I'd like to announce Richard Hutchinson's latest creation, the FlashBoy Plus! This new, second entry to the FlashBoy family expands the previous design by an internal save battery and will finally allow Virtual Boy homebrew developers to make use of game saving mechanisms in their games. Or, better put, it will finally allow people to actually use save game functionality of homebrew and commercial games on hardware.

This marks the end of the "old" FlashBoy line, none of those will be produced anymore. The last ever "old" FlashBoy (#284), which was meant as the main prize for the PVB Coding Competition 2010, is being auctioned off. The competition winner will receive a FlashBoy Plus instead.

This also means that the previously announced upcoming new FlashBoy batch will in fact be FlashBoy Plus units. Those 50 units will be available to those who preordered approximately in early October. The price will stay the same at 90 Euro.

Everyone who did not have luck this time should be happy to hear that we plan to create another batch of FlashBoy Plus units at the end of the year.

Here's how the box of the Plus will look like. (Kudos to Hedgetrimmer for the fantastic cart renders on the back!

RunnerPack has released VBid, a command line viewer/editor for the information block (i.e. the "header") found near the end of Nintendo Virtual Boy ROM images. It contains title, company, version and region information. Get it here.

The new 0.9.12 WIP version of the multi system emulator Mednafen has been released. It offers extended debugging functionality on the Virtual Boy part.

Official Release Thread

A new batch of 50 FlashBoys will be available later this summer, approximately late August. The Price will remain the same at 90 Euro, more details about the package here.

We are currently getting everything we need together, and will keep you informed on the forums. Might even have some surprises up our sleeves.

You can (and should, as demand is high!) preorder yours now by sending your name and email using this form.

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.

New cool releases from DogP!

Firstly, a tool called "Dictionary Word Finder" for doing relative searches through VB ROMs for specific words, e.g. "Debug". Hopefully this will lead to some interesting discoveries. Forum Link.

Second, and most interesting, is some tools to generate maps of ROMs, This is a great opportunity for ROM hackers and those trying to reverse engineer commercial games. There's a new Reality Boy build with support for automated ROM map generation, as well as tools to e.g. merge individual maps into a master map. Forum Link. Did anyone just say VB Wario Land level editor? Mario's Tennis 2 Player mode restauration?

DogP released version 1.1 of his VB Sound Generator. It has a few minor changes in how values are processed, as well as a few other small changes. The source code is now also included. Forum Link.