VUEngine

Formula V Demo 14 - Get ready to Rrrrumble!

We like to make our games for the Virtual Boy future proof and a cool way to do just that is to add support for yet-to-be-released add ons for it. We have had in our hands a prototype unit of a Virtual Boy Rumble Pak by RetroOnyx, aka Kevin Mellott of HyperFlash32 fame, for a couple of months by now and, for this release, we wanted to fully support it both in the engine, for other soon to be released demos built with it...

Formula V Demo 9 - Versus Mode!

Welcome to the release post for the 9th WIP build of Formula V! This is a special one. 

Since the beginning of our Patreon campaign, we wanted to develop a game that makes use of the Virtual Boy's hardware capabilities to the fullest, including Link Cable support for multiplayer action. We created a small Pong clone, SPONG, to learn our way around the console's communication port and to lay down the VUEngine's foundations for general support for 2-player gameplay. Since Formula V's...

Formula V Demo 7

Here is the latest WIP build of Formula V. And this time, our Super Backers get to enjoy it, too! 

Besides the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes, we mainly improved the overall presentation for this demo. Here's a quick overview of new things to look out for:

• New finish line animations
• Light posts
• Camera flashes on the stands
• Digital billboards by the track
• A tunnel
• Race intro information
• TV channel logo 2020-04-30 20:50:08 +0000 UTC View Post

Coronavirus quarantine hackathon results

Hey fellow friends of VUEngine,

so, our two weeks off from Formula V development are already over, oh how time passes by! As promised, here's our results. Ordered by time of achievement and, coincidently, also by their level of interestingness one might say. ;-) OK, let's start small:

Project 1:  VUEngine Studio:  "New VUEngine Class" dialogue

When we started poking around with new blank projects, we noticed that our copy-and-paste way to creat...

Coronavirus quarantine hackathon

Hey friends! We hope you all are well and safe in these dangerous times! Just a quick note here from us regarding the state of things. 

With both of us staying in home quarantine due to coronavirus, and both feeling a bit overworked on Formula V, we decided to take a break of about two weeks and go wild on some random other VUEngine-related projects. We will both, separately, be prototyping some ideas and hacking away for a while, then get together and see what we got. Hopefully so...

Formula V progress recap

Given the state of the upcoming demo for Beta Testers, we thought that it would be fun (and revealing) to compare it to the previous released ROMs just to check how the game has progressed in the last months.  It is kind of huge! 

Since images usually say more than words, we have compiled a bunch of GIFs of the demos released so far for you.

Formula V (2019-06-20): Demo 1

2020-03-03 22:15:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Formula V status update

Hey everyone! It is time for another recap of the progress made to our game since the last update. Here we go...

Most of the progress during the last few weeks has focused on polishing things up by fixing little mistakes or bugs and by adding track detail to enrich the visual experience while playing the game.

Following are some of those details.

New screens

Besides selecting racers it seems important to have a track selection screen. And although ...

Beta Tester tier is now $10

Just a quick note that we have updated our Patreon front page to better reflect the current state of things and to put more focus on our current projects, VUEngine Studio and especially Formula V.

If you're interested in Formula V and want to try out the demos, rejoice - we have reduced the Beta Tester tier from $15 to $10 to make it more attractive and affordable. We have also given the other tiers a little overhaul. Here's the most notable:

2020-02-23 13:37:41 +0000 UTC View Post

Formula V status update

Although we have been regularly tweeting about the work being done on our game, it has been a while since we have posted here. Time to do it!

A lot has improved since the last WIP demo. In addition to things already reported about like several spoons of visual sugar (TVs, drones, crash animations, trail particles, bullet time and full screen support), there are quite a bit of things that have changed during the last month.

AI difficulty

The game now supp...

Formula V improvements overview

Recently, after another round of refactoring and performance tweaks, we got 8 racers working at full speed instead of the previous 6. Actually, we could even do 10 racers at that point, but decided to spend the extra headroom for a few more layers of visual sugar and other improvements instead. 

During the past week, we showed you a selection of these improvements in a series of one tweet per day. Today, we want to show you the sum of all parts in a new video overview of the latest...

Formula V Demo 3

After two demos that were exclusively accessible by Beta Tester and up tier backers, finally, we have a demo of Formula V for all our patrons!

We know that it has been a long time since we announced Formula V, but we now have a demo that we hope you will appreciate. At the end of this post, is the link to the ROMs that showcase the core gameplay that we are aiming for with our futuristic racing game.  

Game modes

The current de...

Reproduction carts, free ROMs and piracy

Hi, thanks for checking this post!

As our backers may already know, our latest Formula V Demo has been split into two ROMS with different functionality, one that works only on emulators and one that only works on hardware. This was a deliberate choice made by us. Please, read below our reasons for doing it.

In the last months, a certain website has gained some notoriety by offering reproduction carts for Virtual Boy's official and homebrew games. The persons behind it assure, in t...

Formula V's Developer diary 1: Building the tracks

Hi backers! While we work on finishing the Visual Studio Code extension in order to being able to present you the tutorials about how to use our tools, we want to give exclusively you some insight into the development process of Formula V, so those of you that are not into software development can have a general picture of what goes into creating a video game (it is a lot!). And for those that would like to use our engine to implement a game, these diaries should give a glimpse of what the tu...

VUEngine now has full sound support

In these past years, VUEngine has improved so much and become better and better in all areas imaginable... well, except a single one: music. As one of the oldest parts of the software, the engine's sound manager has been seriously lagging behind, supporting only single track music and lacking any tools to actually produce any music, or convert some into the engine's format.

But that's history from now on! We have finally filled in the missing puzzle piece and rewritten the entirety of t...

SPONG goes public

As promised in our last status update post, below you will find both the playable ROM and the link to the source code of our first multiplayer demo. The ROM is almost identical to that released last year, but it has slightly different physics and updated credits.

For those of you who weren't able to see the original, Patron-only release post for "SPONG", it is a multiplayer top-down Pong variant for the Virtual Boy that supports the link cable. It's meant as a rather simple demo project...

Status Update

Hey everyone! Sorry for being silent for so long since our last post. We have been, and still are, hard at work on a few projects in parallel. In this post, let us give you an little insight at what we have been up to this year so far.

Tutorials

We were pretty happy to learn, through our survey in December, that so many people are interested in learning how to create their own games with VUEngine, and we are eager to create a series of tutorials to empower you...

2018 - A Year in Review

A little more than a year ago, we started this campaign with the hope to get the support from the Virtual Boy community to being able to dedicate more than just some of our free time to develop the tools, the demos and the games that we’ve been passionately making for our preferred video game system since around fifteen years ago.

Campaign and Formula V announcement (Oct - Dec 2017) 

The first weeks of ...

What should we work on next?

The year is coming to an end and the many little things we have been working on in 2018 are finally coming together. Recently, we have finished multiplayer support in VUEngine, crowning a whole lot of amazing features that have been added to the engine in the past 12 months, and we have released demos of both our side projects. 

This looks like the perfect moment to take a step back and consider our options to move forward. So we'd like to ask you, what should we put our focus on in the c...

Link Cable support in VUEngine is complete!

After a lot of testing and painstaking trial and error, frustration at the documentation and at our own mistakes, we have been able to implement 100% reliable and efficient communications between two Virtual Boy systems, using hardware interrupts and without having to rely on artificial and unnecessarily long delays or on magical numbers.

When provided with a pointer to a BYTE array and a number of bytes to be transmitted, the CommunicationManager singleton class supports the transmission of d...

Capitan Sevilla returns

We're delighted to finally be able to announce that we have teamed up with Rubén Garcerá Soto earlier this year to revive his beautiful Virtual Boy homebrew game "Capitan Sevilla 2", which won 2nd prize in PVB Coding Competition 2010.

Under the new name "Capitan Sevilla 3D", we have been rebuilding the game from the ground up in VUEngine, based on the foundation of our Platf...

Super Mario VUE Land

In cooperation with Stereo Boy we present, exclusively to our backers, a 25 FPS HiColor Full Motion Video of Super Mario 3D Land gameplay converted to the Virtual Boy. It is running in 7 colors by blending colors together in consecutive frames, which more or less heavily flickers in emulators but looks pretty smooth on a real Virtual Boy.  

For those of you lucky enough to own one of Kevin Mellott's Virtual Boy Cart Programmers and a 128 MBit cartridge, we attached a 128 MBit version to t...

VBDE 1.3.0 with VUEngine 6.0 out now

Here is the brand new version 1.3.0 of VBDE, featuring version 6.0 of the VUEngine.

Choose your flavor - the lightweight "regular" edition comes with  Notepad++ as its editor, while the Pro edition  is bundled with a proper  IDE, IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, as its default editor, as well as  Git for version control.

• VBDE 1.3.0 (35 MB)
• 2018-09-06 18:46:16 +0000 UTC View Post

Past, present and VUEture

Shortly after the launch of this campaign, we enthusiastically revealed "Formula V" to backers - a fast, futuristic top-down racing game we have been working on and hoped to release this year. We were obviously very excited about the initial success of the campaign and, in the hope of possibly smashing a few more funding goals, we made some retrospectively unrealistic promises.

While the funding is a tremendous productivity boost and allows Jorge to spend between one and two days per week...

How to work around the VB's color limitations

Three shades of red plus black, that's it regarding colors on the Virtual Boy. But there are tricks to work around this limitation and experimenting with these has been on our TO DO list to for a long time.

Time to tick that off. Here's a simple demo demonstrating three different ways to display more than four colors on the Virtual Boy simultaneously. These are:

1. Dither

We're starting off with good ol' dithering. OK, this is technically cheating since we do n...

VUEngine goes modular with components library

After the VUEngine preprocessor, we are happy to announce that we have finished work on another major new feature of the upcoming VUEngine version 6, making a big step towards a more modular architecture. VUEngine Components is a library of reuseable, prefab components like entities, states or fonts, that can be easily included in your VUEngine project for a good headstart and/or to add new functionality. 

For example, the library covers all the basic needs of a Virtual Boy game,...

VUEngine preprocessor 1.0 is done

A major milestone for VUEngine has been reached as we have finished work on version 1.0 of the VUEngine preprocessor. From now on, we won't have to mess with macros anymore but can write code in a clean, compact and secure syntax, which resembles that of C++ to a high degree.

How does it look like?

Without further ado, please have a look at the new syntax in the following scree...

Introducing the VUEngine preprocessor

The Object-oriented programming paradigm arguably is better suited for  game programming than a structured one. It allows for better code  re-usage and flexibility, cleaner, more structured code, and simply  makes it easier to represent your game's objects and their interactions  in code.

The available compiler for the VB only supports C, though, and the memory requirements of object oriented languages like C++ are simply too high for the Virtual Boy's tiny 64 KB of WRAM, a...

Adding Multiplayer Support

The last missing puzzle piece has finally arrived at Jorge's place, who now has a complete multiplayer test setup, consisting of two springarm-mounted Virtual Boys, two FlashBoys as well as a copy of Kevin Mellott's excellent link cables.

With this in place, we can now start adding multiplayer support to VUEngine! As a proper test balloon for this exciting new set of features, we have recently started working on a small two...

VBDE 1.2.2 and VUEngine 5.2 released

The brand new version 1.2.2 of VBDE, your all-in-one portable Virtual Boy development environment, is out, including the new version 5.2 of  the VUEngine.

• VBDE 1.2.2 (34 MB)
• VBDE Pro 1.2.2 (293 MB)

VBDE Changelog

• [Pro] Up...
  2018-02-18 19:36:08 +0000 UTC View Post

VUE-MASTER Demo Reel released

STEREO BOY has released the VUE-MASTER Demo Reel.

VUE-MASTER (read: "View Master") is a take on the classic toy stereo image viewer. It's a Virtual Boy stereo viewer by Stereo Boy and KR155E, containing 7 stereo images, build with VUEngine.

First and foremost, though, it is meant as a VBDE/VUEngine template which allows anyone to compile their own stereo images into a ROM to view on real Virtual Boy hardware, without any programming knowledge. The sources, included with the soon to be re...