Planet Virtual Boy

Wondering if anyone with experience can answer some of these questions about "vuengine". Or point me in the direction of a resource. Apologies for the ignorance;


1. The programming language to be used in vuengine is to be JAVA. Is that the only language supported?

2. vuengine is a modified configuration of "IntelliJ IDEA", which by itself is an Integrated development environment for writing a variety of programs? If so, is it configured in such a way that when you compile the contents of the IDE, it creates a "rom" file, readable by the VB?

3. Does any programming need to be done in vuengine to take into account each display of the VB needing to be slightly different? Or the refresh rate of the red column of LEDs of the display that maybe have to match up with the 50hz vibrating mirrors? I think that's part of how the VB works..?

4. Is the JAVA code compiled into assembly (were not original VB games programmed in assembly?), and then ultimately compiled into machine code?

5. After vuengine compiles and produces a rom, is it the emulator's job to take the rom file (which may be written in assembly?) and translate it to machine code?
AND
If a rom file is flashed to a physical cartridge's EPROM, is it all complied to machine code before it can be flashed? The EPROM is only memory made out of transistors right, it can only hold machine code?


6. When I try to compile "plat-former demo" - I get the error in the picture below.. I'm sure it's something easy - is there a folder misplaced?




Sorry if these questions don't even make sense.
My goal is to mess around with the demos and see the effects.
Then to eventually create a home-brew game.

My fear is that, in the case of ... Water world.. two professional developers with enough experience and presumably high salaries took 6 months to create the VB game Water world... Could a small hobbyist make the next Wario Land in a year of putting in a few hours a week?

My only programming experience is one C++ class in college. I did Chemical Engineering, so not much in the way of Computer Science. I do program in "ladder logic" for industrial computers (PLCs). It's kind of a visual language, supposed to be easy to understand for people who were used to electrical drawings instead of computerized automation. Here's a sample screenshot of a version of an "IDE" that I'm used to working with:

Also - maybe these errors upon start-up are trying to tell me something.. If only I knew what a "Git" and a "VCS root mapping" were.

I see my next problem probably being that I don't have my Reality Boy emulator in the right folder.

Uh-oh, that's a TON of misconceptions there, Matt... Let me try to resolve those.

• You're mixing up VBDE and VUEngine.
  • VBDE is the complete development package which includes a pre-configured copy of IntelliJ IDEA, a modified copy of GCC for compiling VB ROMs, tools such as emulators to run and test your compiled ROM on a PC, as well as a bunch of code samples and more.
  • VUEngine is a game engine that comes bundled with VBDE
• All development is done in plain C. The VUEngine, however, supports object-oriented programming through the use of various macros to "simulate" the most common OOP features.
• VB ROMs basically *are* Virtual Boy (v810) machine code.
• VUEngine handles all hardware management tasks for you. You don't have to worry about stuff like the LED's refresh rate.

The errors you're seeing are caused by your copy of VBDE not residing in a folder called "vbde". To get rid of these errors and to make sure everything works fine out of the box, I recommend you grab the latest VBDE Pro from the front page and place it in C:\vbde.

You can just ignore the VCS root mapping errors. I'll make sure they won't pop up in the next VBDE release. To get rid of them for now, you can just delete the .vcs file from the .idea folder of the project you have currently open in IDEA.

Thanks for the help.
Placing vdbe folder in the root of the C drive lets me compile "vuengine-platformer-demo" now.

When I try to "RUN" or "compile and run" however, the resulting "SDL_app" window opens, but stops responding. I'm guessing this is the point where an emulator would normally pop up and run the compiled code?

Is it true that the community as a whole hasn't gotten their hands on, or been able to decipher any of the source code for the official games yet? Would that be a matter of reverting the V810 code back into assembly?

Nevermind about questions above - I used STEREO BOY's post to find the output.vb file.

So far I've been able to mess around with the music and the main character's graphics. You can expect Wario Land 2 to be out in about a year.

Hey, at least one person read my tutorial! Partly ...
Glad I could help!

Thanks STEREOBOY and KR155E.

I haven't spent as much time with VBDE as I would have liked, so prob have no business asking more questions; but if either of you care to inform me - or point to a resource; My current interest is in how a sprite or image is defined inside the VBDE;

There is the binary (written as hexadecimal) code.

0x01FD007F

So there are 8 digits after the 0x.
I'm going to make a big assumption and say this represents one pixel, which is made up of four "components".

In RGB displays, aren't there two digits dedicated to each color (so 6 total digits to represent one RGB pixel), and that 00 through FF represent the intensity of that color?

If virtual boy has just 4 shades of red - I would think each pair of digits would be either 00 or FF. Obviously I'm mistaken.