I recently have seen several videos of people hooking up the virtual boy to TV and VGA outputs. For awhile now I have wanted to take on the concept of turning the virtual boy into a PC display so I can play games like Doom or quake on it. After reading several older forums it seems like everyone was trying to accomplish this with a cart and/or a link cable. I propose going directly to the source using a video card with an S-video out and soldering that said video cable directly to the LED’s ribbon cable point of input. The signal would have to use a splitter to transmit to the right/left and the video card would have to be equipped with a control panel to simulate monochrome and the VB’s native resolution. The only thing stopping me from trying this is I have no idea what are the negative and positive points on the ribbon cable for the LED nor do I know what are the points that take in the video signal. This said virtual boy would of course have to have a game cartridge in it and the sound turned down, but I am just trying to use a secondary virtual boy as a VR display.

Any information anyone can provide on what the contact points on the ribbon cable are or do will be greatly appreciated.

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I’m not fully understanding what you are trying to do. You want to output Doom or Quake from your PC to be displayed on the VB? How are you going to accomplish that when the VB doesn’t use LCD displays?

The video card has an S-video out which is then converted to an RCA. The Video card itself can be told to be set to the 384 x 224 resolution and in monochrome. This is why I asked what pins are responsible for the video on the LED ribbon. I want to connect the 2 wires in the RCA cable and attempt a connection or VGA pin out to the LED depending on the setup.

I of course would have to disable the LED Ribbon pins responsible for video from the virtual boy itself so that it could be interfaced with the desired PC. The virtual boy would just be used to house the display and power source.

GeekNFreak schrieb:
PC. The virtual boy would just be used to house the display and power source.

What a cool idea 🙂

Usually people go the other way around – bringing VB pictures on a TV in 3D. But having PC games in 3D isn´t a bad idea either.

Especially when you create a mod in which you can switch between TV input and VB internal!

As stated before. Unfortunately I am stuck unless I know what the contact points layout is on the ribbon cable.

GeekNFreak schrieb:
As stated before. Unfortunately I am stuck unless I know what the contact points layout is on the ribbon cable.

I am not sure if that is correct, but I think DogP (he is a member here) made an experiment some time a ago. He might know more:
http://www.projectvb.com/tvvga.html

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this since none of the pins on the ribbon cable take any kind of standard video signal (vga/composite/s-video). It’s all proprietary stuff. I don’t know the details, but you would have to build your own hardware interface inbetween, which requires some serious electrical engineering skills…

You could always use the “brute force” method, hook a video camera up in front of one of the screens. Don’t know how the scan rate of the VB will interfere with the camera chip, but it’s worth experimenting, spy cams are cheap; nothing will explode by trying!

DanB schrieb:
It’s all proprietary stuff. I don’t know the details, but you would have to build your own hardware interface inbetween, which requires some serious electrical engineering skills…

Are you talking about an FPGA? I know of a succesful project for the Atari LYNX…they made it possible to play Atari Games via Lynx on the TV. Of course with some modification – in this case with a custom ribbon cable and an FPGA board afaik.