Random: This Mod Turns The Virtual Boy Into A Proper Console You Can Play On Your Television

That's honestly pretty cool.

Real shame Nintendo didn’t port the VB games to the 3DS

Nice

@Julien I was just about to say this too, a missed opportunity I think!

Still annoyed Nintendo didn't release their Virtual Boy games on the 3DS.

"Easier on the eyes", but not by much. Lol

Now, if they would have got it working on a 3D TV, with all the effects in place, then I would be even more impressed. As it stands, even with all of the impressive work they've done, it's an inferior experience, because not only have you lost the 3D effect, but the all red screen on a large TV is only making it even worse than it already was.

My wish has always been that Nintendo would have released all the Virtual Boy titles as VC for the 3DS, which was basically the perfect platform for them, but stupid/ignorant/oblivious Nintendo was obviously never going to do that, unfortunately.

Wario land and galactic pinball are incredible! Wish they would port those!

I still say Nintendo dropped the ball by not porting any of the VB games to 3DS.

Wow this is something I have always wanted to experience out of curiosity.

As cool as it would have been for Nintendo to release these titles as VC on 3DS, I think they'd rather everyone forget it was even a thing rather than make more people aware of its existence.

The Virtual Boy will never be a proper console.

While it definitely wouldn't be the best way to play them, it would be cool to have Virtual Boy games available to play on the Switch in 2D (similar to the console in this article), and also have Labo VR compatibility.

But yeah, putting them on the 3DS would have been really sweet.

I can already do this on my tv. You'd be surprised what you can do with a modded wii! I remember when you could rent the games at blockbuster video. (yeah I'm that old) Sure didn't last long though.

Oh and if anyone is curious Wario land is excellent! Just a shame they made it for such a dud system.

Love my VB, flash cart is pretty handy too.

@Cotillion
Have you played Luigi‘s Mansion 3? To communicate with E.Gadd Luigi has to use a device that‘s pretty clearly a Virtual Boy. Even menu screens and the map are in the red and black design so I don‘t think they want people to forget about it.
I‘m pretty sure they‘ve talked about porting these games but maybe it just didn‘t seem worth it in their calculations.
But I agree that it really was a missed opportunity.

The story about Yokoi being blamed so heavily for the Virtual Boy (along with the legend that he was `fired` or left in shame over it) is not actually true. According to Nintendo Magic, Yokoi and Yamauchi were actually very close even outside of work ("like father and son") and nobody involved quoted seemed to place any blame on him.
He had also planned to leave the company soon anyway, and simply speeded up the process as he wanted to work on other things (as he did with Wonderswan).

I know everyone wants to point accusingly and keep the "Virtual Boy was so bad it caused xyz" stuff alive, but in this case it's a myth that affects a real person's legacy. It just isn't true.

I really hope they didn't do this to a working Virtual Boy. You can add an RGB out port to the system would let you hook it up to your TV with Genesis Model 1 SCART cables and still use it the way it was originally intended.

@Averagewriter wrong. Yoko made that claim after it flopped.

His philosophy was repurposing old, done technology - the virtual boy epitomised his ideals, he screwed argonaut who designed a colour 3d system. However what worked in 1989 with GB was not going to work in the mid 90s.

Finally he was pushed, Nintendo finally got a replacement engineer who immediately released the most obvious Gameboy color and so it went.

So he went on to produce Wonderswan realising he was wrong all along.

I currently play them on my Oculus Rift, still in stereoscopic 3D too, and they look great.

VR is just amazing: You can play VR games in it, watch movies and TV shows (inside a giant virtual cinema), play all your old school classics from yesteryear (on a virtual TV or giant virtual cinema screen, and some of them can even be run in full stereoscopic 3D for the first time, such as the classic GC game Eternal Darkness), watch stereoscopic 3D p**n, view 360 images and movies, use Google Maps VR to visit foreign lands and view them as if you were actually standing there (as best as can be done virtually for now), go to the moon (virtually), watch live sports events and music concerts remotely and basically feel like you are there in the crowd, play old arcade games inside a virtual '80s/'90s arcade (including authentically replicated arcade guns games where you point and shoot just like you would back in the day), etc. VR can pretty much do everything that every other separate gaming and entertainment related platform can do but combined into one system--it's just awesome.

@Zeldafan79 I have a modded wii, I guess google will help get these running on there?

I still can't believe I got one of these for Xmas back in 1995 along with Telero Boxer, Galactic Pinball, and Wario Land.

Didn't think my aunt would get it or the PSX and I got a proper surprise that morning. lol

I still loved it and it became the first game system I completed a library for the following year.

Playing Tetris 3D for 4 hours straight on a very warm July afternoon the following summer in my hot attic room was idiotic on my part though.

@Jayofmaya
Yeah the emulators are out there. Google it and I'm sure you'll find something.

@Zeldafan79 Found already. Thanks! Never thought this would be a possibility.

@Jayofmaya
Surprised me too. I only recently got into modding and i was amazed at how useful your old systems can be!

@Zeldafan79 I suggest SNES emulator and some Mario World hacks. I know we have Mario Maker 2 but the pallet changes, music changes as well as some extra mechanics snuck into some of the hacks out there make them well worth the effort of patching and playing. I play them on my Snesx9 wii channel and it's even better I'd say, something about using Nintendo hardware provides the cherry on top.

I was told by both furtek and I fix retro that you can have two independent televisions display the left and the right eye. And you can make it so that the left is red and the right is cyan.

but neither of them have any idea on how to take to existing signals 1 black and red the other black and cyan and color-wise add them so that pixels with both red and Cyan are white. I know red plus blue plus green equals White, a green plus blue equals cyan, so red plus cyan equals White.

The only issue is synching.

I know if one wanted to run a computer simultaneously they could take two inputs and use a program like bino 3D to overlay the black and red and the black and cyan to make a red and cyan anaglyph.

And I know there are editing boards which take two pictures and blend them, even though they usually blend in them in a mean way and not an additive way. (Mean mean average and not in a way to provoke anger in someone.).

I understand most of television production in America works with a black and white compatible system, which uses luma and one or two elements of chroma, I've also heard of yuv which is luma plus two other things I've no idea what they are.

The way I understand live control room editing boxes are more expensive because the variables have to be adjusted on the fly live. but since this is a constant thing that doesn't need to be adjusted maybe a cheaper specialized circuit could be made the takes the black and red of one and the black and cyan of the other and does an additive function and syncs them into a new signal.

Furrtec as I fix retro, both said it sounds reasonable but they are not the people to do it.

I'm just spitballing kind of like how Donald Trump did with the UV and the coronavirus saying there's some way we got to make the principle work.

Just like Donald Trump I don't know the specific idea. In his case he would hire the person who thinks he has the answer to it. My case is asked the community. If someone knows how to build an RGB additive combiner of two independent signals, then you just need to Virtual taps the labor to make them work and attach them to a RGB additive combiner.

the cool thing is at if I'm right both scart and VGA can both deal with their signal in terms of rgb. Which means less complicated instructions for the chip, therefore less ping.

we do not need to be nanosecond accurate because there are no light gun games for this. Just thought I could throw in a suggestion.

I would have said I fix retro did successfully do it with a red and blue test but I didn't have red and blue glasses only the red and cyan. So I took it to a 3D expert and he said that confusing the two standards could make one eye look overly dominant. Bur did look at the video and said the red and blue is accurate in giving magenta pixels. With cool 3d effects.

Ifixretro, the reason why your test video failed is because you used a red and blue Anaglyph, but watched it through red an cyan glasses. That screws up the Stereoscopy. Next time, either use red and blue glasses, or make the right eye black and cyan (cyan = green + blue in equal parts)

Well it's been a couple years and I forgot to follow up with this post.

I finally got Virtual Boy working in 3D.

I don't know if it's the lowest ping route, but the steteoscopic effects do look convincing.

I do show on Twitch every third Thursday of the month called "The Third Thursday in the Third Dimension."

Sometimes on that show I play my Virtual Boy on Twitch.

The website is twitch.tv/tripletopper.

To be paged when I go on the air follow my Twitter ID @tripletopper.