What's The Chances???


Kumaki

Kumaki

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There could be emulation of Milton Bradley's Microvision...on the Pandy?

There were not very many games released, about 10 or 12 in all, but there were really kinda fun.

Rather than an emulator/rom setup, maybe someone could look into the games and just make ports of them to PND? Since there ARE so few games on it?
 
I remember those! One of the things I wanted for Christmas back then but it was too expensive. Looking at them in the toy store window almost made me dribble.

There's a bunch of the games simulated here:http://home.comcast.net/~eichler2/microvision/MicroSimProject.htm

Tried a couple in Firefox on the Pandora and they were quite playable with the left nub!

Maybe if that guy is agreeable they could be repackaged somehow like the Game & Watch simulations pnd? With a more 'photographic' surrounding bezel..

At the least, they offer a good guide to the way the games played. The original screen was quite a bit crappier though.

EDIT:Bleh! Multi-Ninjad!

EDIT 2: Had to remove Url tags from link, seems the forum is inserting a link back to the thread instead again if they are used
 
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What're the chances? I don't know what the chances are. Looks like the 70s had it all though... a great time to be a kid. (Before the racist comments on the internet, too.)

(Edit by Moxie: There. Fixed it for you.)
 
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Amen. I owned a Microvision when I was a kid and I loved it.

I'm not quite sure what made me remember it this morning, driving home from church...but there it was, on my mind for no good reason, and I thought I'd ask.

That page above...well, it does not work too good with a mouse. Haven't tried yet on the Pandy browser....but I'd still like to see these ported, so that one can play them without the need for battery-killing wiFi connection.

so what's the chances?? Pleeeeeeease??? anyone??

This is some good nostalgia stuff here...and for a skilled programmer, I'm guessing this sort of early tech should not be too difficult.
 
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It's just javascript, so you can simply download those pages and browse them off-line.

A real emulator is probably impossible because this thing had no CPU, each cartridge had its own CPU with a bit of rom integrated in it. It's probably not so easy to dump that rom.

If someone feels like making a nice wrapper PND for those 5-6 javascript programs, that would be nice...
 
The wrapper was what I had in mind. Because A - there are so few games for it and

B - what you said about the difficulty fo dumping ROMS in Microvision's case.

There's about 12 total games, but I guess only six or seven were compiled on that one page. Definitely would like to see Phaser Strike, that one was a lot of fun for me as a ten year old.
 
_wb_ said:
A real emulator is probably impossible because this thing had no CPU, each cartridge had its own CPU with a bit of rom integrated in it. It's probably not so easy to dump that rom.
Click to expand...
Apparently only two types of CPUs were used and the games using the former were even ported to use the latter. Having the ROM embedded in the CPU is indeed a challenge, but it's a pretty small ROM on an ancient process so I'm sure it can be pretty "easily" reversed via decapping (compared to other decapping and ROM reversing efforts, of course not at all trivial on its own). There are only 13 games at most (less if there are no prototypes for that unreleased one) so it wouldn't be too expensive if the games can be rounded up; I guess the bigger concern is that some of these games seem pretty rare and it'd be bad to have to destroy them. On the other hand, if the original consoles are all pretty much doomed to failure then you'd be better off destroying the games to allow them to be accurately emulated than preserve games that can't be played anywhere.

I don't think you'll convince a collector of that though.

I expected this to be a project someone already started, or at least proposed, but I can't seem to turn up anything googling for it, at least not yet.. I do read some speculation that there could be a test mode that lets you read out the ROM. That'd be useful.
 
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I'll note here that although the Visual Basic Phaser Strike site is down now, it is still (even the .exe) archived at  http://web.archive.org/web/20100703110458/http://www.retro-net.de/amivisi/

EDIT: And yeah I was going to note that it propably would be possible to reverse engineer the system and even dump the roms by essentially destroying a full set of cartridges. But it would still be lots of work and quite non-trivial... but then I got ninja'd...

And the system (TI TMS1100) had (as customizable features) a ROM (for the real code) and two PLAs, one for modifying instructions and another for modifying outputs of the device... but maybe they recycled the PLA design across the games so that would be static... or not.
 
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I just downloaded the Phaser Strike exe file.

It works nice, just like the original. Would be nice if it could be PND'd. And then other Microvision games using the same basic structure.
 
Kumaki said:
Haven't tried yet on the Pandy browser....but I'd still like to see these ported, so that one can play them without the need for battery-killing wiFi connection.
Click to expand...
Until that happens, and assuming use of Firefox, as per _wb_ you can save the few there are:

On the main page with games list ( http://home.comcast.net/~eichler2/microvision/MicroSimProject.htm ) right click on the game name and use 'Save Link As' - You'll get the game code saved as a .htm file.

Just open Firefox offline, and go to the File menu and 'Open File' - presto!

Still need to make your own noises to accompany them though.

'Blip!' 'Thork!'
 
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Not bad. But I still would like to see some PND ports on this stuff. I mean, Microvision was like the original GameBoy, before Nintendo was ever even heard of.
 
Bump.  Just want to see if anyone would like to try taking on this project and doing a wrapper on these Microvision games, just because it would be cool to have yet another nostalgia item on Pandy.
 
No one has been able to dump any Microvision roms yet.. let alone write an emulator for them.

It's one of the consoles that... there is some historic interest in it... theories on how to emulate it  but no one with another oomph to actually make the effort to work out how to dump the roms and emulate the thing.

Even that old simulators project is dead with most of the other games being undone. I don't think many people want to spend time writing an accurate simulator just so that someone will playing around with a game for 1 minute.

I would love for the roms to be dumped... I know the MESS team has copies of some if not all the games.. just none of the team have dumped either.
 
If someone did retrieve the ROMs the emulator code would probably follow shortly.
 
Surely MB is still around in some capacity? They might have the actual code in their archives (they've revived other ancient machines like Big Trak from the same era.

I'm a bit surprised they never made a collector's edition of it, considering you can get a 9999-in-1 LCD game keychain/handheld/lump with a screen of similar resolution and games of similar if not higher complexity, for under $5. They could have put all the games internally, with plastic templates for the original rom/controller bezels.

Then they can get round to a collector's edition of the Vectrex.
 
Well, it seems someone could try to make the programs in Javascript and put them in a nice wrapper and PND the whole thing.  I am not talking about making an actual emulator and dumping ROMS...for the 12-13 games Microvision had...it isn't worth a real, full-fledged emu.
 
I can try to do that, but give me some time. i need to compile a newer webkit for that ;)
 
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