Virtual Boy Sacred Tech Scroll

mossy_11

I caught wind a few days ago of a huge new technical document about the internal workings of the Virtual Boy, and decided to have a chat with the creator. The result of that is now on the Archive.vg blog. Check it out.

Turns out he's writing an emulator, too. It might be called Vinny.

And the Virtual Boy homebrew scene is surprisingly robust.

Mucx

Awesome!... and did you mention OpenEmu when he started talking about UI's? :)

mossy_11

I did.

Richard Moss: You could always just work on the core and get someone else to do the UI. There's OpenEmu on the Mac, and I forget the name of the Windows equivalent.
Guy Perfect: Oh, I can handle it just fine. But there's always the part about having the UI to work on before I can see it come to life.
Guy Perfect: For example, I might get the graphics perfectly emulated, but not be able to see any pictures until I work on some way to get them on the screen.

seanstar

*clicks*
*skims doc*
...
Okay. It's official. The Virtual Boy is powered by headache induction. Amazing, surprisingly sensible, technically sophisticated headache induction. I always knew that was the player experience, but that graphics system... so much power... so infinitesmally few ways to invoke it without actually causing a forcible inversion of the visual cortex. And I equally would not want to have been one of the chip designers. Awesome chiptune audio capacity; sweep/mod function and noise channel operation scares me. Such straightforward functionality on the CPU, but I can't honestly tell whether I'm more inclined to code in assembly or try to find a high-level-language compiler >.<
...
*contemplates the VB devkit he picked up a year or three ago*