Now here’s a interesting unit!

I found this Virtual Boy on ebay about 5-6 years ago. Check out the bottom of this unit, pretty strange aint it! According to the sellers auction description it was obtained through an estate sale of a longtime Nintendo Employee.

Another thing that was really weird was that included with this unit was a brand-new controller and a brand-new stand, both unused in their original baggies. Its weird because this unit obviously will not attach to a normal VB retail table stand.

It looks like something that the Employee was working on but then stopped in the middle of the project due to the VB being cancelled. Its like the Employee decided to take the unit home but first stopped by the parts department and picked up a brand-new stand and controller.

This auction ended during a bad time for me, so I ended up losing the auction. To me, this is the one that got away.

(Sorry for the poor picture quality)

What do you guys think about this strange VB unit?

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GEZ wrote:
What does a white box VB (with box of course) go for these days, might put mine up for sale. Haven’t seen one available in years…

Completeness would certainly be a factor. Does yours come with its own adapter tap, and does it include its own white box?

Even without the adapter tap, I wouldn’t let mine go for anything under $500.00, and yes, I paid more than that for it.

HP Lovethrash wrote:

I am pretty sure a white box system came up for under $300 buy it now within the last few months. I almost bought it because I had never seen one before and it seemed like a great deal…it was probably something $250 or less to be honest. Maybe i should have picked it up, but I didn’t really know what the white box was for at that point and couldn’t justify the price tag for it :p

Yeah, that was me who bought that one. I nabbed that sucker up real quick! 🙂
The seller didn’t know what he had and sold it as a normal used Virtual Boy system with a White box. It was a “buy it now” for $299 + $15 for shipping.

But a sellers “Buy it now” price doesn’t determine what a item is worth. Its auctions with actual bids that will give you a good idea on what people are willing to pay for one of these units. But there just hasn’t been enough auctions to observe “auction sold” prices. The last actual auction that I have personally seen for one of these systems was atleast 3 years ago ( maybe a little longer ) and it sold for about $700 + shipping.

Of all my years of searching for rare VB items, I have actually seen a few of these systems and they always sell for the sellers “Buy it now” asking price.

Heck, I paid less money for my “New” White box VB unit, but that was years ago.

So I guess if your lucky, you’ll find one at a good “buy it now” price from a unsuspecting seller.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

GEZ wrote:
What does a white box VB (with box of course) go for these days, might put mine up for sale. Haven’t seen one available in years…

Completeness would certainly be a factor. Does yours come with its own adapter tap, and does it include its own white box?

If your asking if his Demo unit includes a White boxed USA Demo tap, then I would have to guess it comes in a standard USA retail VB AC adaptor set box, minus the colors and graphics, so the adaptor set box would be all White and probably with some text written on it.

See, my USA Demo tap that was recently discovered, was packed in with my “used” White box Demo system. The tap was placed in the spot of the cardboard insert where the stands support brackets lay. Included with this Tap was an AC adaptor, and that was crammed underneath the cardboard insert, indicating the Tap was most likely Not originally packed in the box that the Demo unit was packaged in, but later placed in there by the original owner.

Speaking of the AC Adaptor, this Adaptor is identical to all my other snes-002 AC Adaptors. The only difference that I can notice, is that the wire on the adaptor has text written all over it, where all my other snes-002 Adaptors do Not. And it is indeed a genuine snes-002 AC Adaptor.

Does anyone else have a snes-002 AC Adaptor with text written on the wire?

vuefinder83 wrote:
If your asking if his Demo unit includes a White boxed USA Demo tap, then I would have to guess it comes in a standard USA retail VB AC adaptor set box, minus the colors and graphics, so the adaptor set box would be all White and probably with some text written on it.

See, my USA Demo tap that was recently discovered, was packed in with my “used” White box Demo system. The tap was placed in the spot of the cardboard insert where the stands support brackets lay. Included with this Tap was an AC adaptor, and that was crammed underneath the cardboard insert, indicating the Tap was most likely Not originally packed in the box that the Demo unit was packaged in, but later placed in there by the original owner.

Did you happen to check out the preproduction unit that I acquired?

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=31069#forumpost31069

The preproduction tap was packed inside the white-box system in the same place as your USA demo tap, but the preproduction tap came inside its own white box, which is certainly an official one. To me, it seems highly likely that your USA demo tap would have also had its own white box, the same as mine, at some point in time, but it later got thrown away.

Also, as I understand it, when the Virtual Boy was originally released commercially, there was a period of time when a person had to use batteries with the system because no adapter set or tap had been commercially released. Nevertheless, preproduction taps were definitely included with the preproduction systems, and demo taps were included with the very early demo systems. To me this is evidence that while Nintendo did have a prototype tap made and included with its early white-box systems, it was not ready to release that tap commercially. Once the tap and set were ready to be released commercially, the tap itself took on a new form as compared to the demo taps and preproduction taps that preceded it. This is why I would not at all expect an adapter set box to have been included with a white-box system, since adapter sets would not have been finalized at the time that Nintendo was shipping out its white-box systems.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

Did you happen to check out the preproduction unit that I acquired?

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=31069#forumpost31069

The preproduction tap was packed inside the white-box system in the same place as your USA demo tap, but the preproduction tap came inside its own white box, which is certainly an official one. To me, it seems highly likely that your USA demo tap would have also had its own white box, the same as mine, at some point in time, but it later got thrown away.

Also, as I understand it, when the Virtual Boy was originally released commercially, there was a period of time when a person had to use batteries with the system because no adapter set or tap had been commercially released. Nevertheless, preproduction taps were definitely included with the preproduction systems, and demo taps were included with the very early demo systems. To me this is evidence that while Nintendo did have a prototype tap made and included with its early white-box systems, it was not ready to release that tap commercially. Once the tap and set were ready to be released commercially, the tap itself took on a new form as compared to the demo taps and preproduction taps that preceded it. This is why I would not at all expect an adapter set box to have been included with a white-box system, since adapter sets would not have been finalized at the time that Nintendo was shipping out its white-box systems.

Hmm, thats pretty interesting, I was not aware of the time period when ac adaptor tap sets were not available. To me, it just seemed that with the presence of the ac adaptor with my demo tap, that the demo tap might’ve been part of a “demo ac adaptor set” in a white box to go with the white box system.

I never thought of my demo tap being boxed individually like your preproduction jpn tap because all jpn taps were packeged in their own box, where as all the usa taps were packed as ac adaptor sets with ac adaptors included.

So I do wonder now, if my usa demo tap was packed just like your jpn preproduction tap, in its own little white box.

Really cool find btw on that jpn preproduction unit!

GEZ, does your white box demo unit include an adaptor tap, and is that tap packed in its own white box?

vuefinder83 wrote:
… But a sellers “Buy it now” price doesn’t determine what a item is worth. Its auctions with actual bids that will give you a good idea on what people are willing to pay…

Speaking of sellers that foolishly put Buy-It-Now prices on extremely rare Virtual Boy items, did anybody else see that a Virtual Boy alarm clock sold on ebay at a Buy-It-Now price of only $20.00?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Virtual-Boy-Nintendo-Clock-RARE-/201373066803?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ee2c52633

I wish I was the lucky person who saw it while it was listed for probably not even an hour on ebay.

Seriously… sellers need to let bidders bid up rare items, if they have no idea of what those in the market are willing to pay for such.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

Seriously… sellers need to let bidders bid up rare items, if they have no idea of what those in the market are willing to pay for such.

Shhhhhhhhhhh! Thats how I got my 3D Specs 😉

This was nice

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Made a part 2 of this thread.

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6590&post_id=35778#forumpost35778

Old thread for sure, but I just found another one of these.
In the white demo box, has the same strange base plate, guy said he got it directly from a Nintendo rep whose job it was to repair kiosks. Did you ever figure out anything more about these?

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Here’s a new link to another old thread:

This Strange Virtual Boy pt.2

I think it’s safe to say that these were definitely used for the store displays, most likely early versions.

Excellent, thank you. Do you still yours? Is this only the second one that we know of to be found?

I do still have mine 🙂

…and yeah, this is the second one I’ve seen surface. It’s certainly the first one I’ve seen to come in the white box.

Thanks for the info!