Hi everyone, I thought I’d share here that I’ve created a Virtual Boy emulator app for the iPhone that uses Cardboard VR to recreate the 3D effect. When combined with a VR viewer for your iPhone and an MFi-compliant controller like the SteelSeries Nimbus, you can effectively recreate the experience. I’ve attached a screenshot.

I used a pared down version of the Provenance iOS port of Mednafen and combined it with the Google Cardboard VR iOS SDK and was able to achieve the 3D effect successfully. Mednafen reports a 100% compatibility rate so this should run just about anything, though I haven’t tried a ton of homebrew stuff yet.

Source code is provided here: https://github.com/tomkidd/VirtualBoyVR-iOS

Long article explaining everything is here: http://schnapple.com/virtual-boy-emulator-for-ios-using-google-cardboard-vr/

I used the Virtual Boy logo font from RunnerPack that he posted on here some time ago. I’ve made sure to attribute him in the GitHub repo.

And if anyone remembers the website The Red Area from way back in the late 90’s, I’m the guy who ran that site. I run down the whole history in that article up there too.

Anyway, hope someone here likes it. I’ll submit a news article to the main site, too.

Attachments:

1. 

   vbwl.jpg
   

Cool! I’ll have to give this a shot.

Then all you would need are one of these “View Master VR” sets with a custom Virtual Boy logo on it, and you’re good-to-go.

They’re essentially Google Cardboard but made out of plastic.

Thanks for posting! 👍

Attachments:

1. 

   vm-vr-1.png
   

Yeah the one I’ve been using is this $5 guy from Walmart. It’s even the right shade of red and it has a head strap, which is nice but not 100% required since my app doesn’t do head tracking or anything.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Onn-Virtual-Reality-Headset-Red/665354143

This looks great! Dumb question just to make sure I’m not missing something… I assume you need a jailbroken phone to install this app, yes?

astro187 wrote:
This looks great! Dumb question just to make sure I’m not missing something… I assume you need a jailbroken phone to install this app, yes?

Well, I’m actually releasing it in source code form (that’s the GitHub link) so anyone who can get it up and compiling on a Mac using Xcode can run it, and anyone with an Apple Developer account can get it running on their phone. You can use a free account and push a version that works for a limited time (you can just keep re-pushing it to the phone).

At some point I plan to make a page and/or video that explains the process but in any event right now I’m not distributing it in compiled app format (but the source is out there so anyone who wanted to could do so)

So no you don’t necessarily need a jailbroken phone but you can’t get it off the App Store either.

This is awesome! Thank you for sharing the source code, too.