Hello people! I have a question/idea… I don’t know if anyone else have thought of this but… I was wondering. Could you make it so you could somehow connect a Virtual Boy To another Virtual Boy. So like you’re playing a Virtual Boy and, Someone else if viewing the game you’re playing on another. So You’d be playing like. Mario’s Tennis and someone else could watch the game with the 3-D affect. If so please tell me how! I’d really appreciate it!

That’s a really good idea! someone who knows alot about modding should reply!

Moved to the dev board.

IIRC DogP had something like this going a while back. I tihnk you just have to connect the display cables from the second unit into the first one, and you can both view the display simultaneously.

Yea, a hardware link at the display side would be best, you just dont have enough bandwidth to move game state data over the link cable. It would be easy to implement if you were writing a game from scratch but almost imposible to retrofit into mario tennis, etc.

So basicly, i just take the display wires from the second VB and connect them to the other? Because I really want to see and so do my friends, when someone else is playing. 🙂

Yup, I built a test setup with it, but I never got around to building a whole system with a cable going between headsets… it does work though, it’d just be a pain to have about 30 wires running between systems.

DogP

Cool. What about building a video signal converter, would that be possible? I mean, so we know enough from docs about how it all works to build and program such a device to make it possible in theory?

Yeah, I’d really like to build a signal converter so we could watch the VB stuff on a TV, but that’s pretty complicated. I don’t know exactly how the whole thing works either, but if I spent a little more time on it, I’m sure I could figure that out. Then I just need time to actually design/build the converter.

I think it’d be easiest to make an interface for the PC, then have the software display the screen though, since it would be easiest to read the screen data, store it into some sort of memory, then just dump the memory to the PC over the parallel port or something, instead of having to then convert to some sort of video signal.

DogP

I’d leave the memory out of the device itself and just make hw that sends the video data directly to the PC, which could then render and/or store it. Just my $0.02…

For those that don’t know, the screen interface is something like a series of (28?) NES pads. Groups of 8 “pixels” (enough for every row in the 224 pixel tall screen) are each “shifted” over a wire and all synchronized to a clock pulse. Both screens are connected to a common “bus” and activated by a “select” signal. Only one screen is drawn at a time.

The hard part about decoding the data is the fact that the shades are done with PWM. The ratio of a pixel’s on and off times determines how bright it is. This is further complicated by the “column tables” that correct for the “pendulum” motion of the mirrors. That’s why I think it should be left to the PC.

Yeah, I agree that it should be processed by the PC, but I just don’t know about reading the display data directly with software. It goes so fast, and with the brightness controlled by the pulse width, I think the low priority of the parallel port would be too slow/inaccurate. If we could read it realtime with a microcontroller that then sends the data to the PC during the blanking period, I think that’d be the way to go. Of course, that’s more hardware/complexity, and software is so much easier to write, but I can’t see it working well :/ .

Or, we could just get our hands on a Video Boy and copy their design 😀 .

DogP

/me grabs 800 bucks and jumps in his time machine 😀

/me wishes KR155E had waited for the rest of us.
Imagine walking into a Japanese shop and actually purchasing Space Invaders – for retail price. 😀

*sigh*

You know, somewhere in Japan someone is lamenting that they have to pay so much for Water World… Its always greener on the other side of the sea

ps. I got water world for $2 at a thrift shop when they were going for $50 on ebay