Case study

vmiv: View-Master Interactive Video emulator and format notes

vmiv emulates the View-Master Interactive Video system by decoding a captured tape video with FFmpeg, extracting the UART-style data bytes and auxiliary audio carried in the scanlines, and feeding them to an 8051 core that runs the VMI8802 ROM alongside a TMS9128 video chip model rendered with SDL2. Its notes document the mainboard chips, VDP register setup and VRAM map, the RLE sprite and tile records, and the packet layout with sequence numbers and CRC-CCITT checks. A companion dstool disassembles and reassembles the stack-based script bytecode delivered on the tape.

Targets: Firmware · Protocol
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-09

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Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: Building needs a C compiler, SDL2 and the FFmpeg libraries (libavcodec, libavformat, libswscale, libavutil, libavdevice).
Prerequisites: Running needs the VMI8802 8051 ROM image (vmi8802.bin by default) and a video capture of a View-Master Interactive Video tape.
Limits: The Makefile links imgdecode.o, whose source file is absent from the repository.
License: No licence file in the repository; the 8051 core comes from jarikomppa/emu8051.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{vmiv-case,
  title = {{vmiv: View-Master Interactive Video emulator and format notes}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://codeberg.org/Sprite_tm/vmiv}},
  url = {https://codeberg.org/Sprite_tm/vmiv},
  urldate = {2026-11-09},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/vmiv-case/}}
}

Plain text

vmiv: View-Master Interactive Video emulator and format notes. https://codeberg.org/Sprite_tm/vmiv (accessed 2026-11-09). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/vmiv-case/

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