The Video Boy (and the Dev Kit with TV output) was made for this… but yeah, they’re rare and expensive.

I built my own TV output using an FPGA, but it’s still currently a large board with a bunch of wires hanging out.

Here are a couple videos I posted of it several years ago:

Someone else also recently made one: http://furrtek.free.fr/?a=vbtvout , though it’s 2D only.

But no… there’s no “kit” to do it… it’s still pretty much a DIY kinda thing.

DogP

I finished the model of mine tonight (I had the frame modeled, just needed to add a couple missing faces). It should be the right shape, and the holes should be in the right locations (according to measurements I had taken)… but I haven’t double-checked, and I haven’t printed it… so don’t expect perfection.

If I get a bit of spare time (maybe this weekend), I’ll do a test print to see how it looks. It should be easily printable on any 3D printer (thick walls, flat bottom, etc)… though you may need to drill out the holes if your printer isn’t perfect, since I think I made them the exact size (a lot of printers tend to print holes smaller than modeled).

Anyway, I attached a jpg of what it looks like, the Sketchup file in case you want to modify it, and the STL file if you want to print it. If you try it out, definitely post how it works.

DogP

Attachments:

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Craby wrote:
Has anyone tried a kind of “clamp” fix ?

I started to create a clamp 3D model in Sketchup, which I was going to 3D print… but I didn’t have any displays that responded well to increased pressure (I’ve soldered most of my displays). It was just a piece of plastic with holes that the LED screws would go through, with a slight bulge near the top for increased pressure on the cable, and a curl at the top to act as a strain relief (to keep the cable from pulling away from the display).

I don’t know of anyone that has actually tried something like this though… lots of people (including myself) have tried various tapes/adhesives to hold it tighter, but results have been mediocre at best.

My opinion is that it may work as a temporary fix on some displays, but probably would eventually fail (since displays in advanced stages of failure don’t seem to work by simply applying pressure). Though maybe if you apply the clamp early enough, the adhesive wouldn’t weaken, because the clamp would be reinforcing it… I dunno. If you try it, be sure to post how it goes!

DogP

Cool! I really need to learn Japanese.

Did you take a look at the rest of the CSG scans? I’m just curious whether there’s any other different info that’s not in the Famitsu magazine (or other articles).

DogP

I’m not at home, so I can’t look at mine, but there should be a ballast in there, which could be bad. You’re plugging in the correct power cord, right? There should be an AC power cord going to the unit, not just the VB AC adapter. The bulb didn’t flash when you turned it on, right? Usually, if the ballast is shorted, it’ll immediately blow the bulb.

I don’t think there is any sort of switch, unless it’s completely internal (maybe used for the hanging sign or something).

I haven’t had mine open in over 10 years (I replaced the bulb in mine when I got it), so I don’t remember much about the insides. I’d try to find the main AC wire that comes into the light and verify power is good on that cord (using one of those non-contact probes would be easy). And then follow the wire from there.

DogP

I’d start by cleaning the opto. The first thing I’d try is just blowing it out with air… if that doesn’t work, try a small cloth or qtip with alcohol or something (just be careful not to damage the “flag”, which moves back and forth between the opto). You can see some pics, comments, etc. that I posted about a similar issue here: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5152&post_id=24681#forumpost24681 .

DogP

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Needless to say, most people will never be able to accomplish this feat, especially on a real Virtual Boy with no cheating allowed.

Yeah, it took FOREVER to do, though it was a fair game (I progressively got better and better). I’d say it took more time to get a 300 in NFB than to get 999999 in Mario Clash (effin’ 299 games… probably got 20 of them before finally getting a 300).

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Aha… so you are the “brave soul” whom Brian Hodges mentioned in his review. I figured it would take at least several days to make it there, even playing almost every waking hour of each day. I think it took me about 5 hours or more to make it to level 15, and then I began to realize that it takes almost an hour or so to beat each level at that point because of how the stages are setup. I can’t imagine doing the marathon to get to level 99. My marathon runs in Galactic Pinball were grueling enough on me.

Heh, yeah… that’s probably me. Though the game isn’t really that tough, once you get into it. The trick is to get large combos to skip levels, and of course use the pickaxe fairy (or whatever that thing is) to clear stuff. I actually thought the game was kinda fun (kinda pipe dream style), though poorly executed.

IIRC, sometimes I’d get levels that were just ridiculous, so I’d intentionally fail to get a new set. And I think sometimes pieces would fall into place and actually clear large portions… you could tell when this was happening, because the “curtain” would stay up longer, and you’d get an easy level. This is going from really old memory though (I probably haven’t played it even once since then).

The nice thing was being able to play it over a long period of time, and not having to worry about losing and starting over.

DogP

Yeah, I did have the Virtual Lab pics up on my site before… here they are. And now that I see them, I remember that it actually stopped at level “?0” (went “99”->”?0″->”?0″). Though after turning it off, I remember thinking that I should have played to 110, to make sure it didn’t switch to “?1” (in case it was just showing the upper two digits of 100, 101, etc… but a ‘?’ instead of a ‘1’ because it was too many characters or something). And maybe that’s not a ?… it kinda looks like it, but they’re pretty crappy pics.

DogP

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Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Once he actually tries to sit down and accomplish the goal of getting to the point where the stages repeat in the games Mario Clash, Space Invaders, Virtual Lab, and Waterworld, I think he will understand how completely impossible his challenge is, maybe not so much for Mario Clash, but definitely for the other 3. I think the challenge needs to say that if a game has no ending, then one simply needs to beat each of the preset high scores for every single mode of a game, in order to qualify as “beating the game.” Even with that, though, I don’t think either Waterworld or Virtual Lab has an in-game high score that one is supposed to beat, and making it to level 99 in Virtual Lab would likely take a person more than 100 hours of continuous play, while making it to level 99 in Waterworld is a complete impossibility.

Mario Clash does have an ending (when you get 999999), though Virtual Lab AFAICT doesn’t.

Back when I had free time, I played both of those, trying to beat them, or prove that they couldn’t be beaten. Every 100,000 points, Mario Clash says “good”, “great”, etc… and at 999,999, it goes to a cutscene where the enemies walk across the screen and it says “That’s it, you win” or something like that.

IIRC, Virtual Lab goes from 99 to “?0”. I played that game every night for ~2 weeks without turning it off, and eventually got there. I was sorta tempted to try for 255, but I wasn’t willing to sink several more weeks into it. Regarding the resetting… I think it’s real. It happened to me several times playing my original cartridge, though it never happened while playing it on my flash cart. My guess (completely unproven, though I keep meaning to take a minute to check), is that they changed the waitstates to 1, but use the standard 150ns ROM. That’s the only logical explanation I can come up with for why my flash cart (using 90ns ROMs) would work perfectly, but the original ROM wouldn’t.

I used to have some of the screenshots up on my website under game endings, but for some reason I never reformatted that section when I updated the page style. There were some other screenshots that hadn’t made it to my webpage yet, which are somewhere (probably the dead hard drive from my old computer, or maybe 3 digital cameras ago’s Smartmedia card). I’m on vacation right now, but if I remember, I’ll dig for them when I get home. I should be able to find the old webpage pics for sure (might even have them on my laptop)… and I might have made a post about it here while I was doing it (probably ~2006-ish).

DogP

Ah… yeah, I’d guess the optos aren’t working on that one (either failing, or dirty). It looks like it’s starting the mirrors fine, but not getting any feedback, so it goes too far and out of control.

I still haven’t seen a mirror control problem myself, but it sounds like they’re becoming more common (other people have been mentioning seeing one display fluctuating in size, which would be the mirror going faster and slower). Without actually seeing it, I can’t say for sure what it is… but it really sounds like the optos aren’t working correctly.

DogP

I’m not sure what you mean by “LED casing”… but if the mirrors aren’t moving properly, the displays won’t turn on.

Can you take a pic of what piece you’re talking about? If you mean the red eye pieces… you can easily pull them out and try again. I’m not sure how the mirrors would be hitting anything though, unless it somehow became horribly unmounted from the rest of the system.

DogP

Are you running on batteries, or AC adapter? It sounds like you might need to replace your batteries, or maybe have a bad power supply.

DogP

Sounds to me like the poster is trying to have a little reality show of his own. Throw a bunch of random stuff in a safe and “break into it”, LIVE ON TEH INTERWEBZ.

The problem is that the cart is only a few months old, which kills any credibility of this safe being anything other than staged. 😛 Though not much less believable than the staged lockers on storage wars (and who knows… maybe this guy has connections, and we’ll see this Faceball show up on Pawn Stars, to go along with the broken VB they bought 😉 ).

DogP

DPsx7 wrote:
I’ve repaired a dot matrix display with it. When I got my pinball machine a few lines of the display were broken and a new one costs like $120. I tried with solder but just couldn’t get it to stick to the piece inside the glass.

Heh, actually… pinball displays are the things that I’ve had good luck with as well. The first was a few Williams System 7 displays that were missing a few segments. The problem was that the metal that was deposited on the glass was corroded/burnt, and sandwiched between two layers of glass… so there was no way to solder it. So I took a piece of 30 AWG wire covered in the conductive epoxy and painted it in the grooves. The second was a DMD for my Terminator 2 that was missing a few lines. The display was perfect, except for the missing lines, and AFAIK, it’s still holding up (it’s at my parents’ house now).

But, those were an order of magnitude larger than these displays are. I remember the stuff not being particularly easy to work with (kinda globby and hard to lay down a fine line). And you’d still need to expose the copper on the cable. But yeah, if you try it, definitely let us know how it goes.

DogP

DPsx7 wrote:
In my thread I suggested a conductive epoxy as a possible solution. However while browsing some sites tonight I found this which might be easier to buy and use.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/b70c/#tabs

I don’t think that stuff, or conductive epoxy would work well for fixing VB displays. The pins are pretty tight (~0.6mm pitch IIRC), and it’d be really difficult to not short the pins. Of course, feel free to give it a try, but when you end up with a messy glob, be sure to clean it really well before it dries into a hard, shorted glob. 😉 I’ve found that the conductive epoxy is useful for making/fixing circuits on non-conductive surfaces, but never found it to be much of a solder replacement.

The reason solder works so well is because it only “sticks” to the copper, and the flux keeps it from shorting between adjacent pins. So, with the right technique, you can drag solder across the bare copper and end up with a nice soldered connection.

DogP

vb-fan wrote:
Will your module be able to output NTSC? I’m not sure how the analglyph would work — one image fully red, the other fully blue?

I’d love to try to make those Chinese glasses work; haven’t verified the “odd/even (interlaced) 3D”, but can’t imagine it would be anything else. Except maybe doing like the arcade 3D sets did, cutting the frame rate down to 15 (very bad flicker!).

The Chinese glasses have a “VGA” button; but doesn’t VGA need multiple connections, like separated red green and blue lines? A single composite line would be better…

Yeah, it currently outputs NTSC (S-Video/Composite) and VGA. I don’t know anything about your specific glasses, though there are several pretty common 3D signals, and my board could probably do most of them (not saying that it will, since they take time for me to do.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
This reminds me of something. The Video Boy made by Intelligent Systems, how does it display Virtual Boy games on a television? Does it simply display one of the two Virtual Boy screens, resulting in the shifted-by-parallax problem, or does it somehow correct for this?

It definitely doesn’t do any sort of correction. It does output at least just a single eye… I don’t remember if it does anaglyph or not.

Koohiisan wrote:
Who says it has to fit into a VB? 🙂

Me. 😉

Koohiisan wrote:
How about a prototype box that sits outside and connects into the needed places via some sort of cable? I’m sure any of us that love to tinker would gladly have an extra box connected into both our VB and TV and not give you any grief over it!

Feel free to save the internal mod for version 2 of the release once we’ve helped you get all the bugs out of it! 😀

I’ve pretty much already got that… just not in a box, or with a connector (just a board with wires connected directly to the VB). I definitely don’t want to solder individual wires to the displays for every board (it’s pretty fragile that way). And really… laying out my own PCB that does exactly what this needs to is the way to go, and if I’m gonna go to that length, I might as well just go for the gold and make it fit in the VB (size certainly isn’t the limiting factor… it’s more the specific form factor).

DogP

WoLfMaN wrote:
So is there some hope, that you continue working on your solution?

Yeah, I still put a couple hours into it every now and then… I just have a LOT of different projects going on. I really just need to get a PCB laid out for it, but figuring out the mechanicals of making it all fit nicely into a VB without hand-wiring a bunch of wires is time consuming.

DogP

vb-fan wrote:
I was really disappointed the output wasn’t “3D”. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t do that…

Yeah, I was wondering about that too. He says: “The 3D separation is too pronounced to work with anaglyph glasses, let’s forget about that idea.”, though I’m not sure about that… I had no problem using red/blue on mine, and shutter glasses work too.

Without 3D, it’s not really playable… it’s only good for showing what someone is playing, or grabbing screenshots (though VGA capture isn’t very common, so it’s not too great for that). If you try playing using only one screen, everything will be shifted by the parallax, making everything seem awkward.

The technical reason for him not being able to do it, is because he went with the XuLA, rather than the XuLA2: “Luckily the anaglyph mode was a bad idea as it wouldn’t have been possible with this board either without heavy tearing in the output since it would require 2 separate framebuffers and so twice the amount of RAM.”
The XuLA (with the Spartan 3A) only has enough block RAM for one frame buffer. While it could be possible to use the SDRAM, that would complicate things quite a bit (especially since VB draws in the opposite direction of TVs), while using block RAM makes it really easy. But the XuLA2 is double the cost, so I guess that’s the tradeoff.

The FPGA I used didn’t quite have enough block RAM for two whole buffers, but I was able to make up the rest of it with distributed RAM. When I finally get my final version built, I’ll be using a newer FPGA with plenty of block RAM.

DogP

HorvatM wrote:
I did some comparison between the two ROM images. To compare the code, I used the function that seems to load BGMaps (and does something else?), as it writes to the address 0x20000.

Nice analysis!

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
I am still very curious to know if the person(s) responsible for making the version of Sample Soft for VUE Programming on my EPROM cart can be determined based on the resulting machine code. I certainly won’t jump to the conclusion that the one responsible for making the program was also the one who flashed it to the EPROM chip and then made the EPROM cart.

We can probably determine which version it is… I don’t think there were many different ones compiled with gccVB. It was passed around quite a bit behind the scenes, so I’d say it’s very unlikely that the person who compiled it actually made the cart (unless it’s different than any of the ones that were passed around). The kind of person that would fake something like this probably isn’t the kind of person that’s smart enough to port the code over to a different compiler… or even know how to use the compiler.

DogP

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

DogP wrote:

Hmm… that looks like a smoking gun there. I think that’s almost certainly fake. As far as I can tell, the M27C4001 wasn’t available until 1998, and I believe the date code on that is the 13th week of 2000 (0013). I’ll try to find confirmation of that though (the datasheet doesn’t specify the location of the date code for this EPROM).

This seems to indicate that the M27C4001-12FI existed as early as 1992:

http://m27.isocomponents.com/PART/M27C400112FI

but yeah… if 0013 is the date code for this EPROM chip, that certainly would be the smoking gun.

Yeah, it’s certainly possible that they were available before then… I was just looking at the datasheet from ST ( http://www.st.com/web/en/resource/technical/document/datasheet/CD00000516.pdf ), which says July 1998 First Issue in the document revision history. But it’s possible that it’s just that specific document, and there was a different M27C4001 document before that. Not that those IC broker sites are reliable sources of information either though.

Here’s a copy of the first version: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs150/fa02/docs/M27C4001.pdf , and this looks to be the third: http://search.alkon.net/cgi-bin/pdf.pl?pdfname=01398.pdf .

DogP