Pretty much every VirtualBoy I bought came with scratches on the red lenses. I wanted to polish them for a long time but never thought of buying some display polish. Lately I found one of my old mobile phones and remembered that I would polish scratches on the display using toothpaste. So I tried it today and it worked like a charm. Plus it smells like mint.

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SirGuntz wrote:
The VB console is too difficult to take apart for home users.

If you have the right screw driver the VB is very easy to open. Especially changing the lenses does only require a minimum effort. I meant to say that it would have been interesting if the VB would have come with exchangeable lenses by default though.

SirGuntz wrote:
Besides, even if the lenses were swappable, the LEDs were still red.

If I remember first grade art class correctly red LEDs with blue lenses would result in a pink image while red LEDs with green lenses would result in an yellow image.

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thunderstruck wrote:

SirGuntz wrote:
The VB console is too difficult to take apart for home users.

If you have the right screw driver the VB is very easy to open. Especially changing the lenses does only require a minimum effort. I meant to say that it would have been interesting if the VB would have come with exchangeable lenses by default though.

SirGuntz wrote:
Besides, even if the lenses were swappable, the LEDs were still red.

If I remember first grade art class correctly red LEDs with blue lenses would result in a pink image while red LEDs with green lenses would result in an yellow image.

Ahhh, a trip down memory lane, high school! Lol, well, this actually should be working like you say, though I think the brightness will get hurt by using different color filters, it still might be a cool effect.

thunderstruck wrote:

If I remember first grade art class correctly red LEDs with blue lenses would result in a pink image while red LEDs with green lenses would result in an yellow image.

Nope, it doesn’t work like that. Blue lenses would result in a black image. That’s how the red/blue glasses work, the blue side blocks out red light. You wouldn’t see anything…

thunderstruck wrote:
If I remember first grade art class correctly […]

You may be remembering correctly, it’s just that they taught you the subtractive mixing of pigments, and what you need to know (and what your diagram shows) is the additive mixing of light. In this case, the pigment in the filter can only subtract light. Since the VB is only producing red light, you can only make it dimmer, not change its color.

However, thanks to nanotechnology development, there now exist so-called “Quantum dots” which are able to absorb photons and re-emit new ones of another color. Eventually, it may be possible to get some of these and make a filter that can absorb the red light emitted by the VB’s LEDs and produce another wavelength that can either replace or mix with the red to produce another color. It will most likely be necessary to place them directly on the LEDs themselves, but changing the VB eyepieces will also be required to avoid absorbing the new color(s) of light.

Of course, if we’re talking about “the future” we might as well say that “someday” we’ll be able to make highly integrated semiconductors at home, in which case we could simply make replacement LED arrays of other colors as drop-in replacements for those in the VB…

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I just wanna play golf in green 😛

bigmak wrote:
I just wanna play golf in green 😛

That would be epic =P