…well at least this is something I would like to write.
But maybe I have your attention now 😉

A few people here know me. I am a very long time member of PlanetVB. I contributed a lot to the VB scene.
Many times without asking for anything in return.
The Virtual Boy always fascinated me, even with its flaws and problems. There are several real nice games on it and you can not find or play them on any other system.
And this brings me to the point of this topic.

The Virtual Boy and some of its games deserve to be played by a wider audience. There is also a lot of very cool homebrew by now. The sad thing is, because it is Virtual Boy not many can enjoy it in full and propably never will.
The System itself costs now quite a lot and lets not even talk about some games.
Also if you have a VB, chances are high that your system suffers from the display problems. This is fixable but it is not very easy to do. The usual new “retro fan” won’t bother.

There are emulators out there but with none you can enjoy the games and its 3D without hazzle.

The way I see it, we need to do something about it.
The only system which can bring the VB games to a real wide audience and also features the 3D without any problems is the (New) 3DS.

The Nintendo 3DS is out there now for a very long time. When this system came out, I did MPO files of Teleroboxer to show how well it would look like on it.
Now after many years, the 3DS and the New3DS is fully hacked and homebrew is possible without big problems. There is even a quite good working 3DS Emulator called Citra out there which should make development easier.

Unfortunately there is still no usable VB Emulator for the 3DS and this I do not understand at all!
For me a proper VB emu on 3DS was a inevitability from day 1.

The only VB emulator on the 3DS is Mednafen trough RetroArch.
On a limited system like the 3DS this makes no sense.
We really need a dedicated VB Emulator.
It should be possible to use sourcecode of available VB emulators for this but it needs 3ds spcific optimation.

I am not sure if the 3DS can be used but the New 3DS should be usable. There we have all the buttons needed, there is 3D, the screen offers high enough resolution so that no scaling shit is needed and there is Head Tracking. In theory all is there to offer a second best thing after the VB.

3D Pictures of 3DS Games on the VB is a cool idea but we should also do the other way around. Seeing all the effort with the VB homebrew I would say we have all the recources to pull this off.
What we are waiting for? A wider audience can only be good for the community.
We are also in luck because there are only a handfull of games to take care about. This should not take ages. What do you think? Also I am sure there are people on GBATemp who are willing to contribute to this project in several ways if done right.

If we look into this, I think we should first determine if the New 3DS is capable to emulate the VB at full speed or close to it and go from there.

PS: with a wider audience and more interest in the VB several things could happen:
Unreleased games surface (Dragon Hopper)
Or Nintendo finally stops ditching the VB and brings official VB Virtual Console Content which could lead in Dragon Hopper or others. When it came to emulation stuff, Nintendo always did it after the Internet community was first.

Well it turns out somebody started a VB emu already some time ago but as usual stopped halfway.
https://github.com/mrdanielps/r3Ddragon
If I see this right, there is interest in a proper VB emu.

I have been wishing for this for a long time! I was super momentarily excited when I saw your topic! 🙂 Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the skills required for such a project, but I know many people on here do! I would be all too willing to help crowdfund a project like this though! I think it would be a great alternative way to experience the games (not to mention awesome for when I’m on travel).

I also believe that there is enough interest in a proper VB. Emulator.
The guy who startet the RedDragon port wrote a FAQ:
“Why would you make a Virtual Boy emulator? Nobody asked for it.

The 3DS is the perfect system to faithfully emulate the Virtual Boy. They have similar screen resolutions, the 3D effect is better and it’s actually portable.”

Well nobody asked for it is not true. 😉
The rest says everything. And to add, the 3DS is also a Nintendo machine so it is a good fit.

I checked last night and apparently GuyPerfect wanted to attemp a proper ARM version. I guess this is also needed to make it run full speed. According to what I read, he had outlined the full idea already. Unfortunately it seems something stopped him.

I guess people just need proper motivation.
A fundraiser could help and there are tons of people on GBATemp who are interested in a VB emulator and are waiting. SOme of them propably would support the cause if the project is properely setup and running.

I also checked ebay and buyee last night regarding VB items.
This is so ridiculous. You find not much on buyee because they think now it is a good ieda to put their shit on ebay. All overpriced as hell excluding shipping! They really ask 300-400 USD for a single Virtual boy. Game prices itself are also much more for common titles.

Once I had a full Collection except for Virtual Bowling. That was always to expensive. I do not even have a System anymore and even if I would like to get one, it is almost impossible now. If this happens to me I am sure it also happens to a ton of other people.
Something needs to be done 🙂

OH YES!! Count me into the VUE3D task force, please! I also don’t have any dev skills unfortunately, but I definitely would fund a project like this!! And would create teaser graphics, if that could help to inspire developers and funders for this …
I also believe that the 3DS would be the perfect VIRTUAL BOY emulator. And my heart also skipped a beat, when I read your headline …

We really need to expand the range of systems that can play the VB games in a manner which makes sense.
Btw @Stereo, nice work with the GFX

[Goemon]

Here is a rough mockup for the Emulator UI.
This is very similar to the SNES Mini Classic UI plus a information section on screen two.
The BG on the upper screen can be exchanged with other artwork and it should also moving.
With this layout a cool 3D effect should be possible.
Also as you can see, I did this mockup more like the japanes/proto style.
I really do not like the US style of the boxart and so on.
Some do so I would suggest to make a few skins.

Final JP
Final US
VB Prototype

In the 3DS IPL we could display a nice 3D model of the VB with controller.

We need a background music.

Edit:
We should propably move the Button functions from upper screen to lower screen and put sections up there like US Games/JP Games/Prototypes/Homebrew

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Goemon.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Goemon.

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Very Nice 🙂

I suggest that PVB users, who are interested in this project also create a GBATemp account, because we are gonna need support of experienced 3DS homebrewsers, I guess. I’ll create an account the coming days …

Some more naming suggestions:
• VUE|3DS (as VUE is already “3D”)
• VIRTUAL Console BOY
• THE Virtual Console
• Virtual Utopia Console
• OLD BOY

[Goemon]

The frontend I made the mockup for should not be very hard to do when it come to the coding. We would not need the absolute top coder for this task.
Also this UI or Frontend could be done already without the actual VB emulator behind it.
If we include all the box art and infos for the games, people could at least already switch trough the entire VB library and see whats in there. There is just no active starting button to start a emulator behind.
Once there is a emulator ready, it can be connected with the UI.
We can not put in the officiall roms. The user need to take care about it. However, the gfx inside for each official game can be done by us and also all the cool homebrew can be preinstalled.
And I think that this entire UI can be done with the Citra Emualtor at the beginning. No need for 3DS hacking at the start.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Goemon.

[Goemon]

Did a small rework of the Mockup:

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Goemon.

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Fire-WSP wrote:
Did a small rework of the Mockup:

Great ideas! I so want this to become a real thing!

Fire-WSP schrieb:
Also this UI or Frontend could be done already without the actual VB emulator behind it.
If we include all the box art and infos for the games, people could at least already switch trough the entire VB library and see whats in there.

Hey, that’s a good idea indeed. A VB library browser should be pretty feasible as a first target. And actually that would be a very cool 3DS app already! Certainly a great promo for an emulator!

But I’d suggest to enhance the library with 3D screenshots then (and maybe even 3D videos for some games). This is also doable already and the 3DS users could already see the nice 3D graphics of the VB games!

Here also comes another naming suggestion … 😉

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The Idea with the 3D screenshots for a preview is actually very good.
I still have enough space in the bottom touch screen.
We should show 3 pictures for each game.
I will adjust the mockup very soon.

About the name.
Good idea but I was aiming for something short.
VUE|3DS is cool
VUE@3DS
But the name is actually the least problem and also a future coder for the emu should have some saying on this ^^

A video for preview would akso be nice. I have no idea what video is working on the 3DS right now.
But such a video needs to be in good quality without many artifacts. So the filesize is propably a bit gif. Therefore the clips should be only as long as needed. 20 sec maybe?

How about
Virtual One(the boy has grown up into a man)
or
V-1

Don’t count me out just yet. A couple weeks ago I finally came up with a satisfactory way of mixing Java with C and started poking around with a new implementation. Over the course of about four or five afternoons I have what I think it is a nice debugger interface, and the CPU is fully implemented (save for a few instruction classes that will be mini-projects in and of themselves).

Last week I was preparing for a CompTIA Nework+ certification, which I earned on Thursday, so between spats of looking for a new job this week, I might have some time to poke around some more. Free time isn’t as abundant as it once was. (-:

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Not Bad indeed!
Looking forward. 🙂

As a coding noob I need to ask, why another debugger?
Is this because it needs to be ARM specific for the 3DS?

Also why do you want to mix Java with C?

For testing will citra do for a while?

Since we talked about GBA Temp above.
Are you planning to do this project on your own or do you plan to turn it into a open source/community project?

Sorry lots of qustions 😀

Fire-WSP wrote:
As a coding noob I need to ask, why another debugger?

The short answer is that existing debuggers for… well, most emulators… suck real-life balls, not just virtual ones. I wanted something with features I could use to do reverse engineering, not just the barebones “hey look a debugger” features emulators tend to have (if any at all). I have many things in mind such as automatic function isolation and character dot pattern breakpoints among others.

Fire-WSP wrote:
Is this because it needs to be ARM specific for the 3DS?

Naw, I just needed a way to see what the emulator sees to make sure it’s working correctly.

Fire-WSP wrote:
Also why do you want to mix Java with C?

C is better for low-level things such as a portable emulation core, whereas Java is better for high-level things like cross-platform GUI support, Unicode, SSL and a whole host of other things. Neither is fully sufficient on its own, but I want to leverage the strengths of both in the same project.

Fire-WSP wrote:
For testing will citra do for a while?

For the time being I won’t be doing any 3DS development. However, the C library is entirely C code (doesn’t even use the standard runtime library), so anyone can easily plug it into a 3DS project and hopefully have a little Virtual Boy up and running in no time.

Fire-WSP wrote:
Are you planning to do this project on your own or do you plan to turn it into a open source/community project?

It’ll be open source when it’s released, and if anyone’s interested in development in the mean time we can work something out. In the past, it’s come down to a matter of people wanting to help out but not having the corresponding skill set, so I just started up this new iteration of the project without announcing it.

Fire-WSP wrote:
Sorry lots of qustions 😀

Questions are the bridge to knowledge! Never apologize for seeking more knowledge.

Just playing around with the logo …

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Those logos are awesome! I think my favourite besides the original is the second :).

Thanks 🙂

Fire-WSP schrieb:
I have no idea what video is working on the 3DS right now.

The 3DS uses 3D-AVI: that’s two streams inside an AVI container. You can use this tool to encode 3D video for the 3DS: https://filetrip.net/3ds-downloads/utilities/download-3ds-video-1-33-f31828.html

Fire-WSP schrieb:
But such a video needs to be in good quality without many artifacts. So the filesize is propably a bit gif. Therefore the clips should be only as long as needed. 20 sec maybe?

I experienced that the compression indeed tends to cause artifacts for redscale gradients. But greyscale should work fine. And maybe the developper can implement the option to display greyscale videos in redscale …

I had the same numbers in mind – 3 screenshots and for some special games a short video 🙂

Actually, “STEREO BOY” also would be a good name for an VB emulator … don’t you think? A bit long maybe. Anyway, I’m considering to rename my PVB account … 😛

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