I think I heard once that red causes less eyestrain than green or blue. Replacing the red LEDs with the white ones that currently exist would probably be cool, if possible. It’s probably possible for the VB software to use more than a 4-color palette, but the output would still be black and 3 shades of red. Having a larger palette does have some interesting potential uses, though, and I’ve been thinking about it. The question is if those uses are worth the big hit to memory.
But a Virtual Boy will never be able to output more than black and 3 shades of red. There is supposed to be some hardware trick you can do to make different columns of pixels have different brightnesses, but that doesn’t seem like it’d have a whole lot of utility. A Virtual Boy Color would effectively be a different system, and would need more memory and probably a slightly faster processor. I would love nothing more than to see something like this happen, but I assume everyone with the skills to make an alternate past-future tech like that is retired, pretty well-off, and would have no desire to work on our pet projects. It’d be like asking someone to make an Atari console after the 7200 but before the Jaguar.
I got mine on the 29th, I think. It’s a solid piece, doesn’t feel fragile at all. Grips the controller male end very firmly. I think it uses a micro USB B. At first I thought I’d have to go get a cable for it, but my phone uses the same thing. 😀 After plugging that in, I found it worked right off the bat for most applications. There’s a Virtual Boy-related program I have that it didn’t initially work for, but XPadder got it working without any fuss. It even works without batteries. There really are no other controllers with the same layout as a VB controller, so this is the best option.
For those of you who want to use XPadder, you can use these attached images I edited to look nice and work for it. One is full color, the other saves a few KB by using a 256-color palette (in case 30 KB matters to you, LOL).
