Topic: Watercrown News
The author(s) of the bgb emulator should take pride in the fact that they've managed to hold up my entire project.
My VWF code was running smoothly until it hit upon the ugly bits of reality emulated by bgb. See, it's wholly possible for code to run absolutely perfect on an emu, but not work on an actual console. I'd explain the details, but the short version is, bgb emulates one "feature" of a real Game Boy that no other emulator I've seen has: you can't read from or write to VRAM (a.k.a. video memory) except during a VBlank (a.k.a. "vertical blanking interval", that brief pause where the screen is refreshed; imperceptible to the human eye but quite significant in the magical nano-timescale world of graphics programming). So I've taken the effort to fix up my code (nothing major, really) so that it only reads to or writes from VRAM during a VBlank. GBC mode works perfectly now, but GB mode is still a touch buggy. A little more work and it should be perfect in both...
On the brighter side, if bgb hadn't shown me up, it would've happened after I released my translation to the waiting public, and then I'd be known as the guy who released the Sylvanian Families VWF translation that didn't work on an actual Game Boy. So thanks, author(s) of bgb, and thanks to evo for introducing me to it.
I'm still amazed how much screen space my VWF affords me. I can cram text onto one page that would've taken me two or three before. My translation looks much more professional when I can fit more than one sentence on screen at a time...
Posted by Ryusui
at 11:24 PM PST
