Planet Virtual Boy

Faceball: Remastered out now

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:04:20 +0200

When a ROM dump of the unreleased Faceball for Virtual Boy got released earlier this year, it was a great day for Virtual Boy fans. There was a little not so perfect detail, though: The obtained prototype was only about 80% complete. Months of work later, thunderstruck has finally finished hacking the bits and bytes out of Faceball to finish things were Bulletproof Software left off. The hack, called "Faceball: Remastered", features many improvements and fixes, which let it look very much like a finished game:

- 56 unique levels (half of them designed by Benjamin Stevens) instead of the original 14 demo levels
- Hidden Faceball enemy reactivated
- Hidden Menu Image reactivated
- Hidden Music reactivated
- Improved controls with strafing
- Debug menu disabled
- New non-Japanese Faceball title screen logo
- New and fixed text in credits

Wanna check it out? Have a look at this thread!

The final version of FacEdit, the level editor developed specially for Faceball: Remastered, will also be released soon, so everybody can create their own levels.

BLOX released on cartridge

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:57:00 +0200

When it was released in 2003, my puzzle game BLOX was the first ever complete Virtual Boy homebrew game. Today, 10 years later, it also becomes the first ever Virtual Boy homebrew to be released complete-in-box!

More information and order info can be found in our forum.

My complete share of each of the limited run of 50 copies will go towards bigmak to help compensate for the costs of the Faceball release, so you'll even do something for a good cause when getting yourself a copy.

Advanced Pasta Cooking Simulator released

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 13:23:22 +0200

Do you love a good pasta but are too afraid of your terrorist neighbours shooting at you while cooking? With good reason, you're not alone. Luckily, you can now carry over all the real-world dangers of preparing italian food to the virtual world in HorvatM's "Advanced Pasta Cooking Simulator". Buon appetito!

Download and discuss

5 more Famitsus scanned

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:01:47 +0200

Besides a few missed pages of the recently scanned magazines, Benjamin Stevens has released scans of 5 additional issues of Japanese Famitsu.

Entire set of 1995 Famitsu VB articles scanned

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 15:58:38 +0200

Benjamin Stevens has aquired the entire set of Famitsu issues from 1995 and has scanned every single Virtual Boy article for your reading (or viewing) pleasure!

New Magazine scans from Famitsu and Edge

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 21:28:58 +0200

Thanks to foil_lone_wolf, here are three great new article scans of Famitsu issues 323 and 346 as well as Edge issue 24, 09/1995:

FacEdit - A Faceball Editor

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:37:20 +0200

thunderstruck has released v0.01-alpha of FacEdit, a level editor for the newly released Faceball.

Download and dicuss in our forums here.

Multiple BMP to BGMap/charset converter

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:30:00 +0200

HorvatM has released vbimgc, a tool that "can take multiple BMP files at once and convert them to BGMaps that all share the same charset, with the charset only containing as many characters as needed to conserve space and the BGMaps only containing as many tiles as needed, not all 64 by 64." Download and discussion in our forum.

Faceball ROM Release and Fundraiser

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 15:00:00 +0200

The wait is already over, bigmak hereby releases the ROM dump of his Niko-Chan Battle (aka Faceball) prototype for everyone's enjoyment! If you don't know what the heck I am talking about, please scroll down two news posts for the (short) full story.

Bigmak is now accepting donations a well. Unlike previously stated, there will not be any complete-in-box reproductions given out in return for donations, due to a lot of bad feedback received from people who simply did not understand what this is all about. Instead, the already produced carts will be given out for free! Details will be made known soon.

Let us all show our appreciation and help bigmak to recoup as much of his huge investment as possible! Click the button below to make a donation.

Keep it simple, stupid!

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 11:56:33 +0200

I have been doing some work on the site, updated the look a bit and shaved off some fat in the form of features I felt were unnecessary.

For one thing, the Marketplace is gone. All content has been transferred to the re-opened marketplace forum, which will take its old spot as your place to buy, sell and trade Virtual Boy stuff. For another thing, the Guestbook has been deleted as well, its content was archived in this forum thread.

I am also considering to remove the German version of the site, as it will allow me to push out content updates in half the time.

Furthermore, the role of the Dev Wiki will have to be rethought and it's most likely going to be replaced by a bunch of programming tutorials.

Please contact me if you find any bugs.