Since the initial announcement of the Nintendo 3DS on March 23th, I've been excited about the idea of another 3D console by Nintendo, 15 years after the ill-fated Virtual Boy, which almost instantly manifested itself in plans to create a website about it.

The name "Planet 3DS" was quickly chosen and the domain planet3ds.net registered on the same day. A rather lenghty period of finding a concept for the site followed in which I found two equally enthusiastic co-editors, Herman and Max, but also scrapped just as many ideas as I had for the site. Noticing I was going in circles, I created another site in the mean time. Pokémon-Mini.net, build for my friends from Team Pokémé, is based on WordPress and phpbb and was a perfect test run for Planet 3DS, which will now go the same (or at least a very similar) route.

Since Herman will be attending E3 2010 and the unveiling of Nintendo 3DS from June 15th to 17th, we of course had something like a deadline for getting the site up and running, but many other commitments came in the way. The result of this is the quickly put together, temporary site we have now. Should be enough to get you all the news from E3 until I can find the time to start working on the final site design. I still don't have a definite concept for the site, but we'll see how it develops, so for now, Planet 3DS is hereby going live and open to the public.

Stay tuned for some great days next week when E3 2010 takes place. As mentioned above, Herman will be attending and providing us with the hottest info, photos and video footage every evening. Meanwhile, Max will be in the US as well, albeit not at E3, but in South Carolina, New York City and Washtington D.C., and talk to the press, while I will try to post while being at work. Heh.

It's finally done! With the help of our new member Kitaro, it was finally possible to build a good ROM of Bound High!

After all, it was neither a bug in the ISX converter, nor one in the game's source, but a faulty code optimization routine of the VUCC compiler, which could be circumvented with a very small change to the source. Such a little thing, so much hassle!

I'd like to say thank you to everybody who was involved in this and helped to work towards this release, you guys rock!

And now, enjoy this fine release!

DOWNLOAD (380 KB)

Only few days after the new coding competition started, we already saw the first entry. "PongInvaders" by our new member usch (have a look at the User ID ) combines Pong/Arkanoid and Space Invaders into a fun new game concept. You'll be able to follow further development of this project in the release thread. Welcome to the community, usch!

In other news, a new Virtual Emulator has been released. It's called VBjin and is a merge of the PCEjin emulator with the Virtual Boy core from Mednafen 0.9, so it's basically Mednafen with a nice GUI. You can download and follow the project on its Google Code page.

One thing that I've missed is that a new version of GoodVBoy has been released some weeks ago. Version 3.1415 adds most of the newer homebrew releases, but for some reason misses BLOX 2.

The second Planet Virtual Boy Coding Competition will start in three days. It will then run for exactly 6 months, after which a secret PVB community vote will find the winners.

First prize will be a FlashBoy FlashBoy Plus and a PVB shirt, second and third will get a PVB shirt. Plus the first 10 every participant will receive a high quality printed A3 (297mm x 420mm) copy of the competition poster.

For detailed rules and more info, have a look at the Competition Forum.

There's a few rule changes this year:
- Supplemental tools are allowed for submission as well
- Entries have to be open source

Unleash the Power, gentlemen, November 1st is your deadline. :)

The latest WIP version 0.9.0 of the multi system emulator Mednafen has just been released on the official forum. It introduces support for the Virtual Boy. From the games I tested with earlier betas, everything ran perfectly, even those writing directly to the framebuffers, like Red Alarm, which were previously unplayable in any other VB emulator for Windows. Future versions will also feature a debugger, something developers should be really looking forward to.

Dicuss in our Forum here.



In other news, a new version of ViBE has been released. It has an updated internal CRC list to allow the two recently released bad ROMs of Bound High! to play.

A new version of the gccVB compiler has been created by dasi. This is still version 2.95 like the last release from 2007, but has added bitstring and NVC instructions. It also comes precompiled, so all you have to do to is install Cygwin and drop the unzipped archive in your "/c/cygwin/usr/" folder.

Another release comes from RunnerPack. His VB ROM-image Shrinker utility is something like an "inverse padder" and allows you to shrink Virtual Boy ROMs to their smallest possible size (which still has to be a power of 2 of course).

Furthermore, you can find a TTF format font, modeled after the Virtual Boy one, made by RunnerPack here.

So it looks like there was a lot of truth in the rumours we reported about two weeks ago...

According to a press release posted on Nintendo of Japan's Investor Relations website this morning, they are going to release a successor to the Nintendo DS series, called "Nintendo 3DS", which will be capable of displaying 3D images without the need for special glasses. It's said to be released within the next 12 months. More details will be announced on the upcoming E3, starting on June 15th.

Quote:
Originial PDF (J): http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2010/100323.pdf
Originial PDF (E): http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2010/100323e.pdf

RunnerPack has released version 1.1 of his ISX to VB ROM Converter. It fixes a bug which caused the other demo found on the dev disks to not convert correctly.

Thanks to LameBoy, who sent me a build of that demo, which we called "VUE Debugger Sample", yesterday made with his ISX2ROM tool, I am now able to release it here as well:
VUE Debugger Sample (19kb)

It's anniversary time! From today, Planet Virtual Boy can proudly look back at a lifespan of 10 years. Although I don't want to make any big, sentimental speeches now, I'd like to take the opportunity to sincerely thank those, who make working on this site so much fun. To our fantastic community: Thank You!

Now that this is done, we can have a look at the presents (YAY!).

In parallel and independent of each other, two programs to convert ISX files generated by the official Virtual Boy C compiler "VUCC" to the VB ROM format have emerged. There is RunnerPack's ISX to VB ROM Converter v1.0 as well as LameBoy's VeeBee ISX2ROM v1.00. With those, it's now not only possible to compile official source code, but also to use the official compiler for homebrew. Quote LameBoy:

Quote:
Thanks to those great tools, we can now also release all 4 different versions of the VUE demo program from the official dev disks released last November. Those were converted by LameBoy using his ISX2ROM. Downloads:

Sample Soft for VUE Programming (v1.0) (15kb)
Sample Soft for VUE Programming (v1.1) (16kb)
Sample Soft for VUE Programming (v1.1a) (16kb)
Sample Soft for VUE Programming (v1.2) (16kb)

Planet Virtual Boy just switched to a new main domain, http://www.planetvb.com.

Although we and the site grew up with the old domain, http://www.vr32.de, I feel strongly connected to it, I still think that our domain should match the site name. Furthermore, a .de domain for a multi language, international site with a mainly english speaking community just does not fit so much.

You don't have to wave goodbye to vr32.de, though. If you prefer the shortness and uniqueness of the old domain, you can still use it, it now simply redirects to the new one.