Planet Virtual Boy

There's just one thing missing here in this update: a column table tab.

You guys ever thought the column table of the VIP was useless for graphical effects? Well, nope.

The 2nd example used on this article explains why the column table is so useful.

For instance, the Wario Land game's intro cutscene actually uses a fade effect on the sides via the column table. Guy Perfect told me about that on Discord when I was still discussing the VIP with him.

The Sacred Tech Scroll draft just got updated with details of the VB's hardware timer. http://perfectkiosk.net/stsvb1.html#timer

In the Java program's update, the bindings for the L and R buttons are "E" and "R" respectively.

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Any ideas for how that might be visualized?

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While testing Wario Land in the emulator, the column table didn't appear to be updated during the intro cutscene, which seems wrong. The result is a very dark cutscene, which makes sense because the brightness is turned down for the column multiplier to take effect, but it never seems to be written.

I may have screwed something up, but it should be a simple matter of store instructions, so I can't quite pin down what's (not) going on.

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Jumping the gun a bit are we? Feel free to post the next software update so I can take a break. (-:


The Next Software Update

... is attached to this post. I adjusted the focus when running the emulated program, so the keyboard keys should correctly apply without intervention.

I also implemented the timer into the emulation core... I think. Everything looks like it checks out, and the timer itself is fairly simple, but I haven't had a chance to fully test it. I was hoping Galactic Pinball would start working magically once it was implemented, but something else is causing that game to hang on the title screen.

If anyone has a simple test ROM handy that just does timer functions, see if it works correctly in this build of the emulator. Otherwise I'll draft one up for next week to verify that everything is working as intended.

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With a list/table with two columns ("repeat" and "time") that can be edited. The result would be shown on two screen-sized pictures (slightly wider) where each column would be represented by one or more columns of pixels (depending on "time"), their color being determined by the "repeat". The column currently selected in the table should be highlighted somehow.
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I tested it with a private/work in progress ROM. It doesn't do just timer functions, but I did notice that despite the timer interrupt being acknowledged (and EIPC set correctly), upon executing RETI, the PC was again set to FFFFFE10. The ROM works in Mednafen and it worked on hardware the last time I tried it, and I don't think I changed the timer code since then.

And Deathchase, for whatever reason, resets when entering the first level, though it does not use the timer. The source code is available if you want to investigate.