Heya guys, Falco Girgis here. I'm the lead developer of the Elysian Shadows RPG on Kickstarter and I'm the dude from Adventures in Game Development on YouTube.

I've been in contact with an admin here using the Shenmue Dojo YouTube username about this icon restoration endeavor. You might not know, but as part of developing Elysian Shadows and our cross-platform SDK, I've developed a massively-cross platform VMU emulator (ElysianVMU) that will allow people to enjoy Dreamcast-specific VMU content on any device... For example, if you bought ES for steam, you can connect remotely to your iPhone running our EVMU app and it will be used as an additional screen with full filesystem support and even the little beeps, haha.

I've made it my personal mission to make EVMU THE number one emulator for the platform and have gone all-out OCD with implementing a billion features, emulating everything perfectly, and supporting every platform ever. Right now it's in open beta, but it pretty much supports everything and does a WHOLE lot of stuff I've never seen other emulators do.
⋅ Supports the Japanese BIOS packaged with the Katana SDK, so you can emulate the whole system including clock and filesystem mode.
⋅ Insanely accurate LCD emulation, including emulated refresh rate to accurately reproduce pixel ghosting effects and also the grayscale effect that a lot of very advanced VMU games used to create the illusion of multiple shades of black.
⋅ Variable resolution, shitloads of resolution modes.
⋅ 100% accurate buzzer support. Every emulator I've ever seen has half-assed the square wave generation. EVMU is so accurate it even reproduces the VOLUME of the wave, because the VMU does not output every wave at the same volume.
[*}Export feature for VMS icons and eyecatch graphics.
⋅ Save/load state
⋅ .LCD File support for playing animations made with the DC Animator tool
⋅ .DCI Nexus support
⋅ FULL filesystem support, meaning you can load raw .VMU flash dumps of an entire VMU image with game AND save data.
⋅ VMU-to-VMU connection emulated over IP (mate chaos over the internet, lmfao) and even serial, because we're planning on releasing an adapter for connecting physical VMU devices to EVMU.
⋅ Built-in assembler/disassembler and instruction-set reference for developers and disassembling VMU game code to reverse engineer it.
⋅ External USB controller support. Even support for the analog stick. Haha.
⋅ Emulates the "Low battery" signal of the VMU, which can be toggled on and off. Certain games actually give you special screens and notification when your batteries are dying.
⋅ Turbo Buttons
⋅ Speed Up/Slow Down Buttons
⋅ VMI/VMS Header file dumps

The only other big thing that I still need to do is represent the filesystem in a GUI similar to what DreamExplorer is doing. The filesystem itself is already fully emulated and allows for access even remotely. I'm hoping to convince some Dreamcast emulator authors to integrate with EVMU over IP for the full DC/VMU experience.

We're working on a project home page right now, but we have a thread with Dropbox links to downloads and feature requests and bug report discussion here:
http://forums.elysianshadows.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&p=91659#p91659

In the Dropbox folder, there should be builds of the latest commit available for Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu, and the Raspberry Pi (because why not?) with more coming soon.

Any way, the point is that I've invested a bunch of time into loading and displaying the VMU save file icons in EVMU. I want to help with this endeavor, and I can add any kind of feature that can help facilitate this process or make your lives easier.

The "dump-to-PNG" feature does fully work for icons, but it's only dumping it as separate PNG images for each frame. I am actually internally constructing the full animation with proper timing for my display... Is it the animated GIF format you guys are hoping to use? Are they animated? What can I do to help?

Also does it use the "eyecatch" extra graphic? Apparently some games have a higher resolution special "eyecatch" in the VMS header that is displayed in the detail view in the Dreamcast BIOS file manager... I have implemented the ability to dump these eyecatches, but I don't know of a SINGLE Dreamcast game that uses them, so it has never been tested... the image output could be garbage, and need a little debugging... Anybody know of a game that uses them?

Heya buddy, I have a surprise for you! I implemented the animated GIF exporting! This actually turned out to be a pretty sweet feature!

So I'm not exactly sure what file type "vms00.bin" is, but judging by the name, I'm assuming it's simply .vms. If that's the case, you are going to have to change the extension before trying to load it into EVMU, and I'm really not sure why the hell they are just using a .bin extension...

Once you have the emulator opened and the file loaded, there are a few features that are going to make your life so much easier.

Here's a link to the Dropbox folder with all of the latest builds:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rai7db85bqq5iz0/AAAbnQfEJpTFaHkQ8K6nP6kVa?dl=0

Recording an Animation
From the file menu, go to Tools->Capture Animation->Record to begin recording, or simply push CTRL/CMD+R.
http://elysianshadows.com/vmu/evmu_record.png

You should see the red "recording" icon, and a little message. Once you see that, everything that's happening on the VMU is being captured for the animated GIF.

Once you're done capturing whatever it is that you want, either stop recording from the file menu or the shortcut again. The animated GIF should automatically be generated and should be opened with the default program. If you want to actually view the files, they're located at:

Windows: C:/Users/YourUserName/ElysianVMU
MacOS: /Users/YourUserName/ElysianVMU
Linux: /home/YourUserName/ElysianVMU

The files should be named the same thing as the ROM image, and every new recording should simply append a number to the previous recording output.

Halt and Advance Frame
I decided that I should also implement these two, because you might be capturing a very quick/precise segment of an animation, and you want to only record the relevant frames. By Halting the emulator execution, then slowly advancing the frames until you've run through everything you want to capture, you can more easily record precise segments.

From the file menu, the Emulation->Playback menu should have the actions for both Halting and Advancing the frame, or the shortcuts are F2 and F3 respectively.
http://elysianshadows.com/vmu/evmu_halt_advance.png

Note that "halting" or slowing down the execution does NOT actually effect the timing of the animated GIF output, so don't worry about screwing up the timing. "Advance Frame" basically advanced the emulator 1/20th of a second, which is usually a single frame for a ROM. This may be only half a frame for certain ROMs, so you may have to advance twice to get a full frame.

Note that the output GIFs are EXTREMELY optimized and efficient, since the VMU is at such a low resolution and only has a 2 color palette. You can record fairly long, complex animations without the file size getting more than a few KB. I figured that the exported resolution should probably say the VMU's native 42x38 to keep the file small and to allow you to stretch/scale as you see fit later on. Didn't want to introduce any inaccuracy at the raw output level.

Note that this whole feature was developed on MacOS, but it should work fine on Windows. Let me know if anything is wrong or you run into any bugs.

Here are a few animations that I captured:
http://elysianshadows.com/vmu/shenmue.gif
http://elysianshadows.com/vmu/VMU%20Mini%20Pacman_1.gif
http://elysianshadows.com/vmu/Tiny%20Tetris_24.gif
http://elysianshadows.com/vmu/CHAO%20ADV%202_8.gif

EDIT: Oh yeah, if you want the BEST POSSIBLE TIMING, with minimal frame glitches, be sure to load the "jap_bios.bin" from File->Load BIOS along with the ROM. Without the exactly timings used by the official Sega BIOS, it's possible some frames may update in the middle of drawing, so you might see a bit of flickering or half the screen updating like this... although looking at the Shenmue animations, they're so slow, I highly doubt this will really matter.

From what I've been told these vmu character animations were only attainable by getting the winning can from the game and then connecting online with the Shenmue passport disc. I've tried see if these VMU icons were somewhere in the passport disc itself but found nothing. Unless we find someone who managed to get every single vmu character downloaded through the passport back then we're stuck with the current incomplete set. Since many were using dial-up internet in those times i think finding someone with a complete set will be very difficult.
Yeah, I highly doubt you will find actual "images" with VMU animations on them like that. The VMU doesn't really "load" images. It takes a bunch of coding to even get a single image to show up, because you have to swap XRAM banks just to access all of the pixels, so it's not like a 1-to-1 binary mapping like that. Looking for physical animations is probably not the way to go.

I think you would have better luck with a hex editor and looking at the save file from Shenmue itself. You would want to try to isolate the byte or data segment that determines which VMU animation gets saved to the VMU. It may very well be just as simple as a plain number, where changing the number to a different number will cause Shenmue to save out a different VMU animation.

You gotten around to trying it yet? It's totally cool if not, no rush. I'm just wanting to make sure you haven't run into an issues with getting that .bin file loaded or with the animation tools...

I develop all of EVMU on a Macbook Pro, but I have an automated build server that shits it out for other platforms like Windows and Linux and runs automated tests to make sure the builds are at least sane, but they are definitely not covering anything. :lol:

EDIT: Oh yeah, make sure that you keep ALL OF THE DLLS AND OTHER FILES in the same directory as the ElysianVMU.exe file. Download the full directory and run the .exe directly from there. In the future, I will distribute ElysianVMU as an installer, rather than all of the files individually, but for right now, when I'm releasing new builds constantly, it's better to do it like this so you don't have to keep uninstalling and reinstalling.