Ultimate VMU Development Resource

[GyroVorbis]

Hey guys, as part of getting back into Dreamcast development, giving back to the community, and atoning for my sins, I've decided that I could use my unique position with all of the work I've put into ElysianVMU and VMU devs I've worked with to share some knowledge and some much needed newbie resources.

I've created a page on Dreamcast.wiki: https://dreamcast.wiki/VMU_development

I basically compiled all of the useful links and resources that have been either lost or scattered throughout the internet that VMU devs have told me they either had to find themselves or wished that they could find. I actually posted about this page on Twitter, and it gained an insane amount of support and enthusiasm, as there are a lot of developers who wish to target the device, but unfortunately can't make it past the extremely difficult learning curve.

Anyway, I'm hoping to help bring more VMU developers into the scene, and would love to see some epic VMU code work and questions here on these forums as we support and explore everything Dreamcast development has to offer, including VMU development!

Furthermore, I'm finishing up some of my final work on ElysianVMU 2.0 which features a lot more debug capabilities to aid in VMU development:

[SUPAVGX]

THANK YOU

[Neoblast]

Thanks mate!

[GyroVorbis]

Just a heads up, the page has been getting lots of hits and has been proving very useful for people, so I've been doing my absolute best to keep up with updating it.

New resources added:

• More information on writing C code for the device via Dmitry's um23 emulator (still a WIP)
• Direct link to Waterbear assembler/disassembler's documentation
• Advent Wreath
• Open Source Audio Driver (new release)
• VMU Racketball (new release)
  
• VMU Script information
• VMU Syntax Highlighting definitions for Sublime Text 3

More coming, working on releasing EVMU 2.0 along with a certain surprise appearance of a certain hipster/popular programming language HOPEFULLY on the device with Colton!

[GyroVorbis]

Guys, I was FINALLY able to get into contact with The Rockin'-B, the scene's long lost VMU grand wizard behind Tiny3D Engine and BMOVIE. He searched his old hard drives and was able to find almost all of the source code to his VMU work, including VMU assembly sources, PC-side tools, documentation, rigorously kept optimization notes, and even powerpoint and PDF resources on the algorithms and techniques used to achieve his magic.

The first thing I'm releasing and getting public again is "Tiny3D Enginge," which is 100% absolutely a full-fledged 3D freaking rendering engine--complete with OpenGL-style matrix stack, vector/matrix transforms and operations, perspective matrix with perspective division, and his own 16-bit fixed point primitive math implementations of multiply and divide underneath it all... insanity.

tiny3dBiggest.gif (3.18 MiB) Viewed 405 times

tiny3d2Big.gif (1.39 MiB) Viewed 405 times

GitHub Repository:
https://github.com/gyrovorbis/tiny3dengine

[Ian Robinson]

Just amazing vmu needs way more love.. Indie game makers use the vmu more.. lol

[bucanero]

Well, somehow I was able to recover my DCEmu account , and since we are talking about VMU stuff, I'll share some links to my OLD source code in case it's useful:

VMU Backup CD: https://github.com/bucanero/vmucd
VMZip: https://github.com/bucanero/vmzip

vmu2gif (CLI tool): https://github.com/bucanero/vmu2gif

My complete archive of VMU saves: https://github.com/bucanero/dreamcast-saves
More VMU saves: https://github.com/bucanero/dreamcast-s ... saves/temp

Bonus track:
A VMU library in PHP, in case you want to manage VMU files on your website:
https://pastebin.com/gwdwX116

[GyroVorbis]

Oh snap, bucanero is back on DCEmulation! Good to see you, man!

While we're sharing, I've finally FINALLY open-sourced the core of ElysianVMU, which is everything the emulator entails minus the UI front-end or platform-specific back-end stuff, so it can easily be ported to whatever platforms or included in whatever project. Still working on the official release of EVMU2 for desktop (along with some people working on WatchOS and other platforms), but there was no reason to hold up opening the core itself, which is pretty much done minus a few trivial things:

https://github.com/gyrovorbis/libevmu