Alright, so I have these… grey 3D glasses. They’re not the new, electronic kind with a built-in sensor that comes with those newfangled 3D TVs… It’s an honest-to-goodness cardboard little piece with some dark and light grey sheeting in it. I have no idea where I got it, but I’m sure I’ve used them at least once to watch a 3D movie, years ago.

So I was wondering, is there any (VB) emulator that can use these glasses? Emulators and gimmicky games most usually use the red/green glasses only…

Well, I thought you were talking about polarized glasses, until you said “dark and light plastic”. If there’s one dark lens and one clear, those are called “Pulfrich” glasses and they won’t work for VB (except maybe on the Wario Land title screen).

If they are polarized, you’ll need two projectors and another pair of matching polarized lenses (there are two kinds of polarized glasses: linear and circular). There’s also a way to use a single projector or even a standard CRT monitor, but even if you could find the special active LC polarity filter, it would probably cost more than the dual-projector setup. I can understand why you didn’t find them (or even look) since you didn’t know what they’re called, but there are a few posts about a dual-projector, polarized 3-D setup (a recent one is here).

If you just want to play VB in 3-D on your current PC/monitor, you basically have three options:

1. Anaglyph glasses (you can find them for free + P&H if you live in the U.S., or get them from a magazine or TV promotional giveaway). I would suggest magenta+green if you can find some (they’re including them in some 3-D DVDs, like “Journey to the Center of the Earth”) or the standard red+blue or red+cyan ones they use for printed matter. I thought those new Yellow+blue ones would be better, but they kinda make my eyes feel weird if the picture isn’t a bright, full-color one, which is what they’re designed for and which VB games definitely ain’t.

2. the active LC shutter glasses you mentioned (they can be cheaper than the ones for those new TVs, if you can find them, or about the same price if you get the new nvidia ones). They might not work with your LCD monitor, though. And even if you have a CRT, the refresh rate might give you problems, but not on anything approaching “recent”.

3. Auto-stereo. That’s where you just manually merge the images of a stereo pair that are side-by-side on-screen. I wouldn’t recommend it for extended viewing, though.

Whoa, thanks for all that info. That was very informative.

I figured I’d need red (magenta)/green glasses if I wanted to pick the cheapest way to do this… I’ll get one of those, then! All my LCD monitors go up to 75 Hz at most, which obviously isn’t enough for the shutter glasses, and I can’t cross my eyes, so that just leaves me with option #1.

Another little interesting fact… I just noticed the glasses I have now list some TV stations. Guess it’s from an age when they attempted 3D TV and it didn’t quite work out well yet!

I live in the Netherlands, by the way.

DaVince wrote:
Whoa, thanks for all that info. That was very informative.

You’re welcome. That is why the forum’s here, right? 😉

Another little interesting fact… I just noticed the glasses I have now list some TV stations. Guess it’s from an age when they attempted 3D TV and it didn’t quite work out well yet!

I live in the Netherlands, by the way.

Now I’m 99.85047% convinced that these are Pulfrich glasses. Look at the paragraph under “Examples” in this section of the Wikipedia article on the Pulfrich effect.

You can’t use them for VB, but you could play Orb-3D or Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D… in 3-D 😀

Right, I got the red/green 3D glasses in the mail!

I’ll be honest here… They work, but having them on too long is really bad for my eyes. 😛

Yeah, it does kind of make your eyes feel weird after a while, but you can get used to it. It might be worth trying to tune the colors using the emulator’s controls (Reality Boy and Mednafen both have pretty good anaglyph adjustment settings). There’s only so much you can do, since your monitor doesn’t have a setting for the wavelengths it produces (how cool would that be?) but if you can get a good brightness and gamma balance between your eyes, it can get much easier to play for longer periods.

If you want to experiment with other anaglyph combos (like Green/Magenta), try to get your hands on some Roscolux (or equivalent) lighting filters. I requested a set of samples online and didn’t even have to pay for shipping.

I’ve found that a stack of #389 “Chroma Green” and #89 “Moss Green” for the left eye and #46 “Magenta” for the right eye, combined with (100%, 75%, 50%) RGB settings for the display is pretty good (on my monitor) if a little dark. I’m still experimenting, though, so other filters/settings might work better (especially given the wide range of monitors out there).

Have you tried your Pulfrich glasses at all?

Yeah, they didn’t do a thing, just make things a bit darker. But you already told me it takes some special projectors for those to properly work, right? Edit: wait, no, I got confused because then you went back to talk about polarized glasses. Huh.

I’ll try experimenting with the settings, though I’m not sure where to do that in Mednafen. I’ll also try the pulfrich ones now that I’m not confused about “they won’t just work”, lol.

DaVince wrote:
I’ll try experimenting with the settings, though I’m not sure where to do that in Mednafen.

I posted some configuration info here.

I’ll also try the pulfrich ones now that I’m not confused about “they won’t just work”, lol.

Just to be clear: I wasn’t asking if you had used them in Mednafen. They really “just won’t work” for VB emulation, as I’ve said. I just wondered if you had used them for anything, e.g. Jim Power, Orb-3D, or some other 3-D source (just do a search for Pulfrich on e.g. YouTube or something).

Thanks for the link.

Ahh, nope. I haven’t needed them yet, all (cheap) 3D I ever find is 3D that requires red/green glasses.

(Can’t edit my post?)

red_electriccyan worked best for me! There’s some minor vagueness visible now occasionally, but the 3D effect itself works much better than the pure blue used before.