hello all
A friend off my have this virtual boy whit this stickers on it i never have seen it but do you people know some info about this
The virtual boy is whit a japan store demo unit deliverd.

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Mawa, did you, or can you, get the serial number for this Virtual Boy unit from your friend?

I am going to go ahead and throw out my initial conjectures on this Virtual Boy unit.

It strongly appears to me that the stickers on this unit were placed there by the retail store that received this demo system for interactive display purposes. It looks like the store first placed a generic and blank sticker on the side that is to the right in the picture and then printed out the identifying information on tape and stuck the pieces of tape to their appropriate sections on the generic sticker. The only set of numbers/letters that I am sure of is the first and top set, which represents the Hardware ID.

In the first field, the only Japanese character that is visible on the left side of the sticker is “品.” It looks like the Hardware ID that was taped to the section of the sticker to the right of this is covering over a second Japanese character. I am going to guess that the covered character is “目,” so the first upper left field should read “品目,” which means “item,” and the Hardware ID was given as the identifier for the item.

In the second field, there appears “番号.” This simply means “number.” So the question is, what is this number for? It certainly doesn’t appear to be any number associated with identifying the Virtual Boy unit itself, so I am guessing that it is a number that let the original retail store that acquired this Virtual Boy system for display purposes distinguish it from other items in the store, so perhaps it is a store inventory number.

In the third field, there appears “日” at the end of the 3 characters, but I cannot make out the other 2 characters. “日” means “day,” so I conclude that this must be a date. It looks like “95” refers to the year, “09” refers to the month, and “07” refers to the day, so this gives us the date of September 7, 1995. Since all of the known Japanese Demo units among PVB users lie within the 34000 to 38000 serial number range, it makes sense that these units would have been manufactured and sent to retail stores shortly after the release of the Virtual Boy system (probably in response to the extreme lack of sales at launch). Thus, this date is probably the day that the store received this system, but knowing the first two Japanese characters might help me determine that better.

As for the fourth field, I can’t make out either of the two Japanese characters, and I have no idea what HCDS might stand for, so I won’t even give any conjecture for that one.

取得日 – data of purchase?

No idea on the second one, it’s just too blurry 😐

cYa,

Tauwasser

Hey guys, Dude living in Japan with a BA in Japanese here. Second field reads as “Number”. My guess? perhaps this VB was a rental unit at some point? Would explain the label. Looks like a basic inventory sticker to me. Other option is that it was stored somewhere with a large volume of units, perhaps a used game store, and they wanted to make sure they kept everything together when they sold a unit? Just thinking aloud of course…

thatguyinjapan wrote:
Hey guys, Dude living in Japan with a BA in Japanese here. Second field reads as “Number”. My guess? perhaps this VB was a rental unit at some point? Would explain the label…

Do you happen to know if Virtual Boy systems were allowed to be rented out in Japan? There is always the disclaimer on the Japanese Virtual Boy games which reads “FOR SALE AND USE IN JAPAN ONLY AND COMMERCIAL RENTAL PROHIBITED.” I always understood that to mean that Virtual Boy systems were not allowed to be rented out in Japan as they were in the USA.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Mawa, did you, or can you, get the serial number for this Virtual Boy unit from your friend?

Hi Ben,

I am “the friend” 🙂

Serialnumber is 10075246

rklok wrote:

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Mawa, did you, or can you, get the serial number for this Virtual Boy unit from your friend?

Hi Ben,

I am “the friend” 🙂

Serialnumber is 10075246

Hello rklok,

Thanks for the serial number. Based on the fact that the serial number is above 75000, I must conclude that your Virtual Boy system is one of the regular Japanese retail systems and not one of the in-store demo systems intended only to be played by potential Virtual Boy customers inside of Japanese retail stores, since all of these in-store demo systems typically have serial numbers that lie in the 34000 to 38000 range.

Did you happen to receive your Virtual Boy system with one of the mosaic boxes, like the one depicted here?:

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/hardware/?type=vb&sec=images&show=box&region=jpn_fe

If so, I must say that the wrong system was placed inside of that box. If not, then I guess no harm was done there.

Another thing to note is that the small black Virtual Boy stand that you have along with your regular retail system was originally intended to be used in Japanese retail stores along with the in-store demo systems that came in the mosaic boxes. Thus, I hope the seller from whom you purchased the Virtual Boy system didn’t advertise the whole package as a “complete” demo system setup, since the wrong system was matched to the stand. In any case, it is very cool to have the small black Virtual Boy stand to put one’s Virtual Boy system on.

Hi

Yes I know the box, I had several of them.
My guess is also that this is a rental VB…
There were also loose games included labelled with the gamename..