Fullfilling a childhood dream

Hello all, I’m new here, after purchasing my first Virtual Boy. Here are the events that led up to this:

So I was about 10 years old when the VB first came out, and I have always been a techical-minded person; I was fascinated with “virtual reality” and stereoscopic 3D aspects of the VB. My parents were very anti-videogame and the most I had managed to get out of them was a gameboy with a few games. I pretty much knew I wouldn’t ever get a VB, but I still wanted one. We had a local movie rental place that also rented games, and they were known to have a few console displays from time to time. They received a VB demo unit and set it on the counter where you pay. Every time we went my parents wouldn’t let me go near it, because they were paranoid about it hurting my eyes or whatever. So I would keep track of them and when they weren’t looking I would run up to the counter and try to play for a minute. Needless to say I didn’t get much out of that, and I never really got to experience the VB. But as I got older, I never really forgot about it. To me it always seemed “ominous” and “mysterious” in a way, and I wanted to play it more than anything.

We moved to another town, and I became friends with the neighbors. After about a year, I found out the older brother had a VB in his room, so I finally worked up the courage to ask if I could play it. They tried to find it in his closet, but they never did, so I again did not get to play it.

Then when I was either in 8th or 9th grade I was asking some of my friends if they remembered the Virtual Boy. Most didn’t, but one guy responded, “I heard they’re selling those really cheap at Best Buy right now.” I hadn’t heard that, so I got really excited. Maybe it was fate that I hadn’t played it for this long and now I get to buy one for like $20 on clearance. So the next day I convinced someone to drive me there and I practically ran back to the games section. I couldn’t find any VB’s on the shelves so I asked the nearest employee. He knew what I was talking about, so he checked inventory. Turns out they had just sold the last of their VB stock earlier that morning, so I was out of luck.

Fast forward to today. I’m in college and I’m sort of in that nostalgic/revist-childhood phase, so naturally I’ve been interested in the VB. I’ve been keeping an eye on ebay auctions for VB’s for the past couple of years, but I never pulled the trigger. I finally decided “It’s time” so yesterday I bought a good-condition/working VB with all the important accessories and 6 games. It should get here some time this week. Needless to say, I’m incredibly excited! 😀 I am also an electrical/computer engineer, and the programming aspect of the VB really fascinates me. Perhaps if I get some free time I might try toying around with some code. I see there is a small homebrew community here and I think that’s awesome! I didn’t realize there were so many people passionate about the VB. If you go to youtube, all the videos about the VB are filled with ignorance and about how “it will make you go blind” or whatever. Totally bogus. Anyway, thanks for listening to my long story, that’s about it. I’m looking forward to revisiting some fond memories.