That’s a shame. Sadly, I don’t have the technical experience to pick up the project and run with it, nor am I any longer working for a company that has the equipment for programming — surely someone here does? Seems a crime for all the work he’s done so far to just hit the “refuse bin”.

Anyone game to pick up the ball and carry it the few remaining yards to the end-zone?

🙂

Just ordered one. Couldn’t justify ordering Blox or original FB, the flashboy versions are fine. Really grateful this prototype surfaced; hoping that “DH” will surface soon too!

My computer died three weeks ago, had all the games on it, and Flash-Boy software; glad I was able to repair it (pulled the screen’s ccf, put in 20 surface-mount white LED’s. Now I need to order a MAX618 power supply chip — screen only works with wall-supply, laptops are s’posed to be PORTABLE.)

Looking forward to future games on carts!

I posted a pic on here a while back about a repaired stand; used steel screws & lock washers (had to bend the legs into more of a complete circle), made four cuts into the metal “hub-plate” and bent resultant tabs up, to make stops for the legs.

Lately, I copied a good hub with paraffin, then molded an epoxy-putty hub shell. It looks respectably like original, except the flat side of the hub-plate now has a couple of screws & nuts, instead of the original philip’s screw heads.

But it’s actually STEEL now on the pivots and stops; ain’t gonna break no way no how…

🙂

I gave $400 for “Space Invaders”; but beat that with $800 for “Gundam”. Unlikely I’ll ever pay that much again.

Gundam sucked, regretted that purchase. Figured I’d never be able to play “Lab” or “Virtual Bowling”, until I got a flashboy.

Just ordered a “Faceball Remastered”…

🙂

Do you know the “trick” to get extra lives?

🙂

morintari wrote:
Mario Clash is a lot of fun. But be sure you play it on your Flashboy with the two appropriate patches installed. (DogP’s controller config and Parasytes Level 41 plus selector otherwise it can be discouraging.

Tennis is fine; the 3D effects are great, except when a ball comes straight at you; makes ya’ cross-eyed.

Reminds me of an old joke:

“I wondered why the ball seemed to keep getting bigger and bigger; then it hit me….”

RE “clash” — I’ve been through all levels several times; past 100 they move really, really fast.

Does everyone know the “cheat” to get an extra, extra man on Clash???

HorvatM wrote:
I think vb-fan was trying to remind us of an unwritten rule all VB fans should follow: thou shalt have no virtual reality systems before the Virtual Boy.

Heh heh heh. 🙂

I don’t think it would be a capital offense for someone to buy one; might be interesting to read here how they like it. It will never kill the interest for the Virtual Boy among us enthusiasts.

Anyhow, the Oculus Rift can’t natively run VB software, so it doesn’t qualify as a VB clone.

I think it would only have two real advantages over the VB — color, and motion-tracking. The VB usually exceeds visual resolution (or at least meets it), and the way Human eyes work we are generally only aware of a limited field of view similar to what the VB displays. The brain tends to “tune out” peripheral in most cases.

One of my complaints about the VB is that many sprites are two-dimensional — in “Wario Land” all characters are paper-thin. Our home-brew games promise they can deliver “3D sprites” — like in Mario Cart and others; I’m excited about that.

I’m really pleased (and not a little jealous!) at those writing new games for the VB; hope it continues, and hope we eventually will come up with copies of the “Holy Grails” (especially Dragonhopper, Zero Racers, and Goldeneye). I confess I never thought I’d get to actually play “Bound High” — it’s one of the best games!

I’m betting that in less than a year someone will come forward with at least Dragonhopper…

[vb-fan]

jrronimo wrote:
There’s actually another topic around here somewhere that has one of our users using a VB Emulator on an Oculus Rift, and it works great.

As for the Rift itself, every single video I ever see of someone using it talks about how incredibly amazing it is. Part of the driving force behind it was John Carmack, who is the main engine developer at id Software. He wrote the 3D engine for Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quakes 1 – 4 & Rage. He got behind the project because there was no such thing as immersive, responsive head-tracking 3D virtual reality gear; just that old stuff people barely played. By every single account, the Oculus Rift is revolutionary.

I have nothing against the OR; might even get one some day, if it gets cheap enough, and I find myself with excess cash.

The Virtual Boy provides stereoscopic 3D in shades of red and black. Its 3D is good, but trying to say it’s anywhere NEAR on par with any virtual reality setup, especially the Oculus Rift, is a bit of a stretch.

No one said that; but it’s much more of an “immersive 3D experience” than he was admitting.

Edit:// You keep saying that human eyes have poor resolution. I don’t think that’s correct at all. Sitting at my desk I have a 25.5″ monitor that’s 1920×1200 pixels sitting about 3 feet away from me, and I can clearly see aliasing on text and “the pixels”, if you will.

Think about what you just said — 3 FEET. I was white-hot furious at the “Digital Television Ripoff”, and am getting really fed up with American Congress ramming stuff down our throats (dictating what kind of TV’s we can have, toilets, light bulbs, food, socialized medicine, freon & halon & termite-control, America’s turning into a dictatorship!). I crashed a “digital television workshop” our local CBS affiliate had at a store (it was nothing but a sales-pitch for buying tv’s!!!).

They had two screens up, one HD and the other “standard”. “Isn’t it amazing the difference!” the salesman crooned. I stood up and said, “Excuse me — can ANYONE here see the difference? Anyone?” Of the thirty-or-so people there, NO ONE COULD! Salesman frowned and said, “Well, if you look around the eyes” — I said, “If I have to WORK at seeing the difference, what’s the point?”

Yes you can see the difference if you sit 3 feet from the screen; but not at normal viewing distances — and “virtual reality” recreates optically farther viewing distances. Besides, I’m a bit myopic; most people are.

The Virtual Boy itself is much closer, so its resolution can be lower to achieve what Apple calls a “retina” effect, but the Virtual Boy is no-where near enough to be close to that; few displays on the market are.

As I said, both the “MyVu” (50 inch screen) and the Chinese linked above (80 inch screen) are high enough so that pixelation doesn’t exist, and one can see individual strands of hair and other fine details. The resolution of eyes is deceptive; of the approximately 100,000,000 sensors, many work in blocks, doing “edge” and “pattern” sensing. I am an Electronic Engineer, and I’m impressed by the complexity. (Not the least the compression algorithm that encodes each retina down to about 100,000 optical nerves!)

How many pixels are needed to match the resolution of the human eye? Each pixel must appear no larger than 0.3 arc-minute. Consider a 20 x 13.3-inch print viewed at 20 inches. The Print subtends an angle of 53 x 35.3 degrees, thus requiring 53*60/.3 = 10600 x 35*60/.3 = 7000 pixels, for a total of ~74 megapixels to show detail at the limits of human visual acuity.

Again, it’s deceptive; the retina is not uniform resolution — there is a central “hi-resolution” area called the Macula, peripheral being much lower resolution. And the retina is ROUND — the wider the screen, the harder it is to see (and the more jumping left and right the eye has to do!).

Surely you’re just trolling us yes…?

As Lester Knight wisely deduced, I do have some “emotion” invested in the topic. I had a LOT of equipment that was rendered “non-functional”, and the new digital format brings nothing of value to me. There are several things that are worse — several channels no longer exist for those who bought “converters”, and watching portable TV’s is virtually non-existent. And unless your signal is perfect, artifacts and… audio cuts out… …video drops …”no signal”… can’t watch… “no signal”…

This is not better!

In OKC May 3 1999 hundreds of people stayed alive from nearly 80 tornadoes (one an F5!) by watching weathercasts on pocket TV’s. We had an ice storm in December 2007, 95% lost power for 1-3 weeks; we used pocket tv’s. Not any more! The few ATSC pocket TV’s out don’t work well, or at all moving.

The “Digital TV lobby” is comprised of Samsung, Bestbuy, Cox, DirectTV, and other profiteers. We’re getting really sick of lobbies buying congressmen so the lobby members can get rich.

Most of the hype about “resolution” and “wide-screen” is just to sell more product to those led to believe they’re getting better viewing. Thirty people in that room in 2008 had to admit “it wasn’t”.

I can sometimes see pixelation on Virtual Boy games, but generally my eyes smooth it out and it all looks fine.

• This reply was modified 11 years, 5 months ago by vb-fan.

DogP wrote:
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

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…

segagamer99 wrote:
Ever heard of Oculus Rift?…

I looked it up — very interesting. Has anyone sprung for the $300 for a “demo version”? I wonder if there’ll be significant difference between a demo and the retail? Will it play the same games?

RE the designer’s comment: “I looked all over the world for a 3D Virtual Reality system, and THERE WAS NOTHING.

Uh, huh. Wait — I think there was one! It was called, uhm, ohhhhh — what was the name?

Oh yeah, VIRTUAL BOY!!! Idiot.

So his displays have over 100 degrees vision; Human eyes are very small and poor resolution. The Virtual Boy is really immersive. His system (besides being color) really only has the “motion sensor”. Yeah, right — imagine trying to spin around physically while wearing the still-bulky goggles — YOU’LL spin and the goggles WON’T.

I hope people here will get one of the Chinese video glasses and comment on how they like it; an 80″ screen with really good resolution — I can see individual strands of hair, moles pimples (yikes!) etcetera. But it’d be great to port a VB to those glasses. It might even be fun to sacrifice a console to make a small portable device!!!

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

Lexan (polycarbonate) is inherently soft; you can actually bend it like aluminum. (Cold bend it — you can’t heat polycarbonate unless you dry it in an oven overnight before heat-bending it like acrylic, polycarbonate likes to bubble from the water it absorbs from the air.) A high-speed impact can fracture it, though it’s the stuff used for “bullet-proof-glass”. Bullets will just embed themselves into it, without going through if the plastic is thick enough. And because of its softness it’s the one that gets coated with scratch-resistant film (Mar-Guard for one). Plastic polish will take scratches out of plastic sunglasses and restore them to “new” condition — unless they’re polycarbonate and coated; then the more you polish the foggier they get.

Someone put a hammer through the driver’s-side window of my 1974 Capri once; I cut a piece of light-gray Tuffak (or was it Lexan?) Mar-Guarded 1/4″ polycarbonate; it could be “marked”, but it would throw the hammer right back at the jackass who tried that again. Sadly it was perfectly flat, the original window was curved vertically, made it hard to roll down and harder to roll up…

Yes you could use colored Lexan; but colored acrylic is harder, and glass harder still. No matter what you put in it won’t look as good as the original; I would try the plastic polish first.

🙂

jrronimo wrote:

HorvatM wrote:
But I’m not sure what medium it should use for software. Cartridges are obviously expensive. Am I the only one who doesn’t have a memory card unit? Or is everyone on laptops?

SD card. Or MicroSD. Or just a USB plug with a gig of onboard flash.

Sounds like a super cool project, but seems like a looooot of effort. I’m not qualified to help at all except to buy things. 🙂

Should be able to put most of the games on a single SD card. Yeah I’m not too experienced either with microprocessor design.

Did you see my post on the other thread about the “3D video glasses”? They come with built-in stereo earbuds…

Lester Knight wrote:
Can you recommend for me a brand name polish that you know would work? I tried calling around a bit and got a few different answers, as it seems no one was sure what would work exactly.

I don’t remember the brand. There are several grades of grit, mine was medium-to-coarse. It was a white bottle looked rather like a bottle of sun-block, with red printing. Anyone in the plastics business should be able to help.

I’m still thinking about trying to find someone to make me custom glass inserts. Can someone recommend a way to get red glass or perhaps another product that I should be researching?

Glass is pretty easy to cut, as long as you cut straight lines. Look up a stained glass place in your phone book & ask for clear non-textured red. But — I had problems in cold weather with the lenses fogging over (until they warmed up), bet it’s worse with glass — greater thermal inertia.

There are Dremmel saw blades available; sadly the official Dremmel #400 and #406 (coarse & fine) blades are no longer made, law suits from stupid people who cut their fingers off (not joking). But you can get blades-and-mandrels, a steady hand and you could just cut away the clear red plastic in seconds and then glue in your glass. Hold the Dremmel tool firmly or it will “kick back” and cut your fingers off (the reason for the law suits). Sounds more dangerous than it is, if you just hold it firmly.

Those who lacerated their fingers are the ones who probably had to struggle to make two-digit-IQ’s…

Dreammary wrote:
I still want custom green lenses. It would be really cool!

Well, unfortunately the LED’s are still red. There might be a tiny bit of green spectrum being emitted, but I doubt it would really be visible; green filters would just block most all of the display.

Lester Knight wrote:
i have issues where i see blurred images on the very edges of my lenses. as i have never owned another vb, i’m assuming its from the way the previous owner cleaned them. when i had my vb apart for repairs i found that the inside of the lenses are absolutely perfect, while the outside is slightly scuffed. it got me thinking about what could be used to replace them. i was considering trying to find someone to make me glass inserts, and during that thought i started to think about the shape. the shape gives the vb an iconic look but it has nothing to do with the game play. so perhaps some flat glass inserts would be the way to go.

Grab your local yellow pages and look up “Plastic Supplies” — call around, find one that offers “sheets/rods/tubes”, and one should sell you a bottle of plastic polish. It’s a cream-colored thin paste (rather like fine mud).

Use some fresh toilet paper (it’s soft and grit-free), put a little dab of polish on the folded-up-paper, and buff in circles until the polish is all dried and gone, then keep buffing until the plastic is all smooth and shiny again. I think you’ll be really happy with the results.

The only time plastic polish hasn’t worked for me is when the plastic is coated with an ANTI-SCRATCH film. Polycarbonate sheets often have “Mar-Guard”. Polish doesn’t make Mar-Guard clear again, it just fogs it badly…

in3D wrote:
OK, fine with me, I just thought that if you guys can make custom carts and link cables it would be possible. But, I didn’t expect it to be possible.

I don’t think it’s an outrageous idea at all.

Look at this ebay item:
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand=ViewItem&item=271186584695

I have one of these; look closely at the remote, there’s ALREADY a 2D/3D selection! I suspect it exploits the interlaced protocol (ie, even fields right eye, odd fields left eye). That would be better than shutting down the frame rate to 15 (bad flicker).

With glasses like these, one could easily have a portable emulator with a standard NTSC output. The glasses are satisfyingly high resolution (Human eyes are NOT high-res anyway!), and they are full color. Games could be played in anything the emulator puts out. Red, black-n-white, green, even full color if someone feels like programming it. They’re standard format (4×3), but since I despise widescreen (Human eyes are not wide screen, but full!), it’s never been a problem.

The glasses double as a portable big-screen TV! I watched “Jumper” an a commercial flight with a portable DVD player, while everyone else watched the “in-flight” movie “Martian Kid” (Jumper was much better.)

I also have a couple pair of “MyVu” glasses — but they don’t have a 3D selection, and would probably require some hacking to separate out the two video signals.

The link above is for a Chinese 80″ virtual screen video-glasses; the MyVu are 50″ virtual screen.

Before the “epoxy-putty” stage, I would carefully cut off ONE SIDE of each clothes-pin jaw — the side attached to the block; if the clothes-pins extend a half inch above the block, cut each “half-inch” off flush with the block. Then put in the spacer (also flush with the block), and mix & apply the epoxy sausages.

It would be nearly impossible to get one epoxy cylinder to attach only to the “plywood/jaws” side if the extended jaws are still there. Once the epoxy-putty catalyzes (hardens), you’ll have a strong and solid spring-loaded clip. The VB case will shape the epoxy into exactly what it needs. It will be stronger with six “finger-slots” on each side than with the manufactured “C” clip.

The whole assembly can be lightly sprayed with black paint, but that after attaching legs…

ongikong wrote:
thanks for the answer.
unfortunately i don’t have the clip.
is there a chance to build my own stand without the clip?

or does anyone maybe have a clip for sale?

How good are you at building things from scratch?

If I was starting from scratch, I would start with a wooden block about an inch and a half cube (maybe inch and 3/8 on one measurement), and a couple of wooden clothes pins. Some five-minute epoxy putty, and some wood glue. Attach the clothes pins at the edge of the block (1.5 x 1.5 inch side, so that the if the clothes pins are VERTICAL the top surface is 1.5 inches by 1.375). Place the clothes pins so that they fit within the rails of the “mounting block” on the bottom of your VB. The jaws of the clothes pins should stick up a half inch or so.

Glue an inch and a half wide piece of 1/16 inch plywood on the handles of the clothes pins, so that you can push on the square and both clothes-pins will open together. Allow to dry completely. Cut the plywood so that its length matches the length of the clothes pins.

Put a 1/16 inch separator in the jaws of the clothes pins (a couple popsicle sticks would be fine). Brush Vaseline petroleum jelly lightly over both attaching-surfaces of the VB bottom block-mount (so that your epoxy putty won’t stick), then mix up two large gobs of putty. Roll each into a 3/4 inch thick by 1-5/8 inch long cylinders. Lay your VB upside down, and press each putty cylinder onto each side of the “VB mounting block” (the mounting flanges are made with six little “fingers”) — making sure that the putty does not contact any surface not coated with vaseline.

Press your clothes-pin block into the two epoxy-putty cylinders, one cylinder mashing into the wooden block only, the other cylinder forming around only the clothes-pins & thin plywood plate.

Shape the putty flat onto the side of the block with your fingers (wet fingers work best, keep a small bowl of water handy!), then shape the other putty onto the plywood plate; smooth it out so it will look good when set.

By this time you should have used up most all five minutes of the putty setting time, it will start getting hard. Leave it for 15-30 minutes. When you open the clothes-pins, your new “mounting clip” should pop right off; rotate your assembly away from the VB and move towards the block-side, your assembly should now be clear. SET IT ASIDE for a good couple hours. When you remove the “popsicle separator”, the springs of the clothes-pins will apply constant pressure to the VB-mounting-block.

A helpful hint might be to cut a piece of plastic (like clear plastic from any blister-packaged item), to make a barrier for the VB-mounting-block on the side towards the game-cart-slot; I see there are some square holes down into the console, your clear-plastic card will keep the epoxy putty from extruding down into the machine.

Wait the full 24 hours for the epoxy to be fully cured. You should be able to clean the vaseline off of your new clip with soap and water and a brush; clean the console with dry paper towels, and then a paper towel wetted slightly with iso-propyl alcohol; do not get anything wet into the inside of the console.

You now have a solid mounting block for a stand; further suggestions on “legs” if you wish, if you’re interested and have come this far.

🙂

MisterBull wrote:
I’m not new to this site as I’ve visited it a number of times off and on over the years. 3D is a huge hobby of mine, and the Virtual Boy is no exception to my fascination of the subject.

I’m a 3D fan as well. Have several collections — Viewmaster, Tru-Vue, Keystone. When I can combine multiple addictions (like getting 3D pics of the Graff and Hindenburg Zeppelins) I’m even more ecstatic! 😀

I have a home-made camera, started with a Revere front-plate (which I stepped down to 2.5 inches). It shoots five-hole half-frames (pairs), Made a viewer that uses amici-roof prisms, shoot color slide film. It’s getting very hard to find slide film & processing! I hate digital!!!

Have you ever shot “Hyperstereos”?

Recently I’ve acquired a Sceptre 32 inch 3D tv, and not only do I use it as my main living room tv monitor, but I also use it as a computer monitor and I’ve used it to watch a number of 3D youtube videos as well as play most of my games in 3D on it.

I’d love to hear if you get it to work. Imagine changing colors on something like “Wario Land”, and playing it in 3D! Though I tried a 3DTV once, started giving me a headache as soon as I put on the glasses. Not sure why.

I’d like to see a movement to bring back 4×3 format; Human eyes are NOT widescreen (nor high-resolution), the world is not widescreen, best theater in town is Imax — not widescreen! “Widescreen” was a gimmick (started by Fox in 1953 with “The Robe”) because movie makers were afraid TV would bankrupt theaters. There are a LOT of people like me who despise widescreen (and digital)! But there’s no spokesman or venue for us. I paid a small fortune for a device that FIXES dvd movies/tv, I don’t have to watch ANYTHING “widescreen” any more!

Thanks in advance for any help 🙂 if y’all are nice enough I just might become a regular here!

You’re very welcome here; everyone here is (are?) 3D “enthusiasts”!

🙂

mxpxrobbie wrote:
Greetings!

I’ve been into old games since they were new games, haha…

Got my first VB at launch… begged my mom for it! She sold it after the reports about seizures and things… but I replaced it years later with a lucky bid on eBay!

I have Mario’s Tennis and Wario Land in my collection… if any of you have extra common games you’re looking to get rid of, let me know! I don’t care about completeness or quality – I just want to play the games!

Hi! Welcome!!! 🙂

You could build a collection one game at a time (here, or online auctions); but at this point they’re getting pricey. I got “Jack Brothers” direct from Atlas, a couple of used games; they now go on ebay for $50-100. Space Squash is another excellent game but was “Japan Only”; got mine on ebay for $100.

If you just want to play the games, I suggest getting a FlashBoy, and playing all the games hosted here; especially Faceball and the homebrews. There are also sites that host all the released games, including the rare ones. Thought I’d never get to play “Virtual Lab” or “Virtual Bowling” (online auctions go for well over $1000), but have played them on my FlashBoy.

I also recommend getting the three games from Uncle Tusk — the unreleased prototype “Bound High” is one of the best games made; very convincing box and manuals, they go for $75-$85.

Have fun!