First off, welcome to 2014 for those still following along the V Smile Homebrew website. Hey! was that a tumble weed that just blew by? 🙂
Things have been happening behind the scenes with game development and porting current arcade style games to the V Smile platform, however the major hurtle at the moment is putting the games on real cartridges. If anyone has some incite to that, please comment below.
In other news, I recently picked up a “Bob The Builder: Bob’s Busy Day” cartridge for $1.00 USD. Not a bad deal. I haven’t tried the game out yet, but for a dollar, you can’t go wrong. I’ve seen V Smile cartridges going for crazy money at local thrift stores lately, like $7.00 – $8.00 crazy. Maybe that’s cheap, but to me that’s pricy for a loose cartridge.
Anyway, hello and “thank you” for following along. I’ll try to work on some screen shots of games I’ve already ported to work on the V Smile, which means hopefully more frequent updates to the site.
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So what does a V.Smile Smart Cartridge PCB look like? I decided to crack open a cartridge to find out.
In this first picture you can see the ROM chip is covered with an epoxy resin also known as a glob top:
My next picture shows what’s underneath the glob top. Let me tell you it was a pain in the butt to get that off. It took me about 40 minutes with a heat gun and a razorblade to gently remove it:
It might be hard to tell, but after I removed the epoxy from the ROM chip, it looked sort of like solar panels. I’m not sure what kind of chip this is, but we’ll need to find out if we plan to burn our own ROM chips.
At this point here’s what I know about the V Smile cartridge PCB’s:
- 64MB MaskROM chip
- PCB has a 48 pin connector (14 pin x2 – 10 pin x2)
- Sticker showing 092660 (Disney’s Cars) is the game title
As I find out more, I’ll be sure to share it here on the blog.
If you have any comments, suggestions or additional information to add, please comment below. It’s time to get V.Smile Homebrew kicked into overdrive 🙂
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Some of you may have noticed the slowdown in updates to the site and might be wondering “what’s going on?” Rest assured, I’m as committed as ever to the V.Smile game console and related homebrew development!
In the past couple of months I’ve been busy doing a lot of research on “how to” program for the V.Smile console and have made some really good progress. I do have a lot of notes in an actual paper notebook (I know, so old school hehe) that I’ll get transferred to the site hopefully in the next few days.
Also, I’ve noticed that the V.Smile Homebrew download page has been getting a lot of use with well over 240 actual downloads as of this post of various files available from the page. Obviously it’s a useful section of the site which is pretty cool.
One more quick thing to mention is my good friend Morgan who actually got me into the V.Smile system found some really good information on how to make an adapter cartridge which allows you to play V.Smile games on a PC. Morgan is going to start contributing to the website as well, right Morgan? 🙂
Anyway, “thank you” to the handful of people who are watching this website and have a true interest in homebrew and game ports for the V.Smile.
Cheers,
-Sean
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Vsmilehomebrew.com was launched for one simple reason: Our love and passion for the V.Smile, V.Motion and Pocket educational game systems designed by VTech.
This website will cover anything to do with the V.Smile line of consoles:
- V.Smile
- V-Motion (and wireless controllers)
- V.Link USB
- V.Smile Pocket
- V.Smile Cyber Pocket
- Games and Accessories
- Documentation (manuals, how-to’s, etc.)
It will also cover homebrew programs and games written for use with V.Smile consoles, modded controllers, system hacking and mods, pictures of V.Smile systems out in the wild, etc.
As an added bonus we will also have V.Smile game and system reviews, videos, blog posts and so much more!
Stay tuned for more as we get the site built out and please be sure to watch this space for more information as it happens.
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