I’ve been thinking recently about what games from other systems the Virtual Boy can handle; it has been proven that it can emulate a Gameboy, and I think it might be possible to emulate NES too (I could be quite wrong, however).

I do doubt highly that it could emulate a SNES, but again, it has been proven to be able to run at least one SNES game, in Street Fighter/Hyper Fighting. Now granted this was a port, which not only required a bigger cartridge than every official Virtual Boy game, but I’m sure also took lot of technological know-how to pull off; this and the fact that porting a nearly endless amount of classic games is just not possible, or in any way helping the community move forward with our own stuff. As such, I was curious if it would be possible to have a cartridge with the SNES hardware built in, along with the software to adapt them to, and run them on Virtual Boy – just as the Super Gameboy did for the SNES, or the Gameboy player did for the Gamecube.

Now you may argue that if you wanted to play any of these games you could do so on their original consoles or emulation on a PC, and the only thing I can say to that is I know that other people could enjoy this, especially with the release of the Link cable, and that the Virtual Boy has something that no other console does (even if it means sacrificing every colour bar red).

I was also curious if it could run GBA games in the same proposed way, but unlike with SNES games, I’m not sure it could. Hopefully, I haven’t made too much of a fool of myself on my first post (though I have been stalking for a LONG time), considering I have pretty much 0 knowledge of any sort in terms of game design, nor the effective power of the Virtual Boy, etc.

… I do plan to gain this knowledge sometime in the future…

Please share your thoughts! 🙂

Red Menace.

even if you can build in a SNES on a chip, the games would not be in 3D and the colors could be a real problem.
Also Hyper Fighting is no port of the SNES version.
It takes the GFX from the PC Engine version if I remember correctly.
Also the engine is a complete own thing and not anything from Street Fighter 2.

Ah, my bad. My point still stands, however, in that the Virtual Boy is powerful enough to run SNES games (… I think), but yeah… colour could be a prominent problem for a lot of games… but it might work for some???

As for the lack of 3d – I was hoping that someone else would have ideas for making it so that there wasn’t a lack of 3d, like some sort of software built into the chip for generic 3d on games. Again, I don’t actually know for sure that it would all work out; but if it did, I think it would be pretty cool :P.

Red Menace.

Virtual Boy has 64KB of RAM and SNES has 128KB of RAM. Even without the color and sound limitations, that poses a major issue. Stuff would have to be done inside the cartridge.

A fair point for sure.

VB graphics would use up much, much less memory. However yeah, I would say an emulator would be pretty much impossible. Ground-up ports would probably be possible and run well, though.

When you say Hyper Fighting is not a port – I don’t understand.

I imagine the code of the game was not reconstructed from scratch.
There must have been heavy configuration needed, for the 3d effect, maybe down-scaling of the graphics. I don’t know the definition of a “port”.

I get that it’s all a big secret, but does anyone have an idea of the time it took for one person (as skilled as they may be), and money paid to create Hyper Fighting?

Would be cool if that same creator took a shot at what I personally consider a better SNES game, like Super Metroid.