I’m wondering if it’s possible to connect my VB directly to my computer, and display on it whatever images i wish, sorta like a second monitor?

I remember a Virtual-E project along these lines ages ago.

Unfortunately it was determined that the transfer speed of the link port wasn’t fast enough, and the project was never finished. 🙁

Actually, it was never finished because Alberto couldn’t get his flash cart working.

I don’t think the way he was planning to do it would have been that limited by the link port. I think he was (is?) going to use the VB as a “GPU” like those in modern video cards. (And sound too, I assume. Maybe even the controller, though it’s not one of the better ones, IMHO…) so only elements of the display would have to be transferred, which the VB would then render, rather than screen-sized bitmaps. Also, compression isn’t completely out of the question. But, since it needs a cart to boot the VB, anyway, an Expansion-based link would be viable, too.

But, assuming you actually like the VB’s display (does anyone? :-P) it would be better to make a new “video card” for it and leave the VB’s CPU/GPU out of the equation.

The patent has pretty much everything one would need to know (except the pinouts, which can be found through experimentation) including the method used to make different shades of red (which could, of course, be expanded to include more shades by the adapter.)

So… How much would anyone be willing to pay for such a thing? 😉

This comes up every year or two, and the answer is always the same. it would be easy (if not nesisarily usefull) to pump data from the computer to the VB via a link cable, or another I/O device embedded in the flash cartrige. it would be dificult at best to reprogram the displays with anything as good as the VB can do. (same goes for building a VB to TV converter).

The real answer is… Go buy a nice pair of shutter glasses or i-glasses, or anything else. For less than $100 you can get top notch 3D on the PC without restricting yourself to the pidiful 384x224x4 colors of the VB display.

David Tucker

hey guys,
i think much cooler would be a camera like the Gamy Boy Camera but with restlight booster so that you can have a “Terminator View”
I know its not usefull but a nice experiment.

Actualy an old serial quick cam and a pic controller would be all you would need to pull this off. Just use the pic as a serial protocol to VB link cable translator, allong with any smothing of the camera messages you want to do. And in the VB you simply need to perform some simple operations on the images as they come in, like normalizing the brightness of the image, and color reduction to 4 colors. Finaly just blast it out to the screen using direct screen draws. Even cooler would be hooking up two cameras for true stereo viewing. im guessing the whole thing could be built for $100 if you already have the ability to program for the VB.

David Tucker

i dont understand programming at all 🙁