\/IRTUAL BOY HOMEBREW DOCUMENT.

Note: This page is under construction. Things might not work the way they're described.

It takes a buncha hard work to make a homebrew Virtual Boy game, but with a little patience, anyone can make one! To make things easier, make a folder called gccvb and put it in your c drive. Install everything in your c:\gccvb\ folder. You'll need the following programs installed on your computer:
1.) VIDE (a href="https://www.virtual-boy.com/tools/vide/">link)
2.) gccvb (link.)
3.) Reality Boy emulator (link.)

Download INCLUDE.vpg and put it in the VIDE\plugins folder. Replace the one that's there now. Now, all you have to have is an idea. Start writing your game using the C programming language. You can do this even with Notepad or Wordpad.

Purty pictures:

The way VB programming images work is each of them is stored in a world. Suppose you want to put in a big ol' picture for a title screen image or something. First, make the picture in either JPEG or BMP format. The maximum size for the picture is 384x224. Then, open VIDE. Make a new "project." Then, click on Untitled1. Then click on the red pyramid with the arrow on it.

You'll get a black rectangle that says Charset1. Click on Advanced, then Charmap tools, then Map Constructor. Then find your image. If you decide to use BMP, it gives you a message saying that it will take a while, and asks if you still want to do it. Keep going, because it's lying and only takes a few seconds. Now, you've got two different files: A MAP and a CHARACTER. The CHARACTERS are tiles of the whole picture broken up into 8x8 squares, while the MAP is the whole picture. Rename the map from "ConstructionMap" to "thingmap" and the character from "ConstructionSet" to "thingchar". Your VIDE information should look like this:

Then, you need to export your map to an .h file. Go to Advanced, then plugins, then "export to .h" You should get a message that says "Which character segment should this map take its files from?"

For now, just choose CharSeg# 0. Then name it "thingmap". Then do the same thing to your character file. It won't ask you that question. Name it "thingchar".

See with C.

Now, what you need to do if you don't know C is put all the images that your VB program will use. type in the following to start:

#include "libgccvb.h"

Now, type:

#include "thingmap.h"
#include "thingchar.h"

Now, how do you display your image? Remember how I told you every image is in a world? Well, this is where that comes in. Type in the following:

Up to .bat

If you want to compile your game, you need to make a .vbh file. This is a file that tells the compiler (in this case gccVB) all the info on the game. If you've downloaded gccvb, then goto the folder it's in, then click on examples, then examples, then copy the example.vbh file and rename it to match your .C name. Then, put the .h files, the .c file and the .vbh file into a new folder called "thing" in the c:\gccvb\ folder. Now, go to the Command prompt and type in the following:

make.bat c:\gccvb\thing\ nameofcfile

The space after thing\ is important. Replace "nameofcfile" with the name of your C file. If you did everything right, then a .vb file should appear. Drag the .vb file into the reality_boy application, and it should display your image.

And that's only how to do a Hello, world! type program. You can do way more stuff with the Virtual Boy, and hopefully you will, because the Virtual Boy desperately needs a homebrew scene bigger than the one it currently has. If you have ANY questions, either e-mail me at atari2600land@yahoo.com or post in the Planet Virtual Boy forums, under FORUMS.

To figure out how to move your image, go to Part 2!

(C) 2009, Chris Read (VirtualChris)