land the only VB titles with a battery backup, or are there others? I'm primarily looking to get this for the Japanese only releases, already have the 14 US titles

[KR155E]

No, there are some more. Games with SRAM are:

3D Tetris

Galactic Pinball

SD Gundam Dimension War

Teleroboxer

Virtual Boy Wario Land

[bones]

Bummer for Gundam, guess I'll have to get good enough to play through it in one run The rest are fairly common, at least here, so no big loss.

[KR155E]

Right, but don't forget that a ROM of Gundam has not been released yet.

[bones]

ahh, so much to learn about this stuff! Which of the non-US titles have ROMs been released for?

[KR155E]

All except these 4 rare ones have been released:

SD Gundam

Space Invaders

Virtual Bowling

Virtual Lab

[bones]

those are some choice titles, would be nice to play them eventually. Hopefully the flash cart being available will encourage the release of these 4 down the road.