Planet Virtual Boy

Like numerous other Virtual Boy titles, Mario's Tennis was going to support the GameLink Cable to offer multiplayer modes, a fact that was even mentioned in an early In-Store promotional video. After the GameLink Cable got cancelled, naturally none of the commercially released games contained any type of simultaneous multiplayer mode.

It was long believed that Mario's Tennis did not even contain any leftover multiplayer code - until M.K. went to great lengths to find and restore exactly that! He just released a patch that restores 2 of 3 game modes (P1 vs P2 and P1/COM vs P2/COM) to a fully working state. The third mode (P1/P2 vs COM/COM) is buggy and won't be fixed until any Virtual Boy emulator implements full link cable emulation to shorten debugging and testing times to a healthy amount. While Reality Boy does offer network-based link cable emulation, it lacks support for the respective interrupts, which Mario's Tennis' multiplayer modes depend on.

Check out the release thread for a brief summary of the discovery and restoration process as well as the patch download.

If you're eager to play some Mario's Tennis multiplayer now and got a friend with another Virtual Boy and flash cart nearby, you might be interested in Kevin Mellot's fantastic homemade link cable. For everbody else, M.K. has released a video of the Mario's Tennis multiplayer in action.

Howdy there, would you like some dinosaur on your Virtual Boy?

StereoBoy has released a brand new homebrew he has been working on recently with Jorgeche and me. "DaumenKinosaurier - VUEdition" is a Virtual Boy port of an awarded stereoscopic flip book StereoBoy made as a student in 2009, realized in the VUEngine.

More information about the project, ROM download as well as sources can be be found in the release thread.

In the nineties, Canadian company VidPro made game retail displays that were used at a number of retailers, most notably Toys'R'Us. The system was simple: instead of the actual game boxes, VidPro displays had cards showing the boxart for every title the store sold, which the customer could browse. If they wanted to make a purchase, they grabbed a slip of paper and brought it up to the cashier to receive the actual game.

Due to VidPro cards being produced prior to a game's retail release, there were also cards made for unreleased games in rare occasions. It has been known for a long time that a card exists for the unreleased Dragon Hopper, and we have even had super-low res scans which were found in 2002 on half.com.

Now the elusive gem has finally been found by vuefinder83! Enjoy high-res scans of the VidPro cards for Dragon Hopper and a few other Virtual Boy games, including early versions, here.

Here is the brand new version 1.2.0 of VBDE, your full fledged Nintendo Virtual Boy development environment for Windows!

• VBDE 1.2.0 (32 MB)
• VBDE Pro 1.2.0 (239 MB)

New compiler

For this version, gcc has been updated to 4.7 with amazing new patches by ElmerPCFX for wider compatabilty (e.g. frame pointers and prolog functions are now supported), better code optimization and much lower compile times.

Thanks a bunch Elmer! Also thank you to Jorgeche for helping with getting it up and running in VBDE!

Pro updates

For the Pro Version, IDEA has been updated to the latest version, 2106.3.5. Furthermore, the C/C++ plugin has been removed since it was causing slow-downs and broke auto-completion.

Tiled support

A script has been added for converting Tiled maps to VUEngine stages. It not only builds Stage definitions from Tiled maps, but also allows to mark certain object or tile layers as "Composites", which get combined into single images and converted on the fly.

Most Stages of the VUEngine demos have been converted to Tiled maps and can be converted with the script, but in its current form, it's not very robust against misconfiguration and more of a hacked together proof of concept. I hope to find the time to refactor this into a clean and highly extensible class structure for a future VBDE release.

New major VUEngine version

The VBJaEngine has been renamed to "VUEngine" and updated to version 5.0, which has seen tons of optimizations and bug fixes, new features as well as new, Doxygen-based documentation.



The VUEngine Barebone and Platformer Demo have also been massively updated. Check out the updated VUEngine Platformer Demo version, it now runs flawlessly on hardware and has improved graphics and animations, new level elements, new menus and an overhauled save feature!

In the following folder you'll find the latest compiled and padded binaries, constantly fed by our new, automated release process.

• VUEngine Platformer Demo Releases

Repositories

Keep in mind that you can stay up to date, independent of releases, by grabbing VBDE and the VUEngine directly from their Git repositories at Bitbucket.

• VBDE
• VUEngine
• VUEngine Barebone
• VUEngine Platformer Demo

So, instead of using the download links on top of this post, you can alternatively just clone VBDE's Git repo with your Bitbucket account, which would also enable you to easily update to future versions through a simple git pull.

git clone --recursive 
https://[your-bitbucket-username]@bitbucket.org/KR155E/vbde.git

Benjamin Stevens has done complete scans of Nintendo's 1995 and 1996 Annual Report Booklets. While the 1995 one contains about a dozen pages about the Virtual Boy, including a bunch of nice images, the latter has only a single sentence about it (page 31).

Sales of the Company's Virtual Boy system did not meet expectations.

Yep. :-)