I came across some Virtual Boy emulators while looking for the Japanese Super Mario 2. I thought it would be interesting to give it a try, but none of the emulators would run any of the ROMs I d/led. And considering only about 30 games were released for the console, I tried a large percentage of them (though most were legit homebrew games).

So… what’s the state of V-boy emulation? What’s the state of V-boy homebrew? Are there any IDEs for developing Virtual Boy games?

there’s a very nice emulator for mac called vide, and reality boy on the windows side. vb emulators are good but not perfect yet, especially sound emulation and direct framebuffer writes are a problem. those emus can be found in the tech section.

homebrew-wise, there’s a very good c compiler called gccvb. a number of homebrew games and demos have been released, some even support the link port (using a selfmade cable), which was never used by any commercial games. in the games section you can get an overview of all homebrew projects, released or unreleased.

the vb homebrew scene has been pretty quiet for some years now, but homefully soon there will be some activity again, with the flashboy now being out there and jorgeche’s vbjaengine (a very comprehensive vb sprite engine) right around the corner.