This interview is a part of KiNOX's website.

David Tucker has been interviewed by us almost 1 year ago (interview #2), in that time he was mainly working on the CD-i Emulator but since he has stopped (see slowed down) and he's working on the famous RealityBoy Emu (_THE_ VirtualBoy emu :).

1. When I interviewed you [more than 1 year ago], you were developing a CD-I emulator, what happened with it?
    Well to be honest, not a whole lot has happened in the past year.   The Virtual Boy emulator really took off about a year ago, and I just have not had the time to devote to the CDi emu.

2. You're still working on it?
    I still pock at it every once in a while, but I don't give it the time it really deserves.  I would like to share the project with someone who has more time to devote to it, but so far know one has shown the interest in persuing this.

3.  Are you working on any other breath-taking emulators?
    That will generate as much interest as the RB did (I remember euphoric statements about it :)
I have poked around a bit at a Game.Com emulator, but I have not been able to dump the roms yet, so that has not gone far.  Also I investigated making a PC-FX emu, but I do not own a PC-FX or any games, and so far I have not been able to find the boot rom.   Maybe I will break down and buy this system some day.  Actually this would not be a hard system to emulate, it is based on the exact same v810 micro processor as the Virtual Boy, and the hardware is straight forward, with no 3D effects (except on the PC-FXGA)

4. Why develop a VB emulator?
    I have always been fascinated by 3D effects, on the side I collect 3D stuff like holograms, and red/blue comic books.  When the VB came out I was fascinated buy it, but The cost was so high that I could not afford it.  I forgot about it until Target started selling the system for $30.  Once I got my first VB I knew that I had to program it, the system was just to cool.  At the same time I had been looking into making an emulator, so naturally I put the two together.

5. You also dump ROMs for VB, how to dump VB roms?
    Technically I only dumped my own roms, someone else dumped the roms that are out on the net (just a legal disclaimer, don't sue me Nintendo). Basically to dump a rom you have to build a device that can drive all the address lines to a rom and at the same time can read the data lines.  I used two methods, first I have an eprom programmer that I wired up a custom adapter to, that makes a VB cartridge look like a standard eprom.  Later
I purchased an IO-56 digital IO card for my PC.  This is, as it sounds, a 56 pin digital input/output card that lets you wire up digital logic devises (like eproms) to your pc.  I have speculated that you could dump VB games on a Genesis copier like the multi game doctor, etc.  The genesis and the VB use the same eprom and it would be a simple task to make an adapter between the two.

6. What do you think about open source emulators?
    I think it is a great Idea!  The only reason's that I don't freely distribute my source code are:
First I'm not even 75 percent of the way done with the emu, there is a lot I don't know about the VB, so why release code to a half finished product.  And finally, I'm trying to avoid the headaches that others have experienced in the past when they released there code.  Mostly the problem with lamers recompiling the thing and calling it there own work.
    With that said, I have always given away my source code to anyone that wanted to look at it, this includes Marat and the Virtual-E team.  In fact the Virtual-E team and I have worked closely to improve both our emu's, I like the idea of sharing my work with others if people are not taking advantage of my hard work.

7. Did you know that Marat was trying to make a VB emu and that it didnt really work like he wanted, did you've heard about or even try this emulator, if so what you think about it?
    Marat wrote me about a year ago, when my emu still did not play any commercial games, looking for technical info on the VB.  I sent him my source code and all the info I had at the time, but I never heard anything since.  He is quite an accomplished programmer, I have no doubt that if he wanted to he could make a much better VB emu than me.  Actually I was afraid at the time that he would eclipse me, coming out with a killer VB emu before I got anything going myself.

8. Do you prefer to have the monopole over the VB emu "scene" or will you prefer more competition... like 5 more VB emu?
    Well I'm not in a total monopoly, the Virtual-E emu is really quite good, it is only about 2 rev's behind my own emu, they could surpass me at any time =0)
    I use to worry that a tone load of people would come in and make VB emus, like they did with the Game boy, but that has obviously not happened!  And at this time I would welcome anyone who had a technical interest in the VB.  Reverse engineering the VB is quite challenging and I could shure use some help.

9. What's the present status of RealityBoy?
    Currently about half of the available games are playable in some form or another,  and the remaining games are very close to starting up.  I have the display about 90% of the way figured out, and the CPU is at 99%, the big holdup is the VIP registers and the Display Interrupts.  I know for a fact that the display Interrupts are holding back several games, and the VIP registers are just a murky fog in my mind.

10. When can we expect a new release?
   Hopefully within a month or so.  I had High Hopes for a summer release but I really got bit by not backing up my code base, and I lost a lot of time and energy trying to recover from some major bugs I introduced into the code.  Right now, there is only one game working that was not going in the last release.  And I'm waiting for some more dramatic progress before I release again.

11. What's your preferred VB game? Is it dumped?
    Well I have never tried it, but I know that my favorite VB game is 'Space Invaders Virtual Collection'.  Unfortunately this is one of the 4 games that have never been dumped, when it is you can expect me to work night and day until it works!   My second favorite game is Wario Land, followed by Nesters Bowling, Vertical Force, Mario Clash, and Mario Tennis.  Sadly enough the games released for the VB do not take advantage of the power of the system.  I think if Nintendo had held on for another year or so (and dropped the price dramatically!), we would see games that were many times better than these.

12. And to finish this c00l interview, what do you expect for the emu scene this year?
    I expect 2 things:
First, I expect that The Virtual Playstation and Bleem will win there court cases against Sony.  Helping make emulators an accepted practice (much like MP3's are becoming accepted by the music industry)  and second I expect that Mame (or another multi game emu) will come into legal troubles, possibly forcing the end of that emu project, and disturbing the scene a lot.  I can't see how large videogame manufactures like Midway can sit and ignore emus much longer, they will either embrace them (when has a big company ever done the right thing!) or they will try to use there money to squash it.  Either way, in the end emus are here to stay.

   David Tucker
 David's Emulator Space dbt@dana.ucc.nau.edu

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