I assume the red links mean those pages haven’t been created yet, but were put there as a placeholder to encourage someone to write those pages.

Speaking of the wiki though… it seems like after browsing around on the wiki a little bit I take down the whole server for a short period 😛 . It comes up with just a white screen, and then eventually comes back, but anywhere I try to browse on vr32 (not just the wiki) just comes back with a white screen. While it’s down on my PC it’s down from other PCs (at least at my house). Any idea what’s up with that? I’m using Firefox.

DogP

Heh yeah… I guess I probably could 😉 . I’ll try to remember to email it to you when I get home tonight. I doubt there’s much difference except the title screen though 😛 .

DogP

Actually, that’s probably correct. I don’t know that I ever sent KR155E the newest version where I changed the title to 3-D BattleSnake.

DogP

Heh, yeah… TV output is definitely MUCH higher on the priority list than my LaserVB 😛 . It’s just fun to think of projects that I’d do if I had infinite time on my hands. I think the laser one could be done w/ 224 lasers though… you get 5ms for one eye, then 5ms of nothing, then 5ms for the other eye, then 5ms of nothing. That should be plenty of time.

I do think it’d be pretty tough to do the laser that scans both vertically and horizontally though (the shift from all the way down to all the way up would be tough). The easiest solution to that would be 32 lasers that scan vertically opposite and meet in the middle (the top basically “hands off” the display to the bottom half)… then when it gets to the bottom, the upper one is already at the top, and when the top half gets to the middle, the bottom is at the middle ready to go to the bottom.

DogP

Never tried this method, but it may work: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/562638 .

DogP

You also gotta remember that it’s not just an LED bar… it’s an LED bar with simple circuitry (clocked parallel loading shift register or mux at least), so unless you’re planning on soldering the LEDs directly to where the other ones are (HA!), then you’d need to also have the circuitry to take the data from the VB and output it to the raw LEDs.

I’ve thought about trying something weird by making a large LED display, but I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought and coming up with a way to scan like the original mirrors do would be pretty tough. The controller would be easy and building the display would just be time consuming, but you either gotta make a huge oscillating mirror (yeah right 😛 ) or big oscillating LED bar (like those waving clock things: http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/projects/rtlinux/rtutorial-2.0/doc/ex09_ledclock.htm ), but once again, if it’s too big then it becomes unrealistic. I could make it small and still 3D if I did some surface mount RGB LEDs ( http://www.ledtronics.com/product_news/tn_article_071305.htm ), but at 2.15 each, a 224 LED bar wouldn’t be very cost effective 😛 .

The most interesting way IMO would be the 224 laser pointer display though 😉 . Get 4 lots of these: http://cgi.ebay.com/Lot-of-60-Red-Laser-Pointer-Set-with-12-Head_W0QQitemZ170167828456QQihZ007QQcategoryZ45098QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem . I’ve never actually verified the angles, but I think it’d be the same as the mirrors if I put 224 of them on a stick and just turned the stick (or I could actually do 16 laser pointers and do 14 angles vertically to get 224 pixels). Of course you get no 3D that way (unless you use shutter glasses), but a massive Virtual Boy display on a wall would be sweet 🙂 .

DogP

It’s for loading anything… US, Jap, Homebrew… it’s not a mod chip… the system is already unencrypted and region free, it’s just so you can load ROMs to a cart and play on the real hardware.

DogP

Looks nice… LOL! I love that “Eat instruction and precaution booklets before operating”, totally classic. And shame on you guys for questioning it… that’s intentional (play BLOX) and very humorous 🙂 .

DogP

No idea… those seem to be really hit and miss. I remember a few years ago one sold on ebay for ~$120, but in general prices on the rare stuff was higher then. I’ve seen them in auctions with other stuff go for a lot less than that, but people probably didn’t see those auctions since they’re listed like “4 Virtual Boy Games” (no description of what’s special) 😛 .

DogP

Exactly… and I was the same way… computers were a hobby for me, then I started getting calls from everyone in town asking me to fix their computer… I got sick of that (I don’t really like people, especially dumb ones 😉 ), but still did IT as my job (that was fine since it had set times and days), but I knew I really wanted to do engineering.

So now I’m there, and engineering is my full time job, which relates closely with my hobbies (video games), but I try to keep the work at work and the hobbies fun.

DogP

Heh, I don’t understand me… could you explain me please? 😉 But yeah… it’s not so much the value of time (I’d be making less than children in sweat shops), but the quality of the time… I spend hundreds of hours on weird projects because I think it’s a lot of fun to see how far I can push the hardware, or see how much I can accomplish with my skills (along with learning new stuff and getting experience along the way).

When it becomes manufacturing instead of engineering… that’s when it’s no longer fun… then it’s more of a job (and the time that I could be spending on my next project is valuable to me). I do like to help people out, and if someone would get a lot of enjoyment out of this, then I’d like to get them one, but I’d prefer to post the plans on my site and let them do the work themselves if they’re able 😉 . It’s not like I’m gonna get rich off building these things… I have a full time job as my regular income… this is a hobby, and I want to keep it that way 🙂 .

DogP

Heh, I’m an engineer, not a marketing/consumer guy… so who knows whether I’ll actually get around to making this a product for people to buy, and I REALLY have no idea on price. The prototype is on a $150 FPGA evaluation board, and the rest is a couple bucks in parts.

I definitely won’t be making these to sell if it has to be hand-wired like mine is, but if I can just put the FPGA on a small board that attaches directly to the display output, and then can have a pass-through for the original VB display that I can install fairly quickly and painlessly, then I’d be glad to make them.

Of course I wouldn’t be looking to make a killing on them, but it’d have to be worth my time, and the FPGA chip that I’m using is $20-$30 each depending on which package I go with, and then there’s a few small parts like the oscillator, flash to hold the code, voltage regulators, various connectors, resistors, capacitors, etc… along with whatever other small things I’m not thinking of.

And yeah… I’m definitely going to try to make red/blue and maybe shutter glasses compatible… although shutter glasses support will probably wait for VGA (VGA should be easier to do than TV anyway).

DogP

Just a quick update… I’ve picked the project back up after not working on it for a couple months. I pretty much decided that the Propeller wasn’t going to be fast enough to take the data in and basically transpose the data in memory so it could be read by the TV driver… and the memory size was pretty limiting… so I decided to jump over to my FPGA board.

The Prop was nice since it had a TV driver already built, but I’m getting pretty close to getting the TV driver working well on the FPGA, so that shouldn’t be a big problem. The FPGA has more memory available on the chip, and the addressing is much more flexible, so transposing the data isn’t a problem (the memory is written in columns, but needs to be output to the TV as rows). Once I get the TV output working, then I’ll work on wiring it up to the real VB, and write the driver to write the display data into the frame buffer used by the TV driver.

Anyway, here’s a current screen shot… and since it’s not April Fools Day, there’s no VB hooked up to it 😛 . Hopefully I’ll have some time to work on it at work… then it’ll get done faster 😉 .

DogP

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Because even they can’t make a good emulator for it 😉 … heh, j/k… but it probably has something to do with not getting a good 3D effect on the TV, not having enough VB games to make it worth while, trying to bury their failures, or probably a combination of a lot of things… along with the fact that they don’t have any Gameboy stuff on there, and that would be a better candidate for this (they even made a GB Player for GC), and was a much more successful system with a huge library of games.

DogP

I don’t have a lot of time to do much coding, but I’d be glad to help out if I can. And that’s great that Jorgeche is gonna have sound in his engine… now all we need is sound in the emulator (I was actually working on this a few weeks ago, but haven’t gotten a chance to get it all working and stuff).

DogP

It’s been a few years since I’ve sold one, but both the Red Alarm and Wario Land ones seem to be about equally rare, and usually sold for ~$50-$80.

DogP

I personally think that’s a little low, but not by too much. For super-rare games like that people really want it complete because there’s little chance that they’ll find just the box/manual anywhere else. It’s much more of a collectable item than just for playing… and with such a small game library that the VB has, who collects cart only?

To give you an idea, a cart only Space Invaders went for ~$115 recently… complete it usually goes for $250-$350. Complete SD Gundam is worth ~$600-$900, so I’d figure the cart only goes for $300-$400 (and JF could be right since the prices have been down lately).

DogP

I’m not looking to sell that display, although I think I’ve got an opened one that I’d sell. I can probably scan those instructions if you want… the full color one in the back of the stack is the standard Japanese system manual, correct? I assume you don’t need that scanned?

I’m not sure why I haven’t posted my whole collection… probably because it’s all over the place and I’ve never had it all in one room at once 😉 . Taking pics also takes effort, and I’m kinda lazy too 🙂 .

DogP

Hmm… I can’t believe I never posted pics of this before… I got it for Christmas at least 3 or 4 years ago. It has the mosaic tap box (and of course VB system box). Feel free to use these images if you want.

DogP

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I think I’ve got a few… not sure what shipping would be. You gotta watch out though… the Japanese adapter and tap have a different connector than the US ones.

I have a brand new in box Japanese store display… I wonder which tap box it has.

DogP