You’re not the first person to want a full-color VB, but the only realistic way to do it is through emulation. Even then, it would be shoehorned in, since the original games – and, as has been explained before, the system itself – only produces monochrome images.
You don’t seem to understand what a palette is (or how to spell it), the concept of bit width in a computer system, or how many LEDs are in a VB (224 for each eye, on 1cm-long silicon dies, which also contain demultiplexing and driving circuitry). But I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with! 👍 Keep us posted!
I think I heard once that red causes less eyestrain than green or blue. Replacing the red LEDs with the white ones that currently exist would probably be cool, if possible. It’s probably possible for the VB software to use more than a 4-color palette, but the output would still be black and 3 shades of red. Having a larger palette does have some interesting potential uses, though, and I’ve been thinking about it. The question is if those uses are worth the big hit to memory.
But a Virtual Boy will never be able to output more than black and 3 shades of red. There is supposed to be some hardware trick you can do to make different columns of pixels have different brightnesses, but that doesn’t seem like it’d have a whole lot of utility. A Virtual Boy Color would effectively be a different system, and would need more memory and probably a slightly faster processor. I would love nothing more than to see something like this happen, but I assume everyone with the skills to make an alternate past-future tech like that is retired, pretty well-off, and would have no desire to work on our pet projects. It’d be like asking someone to make an Atari console after the 7200 but before the Jaguar.
As I said in my previous post: “the only realistic way to do it is through emulation”, which is essentially what you’re talking about. The way the SGB worked is by assigning different colors to the four shades in each of the GBs four hardware palettes. The VB has twice as many palettes, plus a way to change the color used to clear the screens before drawing. Since the programmers weren’t constrained as to how to use them, it would be a little more work to map them correctly for each game, and might even require hacking the games to get the best effect, but it could be done. However, it has to be done before everything gets converted to four shades for the displays – which happens inside the video processor – hence why it would have to be done with emulation.
Of course, the OP’s original question was about giving the VB a color display with which to show these new colors, which would be extremely difficult and expensive (unless you simply gutted the VB and crammed some small TFT displays inside).
I like that this topic is being discussed, though. Let’s keep brainstorming!
Here’s my crazy idea:
First, make a display that essentially contains three VB displays, one for each primary color (RGB), but with the light emitters very close together.
Second, figure out how to cram three VBs inside one casing, with two of them somehow slaved to the third.
Third, modify the games to run on the master VB (we’ll call this one “RED”), but send separate graphics to the other two (GREEN, and BLUE) to generate the other two color channels of the display, synchronized with RED’s graphics.
The result: 6-bit RGB video (64 colors; see attachment)
Before building one, it could be emulated to prove the concept. The displays would probably have to be built like my idea from this post: https://www.virtual-boy.com/forums/t/different-vb-display-color/#post-995351
