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#p91659In 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?