I thought of this a few months ago and was wondering if something like this is possible. an easy to install hdmi mod chip for the virtual boy the only soldering would by for powering the chip possibly. or perhaps a coupler cable could be made for that too.

one of the plastic that hold the speaker will be replaced with a 3d printed one that has a mini hdmi out preinstalled with 1080p upscale and full 3d support. different resolution can be selected, upscale filters, and 3d can be turned off via 3 small monetary switch on same 3d printed plastic piece.

another idea would be to completely eliminate the console except for the main motherboard and include a new housing and wall power source basically turning it in to a home console.
(i would buy that in a heart beat if it was real lol)

anyways these are just my thoughts on what an hdmi mod chip for the VB could look like.
i dont know how to actually make something like this but it would be cool to see it happen.

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It would probably have to go out one of the speaker inserts; the way the VB is constructed, there wouldn’t be an easy way to make or install a no-cut sandwich mod, like what has been done with HDMI mods for the original Game Boy and the front-loader NES.

On the bright side, this would be a damn easy install; you’d really just need a long game bit driver to get the bottom shell off.

I came up with a bunch of things to think about for such a mod, but I unfortunately can’t edit my previous post, so a new one it is.

How, precisely, should such a mod handle the 3D convergence? I agree that players should be able to turn off 3D for some type of 2D play. Would it be possible to make the convergence be adjustable, as it is with the 3DS?

What kinds of 3D modes would be supported? Color anaglyph? Over/under? Active shutter? (Admittedly, I have a poor understanding of how 3D is handled over HDMI.)

What kind of scaling should be used? Would it be simple, lag-free line-doubling/-tripling/etc., a la the OSSC; or would there be a full framebuffer with more sophisticated scaling, and therefore some degree of lag; and could that more sophisticated scaling be disabled in favor of the simple line doubling, like the UltraHDMI’s Direct Mode?

What resolutions beyond (I assume) 720×480, 1280×720, and 1920×1080 should be supported, if any? I would hope 16:10 and 4:3 resolutions would be available.

Since the VB runs at 50Hz, and I can imagine that wouldn’t be a problem in PAL regions (where the VB wasn’t sold), what can be done to enable compatibility on NTSC TVs that don’t support 50Hz? Would there need to be framerate conversion to enable compatibility on 60Hz displays? How would that look, and would it involve dropped frames?

How would the output options be configured? Simply with the proposed switches and watching the output for changes? Or would this have some sort of OSD, and, if so, would that OSD be visible on both the HDMI output and the native displays (since it’ll be fitted between the main and the display boards), or just the HDMI output?

How would such a mod handle a change in displays, such as if you were to take your VB to a friend’s or relative’s house? If you have your mod normally outputting to something like a 1920×1200 monitor at that resolution, then plug it into a display that supports a max of 1920×1080, does the mod behave? Does it keep outputting at 1920×1200, because that’s what it was configured to use and then require the user to change the resolution, or does it check the EDID info for the connected display (when available) and automatically fall back on the next-best compatible resolution?

And speaking of potentially incompatible configurations, assuming no OSD is available on the native displays, how would users perform a factory reset and get it back to a compatible default?

When the HDMI output is active, would such a mod mute audio on the VB, including or excluding the headphone jack?

If installation will indeed require soldering for power, I suggest including some kind of connector so the mod can be removed/replaced without desoldering anything.

I wouldn’t be able to try the 3D (except maybe an anaglyph mode), but if anyone’s going to make something like this, count me in for a test board; I have two VBs I’ve been itching for more use after NES Freak repaired them.

nmalinoski wrote:
How, precisely, should such a mod handle the 3D convergence? I agree that players should be able to turn off 3D for some type of 2D play. Would it be possible to make the convergence be adjustable, as it is with the 3DS?

There’s no need to adjust the convergence, because the parallax is fixed on most games. Once the pixels are made and sent to the LED displays, there’s no way to change the convergence.

What kinds of 3D modes would be supported? Color anaglyph? Over/under? Active shutter? (Admittedly, I have a poor understanding of how 3D is handled over HDMI.)

I found the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4a spec. as a downloadable PDF, here: https://etmriwi.home.xs4all.nl/forum/hdmi_spec1.4a_3dextraction.pdf

HDMI supports most 3D formats, including over/under (half-height frames), side-by-side (half-width frames), full (packed) frames, and line-, field-, or frame-sequential. And, obviously, any HDMI display would support anaglyph…

What kind of scaling should be used?

I would go with simple nearest-neighbor. It’s the easiest, lowest-latency, and true to the original image. If it wouldn’t be too hard to implement, HQ2x or 3x would be okay, I guess.

What resolutions beyond (I assume) 720×480, 1280×720, and 1920×1080 should be supported, if any? I would hope 16:10 and 4:3 resolutions would be available.

It’s possible to make this automatic with EDID.

Since the VB runs at 50Hz, and I can imagine that wouldn’t be a problem in PAL regions (where the VB wasn’t sold), what can be done to enable compatibility on NTSC TVs that don’t support 50Hz? Would there need to be frame-rate conversion to enable compatibility on 60Hz displays? How would that look, and would it involve dropped frames?

50->60Hz would actually require inserting a frame after every fifth one.

How would the output options be configured? Simply with the proposed switches and watching the output for changes? Or would this have some sort of OSD, and, if so, would that OSD be visible on both the HDMI output and the native displays (since it’ll be fitted between the main and the display boards), or just the HDMI output?

Overlaying on the internal displays would be exceedingly difficult, and, IMHO, unnecessary. In fact, I like the switches idea better than an OSD, since they won’t need to be changed often, anyway.

I have an actual 3D display I could test this on, if anyone is going to work on it. I can even supply my own VB.

Personally, I would rather have the stand-alone version. Trying to cram everything in the original case, and having to use a mini-HDMI to get it to fit in the speaker plate, doesn’t sound like the best idea (though probably doable). Plus, with no vibrating mirrors, DogP’s experiments with over-clocking could be incorporated, and we could make a “VB Pro” to run more processor-intensive games made specifically for it.

afaik Furrtek is the only one working on something able to output video to a tvscreen.

do you have a homemade board/system which can read the vb graphics data from it’s chips and output hdmi already?

Elrinth wrote:
afaik Furrtek is the only one working on something able to output video to a tvscreen.

do you have a homemade board/system which can read the vb graphics data from it’s chips and output hdmi already?

The wording of the original post is that this was only brainstorming; and, as far as I can tell, there are no prototypes, and nothing has yet been announced.

nmalinoski wrote:
… what can be done to enable compatibility on NTSC TVs that don’t support 50Hz? … and would it involve dropped frames?

RunnerPack wrote:
50->60Hz would actually require inserting a frame after every fifth one.

If you buy a flat screen in Europe today, it supports all the HDMI / Blu-ray formats – incuding 60 Hz. So I would have guessed that this only was a problem with CRTs and that modern screens worldwide also support all the HDMI formats today, including 50 Hz?

But converting the VB’s 50.2Hz to 50Hz would still require dropping one frame every five seconds, though.

Just made a quick test, setting one of my computer displays to 60Hz and the other one to 50 Hz and then dragged the emulator window from one screen to the other, running the flickering multi color demo and the test image of the Super Famicom.
The flickering is much stronger on the 60 Hz display, looks more inconsistent to me (so it seems to be a good idea to set your display to 50 Hz to optimize the emulator experience).
With the multi-color blending, there’s still one hard flicker about every 4 seconds on the 50Hz display, though. Due to the remaining offset of 0.2Hz, I guess …

Hmm, interesting. I tried setting my monitor to 50Hz a while ago, but the Multi Color Demo blending seemingly flickered just as much as on 60Hz.

STEREO BOY wrote:

nmalinoski wrote:
… what can be done to enable compatibility on NTSC TVs that don’t support 50Hz? … and would it involve dropped frames?

RunnerPack wrote:
50->60Hz would actually require inserting a frame after every fifth one.

If you buy a flat screen in Europe today, it supports all the HDMI / Blu-ray formats – incuding 60 Hz. So I would have guessed that this only was a problem with CRTs and that modern screens worldwide also support all the HDMI formats today, including 50 Hz?

But converting the VB’s 50.2Hz to 50Hz would still require dropping one frame every five seconds, though.

It’s good that you can get a TV that works, but there is much less support for 50Hz outside of PAL territories, which is why I specified compatibility with NTSC TVs. My US-market Samsung LCD does not support 50Hz or any kind of PAL or PAL-like video, although chances are good that the 4K TCL TV I’ve been looking at should work fine with 50Hz.