Yes! The last time I dug out my Virtual Boy was to compete with @matt in a round of T&E Soft Virtual Golf back in June, and I had zero issues with the output after a few hours. This persisted into the following week’s session as well.
It’s almost been three years since I bought my Virtual Boy in a Book-Off super bazaar in Japan, I’m really glad it’s continued to hold up.
My seasonal Virtual Boy afternoon happened on a lazy boxing day yesterday, and yup, the image artifacting is definitely worse when the temperature is cold. But keeping the system on for a good 15 minutes or so cleared it up, at least, and I was able to torture myself on Mario Clash again. One of the hardest Nintendo games to ever go into production, I swear…
While warmth may be a temporary fix for ailing Virtual Boy display issues, it seems there’s a board that can be soldered on to the unit with a brand new display cable to boot.
Anyone brave enough to order one and try soldering it themselves?
Great website!
I never tried it myself, but I have a soldered Virtual Boy unit and it has never given me a problem again. I highly recommend going that route.
Note: Costanza had a Virtual Boy
And SNES
Love this
Love this thread. Haven’t had access to a VB in almost 20 years. Guess I’ll be installing the VirtualBoy Go emulator on the Quest 2 and getting cozy for the day.
This is amazing. Not sure how I missed it.
For those with a pc bound headset there is also Vbjin-OVR. replicates the VB look/experience pretty much perfectly.
Very cool!
And welcome
I ran across HyperFlash32 a while back for VB. The eink display for cartridge art makes it look super delightful. Could easily see myself spending more time making art for the carts than playing games.
Anyone here with real hardware have hands on time with one of these?
I have my hands on the predecessor flash drive for Virtual Boy - Flashboy+ I think it’s called. It’s very barebones in comparison to this. I think the same person created both if I’m not mistaken.
Definitely would not hesitate to grab it though (other than the high price). Compatibility was 100% with the old model, including user-made games. It also played Bound High flawlessly which was 99% of the reason why I got it in the first place (I think it’s the best game on the hardware and it didn’t even officially ever come out).
This one, in comparison, addresses all of my complaints with the old one. You could only load one game at a time and needed to completely reflash it with your computer when replacing the game loaded with another one.
Virtual Boy on Apple Vision Pro
Something I just ran across, bit off topic but makes a good companion to a virtual tap
Dragon Hopper and Zero Racers are releasing for the Nintendo Switch Online Virtual Boy peripheral next week!
Really stoked for these. D-Hopper is from Intelligent Systems, who rarely misses, and I’m curious as to who developed Zero Racers.
As @androgyne points out in the F-Zero thread, the original director of F-Zero, Kazunobu Shimizu, wasn’t involved with F-Zero X but was involved with Maximum Velocity on GBA.
Shimizu might have directed or been heavily involved with Zero Racers, which would be another look at an alternate timeline for the series, before F-Zero X established itself.
Has anyone gotten the cardboard version of the VB for Switch and tried it out? I’m not sure I can stomach the price for the “real” one.
I bought both at launch and ended up lending the cardboard one to a friend.
It’s…okay I guess. You have to hold the Switch/2 up to your face which is a pain, and it’s missing the red lens.
The red lens is quite important as it creates perfect blacks by blocking out certain wavelengths (can’t remember the details), but it’s very clever.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all! I bet you it was primarily developed by Pax Softnica as well, since he worked with them around that time and Takaya Imamura seems to have little connection to this one, which suggests it was done outside Nintendo.
I’m a big VB fan and I think the big plastic one is a great way to play the games - way better than non-3D emulation options. I am stoked to try these unreleased games!!!
I have paid more for dumber retro gaming things over the years, so I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked and how good it looked!! Fun to introduce my wife to it - Virtual Boy is something she’d never heard of!
I have the big plastic one and haven’t had a chance to try it.
I still have my og vb people working so would love to do a comparison someday. It’s really cool that Nintendo is finally giving VB some love. It took nearly 30 years.
Can’t vouch for the plastic replica enough either. The fact it even exists is still somewhat of a fever dream for me.
This is one of those projects which speaks volumes to Nintendo’s ability to continue addressing every portion of its audience. PlayStation has dropped the ball in that regard, when you look at the poor transition of PlayStation Classics on PSP/3/Vita (Vita had PocketStation support!) to whatever we’ve received since PS4 launched.
And I doubt it was done with ROI in mind. If it succeeds, they might be more daring at faithfully replicating the experience of older hardware in future, beyond the software.
A Wii NSO wouldn’t be right without the sensor bar and Wiimote and nunchuk, after all…
