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Virtual Boy on TV with Intelligent Systems Video Boy

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Why is everyone suddenly getting so excited about the Virtual Boy? (Other than that the games are now showing up on the Switch)

I picked one up cheap with some birthday money. It was fun for awhile, but I never developed the emotional attachment to it that I got to other tech like my NES, SNES, or Game Boy.

The Virtual Boy flopped for a very good reason: Not only were the games ugly because they were not in color, but it was very uncomfortable to play, and there was no "spectator" aspect to the games. The games also weren't very original, nor memorable.

(I do remember trying to strap mine to my head with my belt. That lasted about 3 minutes before I gave up and got bored of the games.) Honestly, I would have enjoyed the games more on a TV with red-green glasses, like shown in the article. (When I was a kid I loved everything and anything 3d.)

Did anyone fall in love with theirs? Is anyone really nostalgic for these games? Or is this something like CED, where the lore, because it's rare, makes it interesting even though it flopped for a very good reason?

For me it is like an appendix - or a route we could have taken.

As a child of the 80s and 90s, all things VR held a special place in my heart, even if they were terrible.

I never had one, never even played the real hardware, but owning one would excite part of my psyche for sure!

I have nostalgia for Wario Land, because I played it for 5 minutes in a Toys'R'Us, and it's a good game which I never got to play in full until decades later. But I never owned one, so everything else you said rings true to me.

Never used a Virtual Boy, but I'm somehow nostalgic just for the development tool -- grey metal boxes with vents, LEDs, and rocker switches transport me into an optimistic future of the past.

Several reasons:

1. Nintendo is releasing Virtual Boy - Nintendo Classics in February 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVvaCe4esCQ

2. Nintendo are also releasing a Virtual Boy shell compatible with the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 which will allow you to view the games in 3D, although I'm guessing it won't look as sharp or bright as the original. https://www.nintendo.com/en-ca/store/products/virtual-boy-fo...

I had one at the time, got it for my birthday as a teen. It's terrible. It caused nausea, the "headset" was uncomfortable and if the stand broke or was lost you were screwed. The controller was clunky and hurt my knuckles. The screen wasn't an issue for me though. In fact I really loved the deep red, but then I used to spend hours in a darkroom printing pictures so the red felt like home. That said, some of the games were amazing especially because of the depth. Worth it? Not a chance. But it worked. It did what it said on the tin and the part that sucked wasn't the image, it was everything else related to interacting with that image.

I'd love to see someone take the lo-fi VR concept further with modern tech. It's proof that VR doesn't require color to be functional. There were ideas there we haven't fully explored.

The big question it opens up for me is:

- What happens if we ditch color and focus on clarity?

  - lower memory and compute requirements.

  - Dot pitch on screens can be smaller since no sub-pixels.

  - Optics can be tuned to a specific wavelength instead of having to fight with chromatic aberration due to the compressed optical pathway.

So much of VR today is focused on veracity, reproducing vivid worldly images. But what if we look elsewhere, the artificial and abstract. I want to see the kinds of sci-fi UIs and VR experiences brought to life pulled from the minimalism and simplicity of a time when cpu budgets per frame counted in understandable integers of cycles and color palettes you could count on your fingers.

I really liked Red Alarm but it was a really tiring game to play. But overall I agree with you about the Virtual Boy. It's not a system that was received fondly for very good reasons.

Yeah, definitely this. It was just not a compelling platform.

When Virtual Boy first came out, Blockbuster Video allowed you to rent the system with some games. We played it a few times and got sick of it before the brief rental period even ended.

I was an active member of the VB community back in college. I did really fall in love with mine. I never experienced any nausea or headaches, and when properly adjusted I didn’t think it was terribly uncomfortable. The “screen” technology was actually very cool, two arrays of very small LEDs are swept across your field of vision by two rapidly fluttering mirrors, so in essence it’s an LED display. The picture is very bright and crisp. If you listen closely to a running Virtual Boy you can hear what sounds like fan noise, that’s the mirrors moving.

The first party games were (as usual for Nintendo fare) fun and quirky, but other than than Wario Land served more as tech demos. The one actually “3D” game for the console (Red Alarm) ran at a pitifully low frame rate. And also as today, there were no games for the platform that “didn’t work” in 2D, but they were for the most part enhanced by the stereo experience.

It was, as with most “virtual reality” experiments in the 90s, crippled by lack of processing power and cost constraints. It didn’t live up to its lead designer’s ambition and was rushed to market with little expectation of success.

I am excited for the games coming back, I really enjoyed Teleroboxer and Wario Land.

Wario Land VB is really, really good. It's a bit slight but seriously one of my favourite Nintendo platformers.

There's always been a very very small and intense VB fandom, but outside of them I don't think there's a ton of real nostalgia for it. The thing sold less than a million units; most people at the time either never played it or maybe tried it at a K-Mart demo kiosk for a few minutes.

To whatever extent that people are getting excited about the Virtual Boy now, I'd pin it on its very unique retro-future aesthetic. In the same way that people who weren't even alive for the 80s got really into synthwave, there's something about visions of the future from a time when the future was actually exciting that people find aesthetically compelling.

I don't get the nostalgia for Wario Land; I got stuck very early in the game though.

I'm a huge fan of it - I was never able to get one while they were officially available, I only managed to rent one from Blockbuster a few times. I eventually picked one up on eBay in the early 2000's for $60, before they became collectors items.

The appeal is definitely somewhere between intrinsic and from the rarity - there's not just been no official way to play these games for the last 30 years, they've barely even gotten a passing mention, and even emualators have been few and far between. It was sad that Teleroboxer, Wario Land, and Mario Clash were basically lost to time.

The games definitely weren't up to to NES/SNES quality, but they were at least up to par with the average portable game at the time, which I think is what they were meant to be compared against. I see the Virtual Boy games as Game Boy games that suffered from the mechanics of the platform the platform they were released on. In that light, I think they compare pretty favorably to similar lesser-known games of the time; most WonderSwan games I've played, hell even a lot of Game Gear and Game Boy games, had much more serious gameplay issues, even though they were on hardware that was arguably less... challenging.

> The games definitely weren't up to to NES/SNES quality, but they were at least up to par with the average portable game at the time, which I think is what they were meant to be compared against.

Which I think is the problem: The system wasn't really portable. When 3D was the rage, it was really a 2D system. I used the system at home when I was in the mood for "big" games.

Seems like it would have made more sense to make a 3D headset for the N64 as a high-end accessory.

I loved it. Not SNES levels, but I had a lot of fun.

Caveat: I got it near the end of its life when blockbuster was selling off the ones they were renting. So for like 50 or 100 bucks we got the console and 4-5 games.

Was it perfect? No. But it was a Nintendo system and had some quite entertaining games. And some terrible ones of course.

It was a very interesting experiment. I’m sorry it was Gunpei Yokoi’s last project at Nintendo and he felt he had to resign from the failure.

I don’t know what “modern” people who weren’t around at the time think of it. And back then a lot of people really wanted it to be what it wasn’t. They really just wanted to judge it for not being the GameBoy Color.

It was a neat try at something totally different.

I hope having it available on the Switch virtual console means more people will play the games and find out just how good a few of them were.

I saw a teardown of the Virtual Boy recently. Wild tech:

The screens are each a bar of micro LEDs. Each eye has a mirror that oscillates every frame to smear the LED bar across your field of view.

If you've ever seen those bike wheel displays, where the light-up spokes make a pattern when the wheel spins - it's that, but as a VR headset.

Unfortunately you can't get the LEDs any more - they were originally from LED printers and those all now use infrared LED arrays. I'm actually working on something similar, and am even using a few VB scanner mechs in development (driven by a raspberry Pi).

For further background, they were developed from an earlier system called the "Private Eye" - still a few references to them on the web e.g. [0]. I've built a circuit to drive one from a Pi Zero - amazing gadgets for 90's tech.

[0] https://www.loper-os.org/?p=752

I tried a virtual boy the first time some months ago. I was super impressed with the quality of the graphics. I've used a Quest 3 and a Vision Pro and obviously these are very different beasts, but its just impressive that in terms of sharpness, this 90s device felt as good.

Here's the Slo Mo Guys teardown. Very impressive tech.

https://youtu.be/jW7M8H99x7Y?si=9xjafT2tCresYC9l

What was fun for me was the fact that when this thing came out everybody I knew thought it worked by shooting red lasers at your eyes. There was very little internet to use to look it up either so I was shocked when this video showed how it really worked.

Wow, that was awesome. They had to crank up the FPS of the high-speed camera into the millions of FPS to see that brightness control over every individual LED was done by flashing it multiple times per scanline. Very cool.

I think that was the video!

Was a random YT recommendation, so I didn't know the source off the top of my head.

A question for the mech engineers: why the back and forth wobble? My first thought when I saw that mechanism was "that sounds harder than it should be. Wouldn't a spinning 6 sided mirror work better?"

I'd guess a 6-sided mirror would be too big. The mirror needs a certain width for its reflection range to span across the viewport, and so a hexagon of that side length would be too big, particularly considering both eyes (the hexagons would have to overlap across the center line.)

Another problem would be that 60º between sides is too little angular separation. When the current frame approaches the right edge of your vision field, the next side of the mirror is already in position to be reflecting the LEDs into the left side of the vision field.

A 2-sided rotating mirror might work, but that's more complicated to manufacture and mount, such that I'd guess they found the back-and-forth simpler. Or else they found that rotating mirrors would impose a torque on the whole device and that wasn't workable. You could rotate the two mirrors in opposite directions, but that would mean the viewports are scanning in opposite directions (one right-to-left), and I don't know what that would do for the perceptions of 3d and persistence-of-vision.

A spinning mirror is certainly an option, there are many projects around using them as projectors e.g. [0]. It would need precision faces and be a larger volume than the flapping mirror approach. Because the mirrors are spring-mounted and designed to resonate at ~50Hz they actually take very little power to drive - there's an optosensor on the back used to stabilise the oscillation amplitude, which is why the VB and Private Eye display widths vary during startup.

Can't see the video from this location, so may be just restarting stuff in it.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2018/04/20/laser-projector-ditches-galv...

It's funny to me how a hacked Nintendo 3DS ended up being the best way to play Virtual Boy titles, many decades later, thanks to the Red Viper emulator.

I think there is also a Virtual Boy emulator for VR headsets.

IIRC aliaspider modified the Beetle VB core to do the same thing on the 3DS years before any standalone emulator... it worked but the framerate wasn't fullspeed and afaik they weren't interested in trying to optimize the core further.

It's a bit of a shame that stereoscopic 3D consoles, like the Virtual Boy (or this "Video Boy" here), are no longer a thing outside of VR. And even VR is looking bleak with Meta recently closing their game studios due to huge losses.

I guess people don't want to wear things on their faces. And autostereoscopic screens, which don't require glasses, don't work so well for stationary TVs. The Nintendo 3DS was the only successful system with (auto)stereoscopic 3D so far. Unfortunately its first hardware iteration wasn't quite there yet, and the generally low resolution was an issue.

But I think it could easily have been an optional feature of the Nintendo Switch 2, if they had built in a movable lenticular lens array and a head tracking camera, just like in the "New Nintendo 3DS" (the original 3DS used a simpler but worse system).

To get to the original 1080p resolution, they would also have needed a screen with double the horizontal resolution (3840x1080 rather than 1920x1080), since autostereoscopic screens effectively halve the usable resolution. Games that don't support 3D would just show the same image for both eyes.

It could have been an optional feature even for games that support it, with a choice between a 30FPS 3D mode and a 60 FPS 2D mode, which comes down to the same amount of rendered pixels. An ML system similar to Nvidia's DLSS might even generate the 3D effect (left and right frame) from a single rendered frame by using the depth buffer. For a smaller performance cost.

But I guess the additional hardware cost doesn't justify a cool feature like that.

The thing is, the 3DS was a success mostly despite the 3D, rather than because of it. No one was excited about it or all that impressed - remember that initially the 3DS was such a flop at launch that Nintendo needed to pull a Hail Mary, cutting the price and launching the Ambassador Program. Or consider how successful the 2DS was.

The 3D on it is a very neat trick, but it's mostly a distraction and there's something "uncanny valley"-like and unpleasant about it. I almost always play with the 3D slider off; it's easy for me to see why Nintendo gave up on it.

The second revision with the better “head tracking” screen (I don’t remember how it worked) was much better than the launch model.

But mostly, you’d just turn 3D off. It was a gimmick, cut the resolution in half, and doubled processing requirements.

It just worked way better as a 2D screen. As you said, 2DS was good.

They should have just made the DS2, not gone for 3D. But such was the time.

> The second revision with the better “head tracking” screen (I don’t remember how it worked) was much better than the launch model.

It worked with a sheet of lenticular lenses on top of the screen, which separated the odd and even pixel columns for the left and the right eye. The sheet could also be moved a tiny amount by a motor, to change the "center" of the separated light, depending on whether the head was tracked more to the left or more to the right.

> But mostly, you’d just turn 3D off. It was a gimmick, cut the resolution in half, and doubled processing requirements.

Well, it did cut the resolution in half, but this meant the GPU cost stayed the same. They could instead double the horizontal resolution of the screen to keep the same effective resolution, in which case the GPU performance cost would indeed double. But as I said, in future systems this performance cost could likely be reduced with a form of frame generation by a machine learning model.

I would add, I've always felt the addition of the 3D screen also held it back because the touch screen became relegated to always being secondary (so that the main display of the game could be 3D). Many games that were sequels to touch-focused DS games did this, they had you touching the bottom screen to interact with something on the top screen and made those games feel a lot worse to me.

IIRC they required all games to work without 3D (because some people couldn't see it? or it gave them motion sickness?), so it could never be a core mechanic and thus doomed to be a "neat trick".

Color is also a neat trick. Or 60 FPS. Or HDR. Or...

> The 3D on it is a very neat trick, but it's mostly a distraction and there's something "uncanny valley"-like and unpleasant about it.

I recently picked up a used New 3DS XL to give this a try for the first time, and I actually really like it. With the eye tracking, it's pretty good imo. Did you also try the later iterations of the hardware?

Yeah, I've got a New 3DS and never actually tried the 1st gen model.

It might be a very individual thing, since everyone's vision can be quite different; if you enjoy it more power to you.

It could also be the novelty to me, to be honest. We'll see if I'm still using it in a few months. :)

> remember that initially the 3DS was such a flop at launch that Nintendo needed to pull a Hail Mary

I agree people weren't very excited about it, but the lack of interest affected the PS Vita (direct competitor without stereoscopic 3D) even worse.

I'm pretty sure the fact that 3DS/PSVita were much less successful than DS/PSP was caused by the rise of smartphones and app stores, which led to a flood of highly successful cheap mobile games that didn't require buying a separate handheld console.

> But I think it could easily have been an optional feature of the Nintendo Switch 2,

It is an optional featue of the switch/switch 2. There's a virtual boy headset you can buy! (Ships in february)

But that's a thing people have to put on their faces, which, as we have seen, most people really don't like. It also costs extra money, unlike a "3D mode", which would just be enabled in the game menu.

I'm pretty sure adding headset-less 3d display hardware to the switch would have also cost extra money, but everybody would have had to pay for it.

Yes but game developers can't rely on optional add-ons because most people won't have them. So there is little reason for the developers to support them. That's why such optional add-ons were rarely successful in the past.

Coincidentally two "lost" unreleased Virtual Boy games are being released by Nintendo imminently:

https://bsky.app/profile/wario64.bsky.social/post/3mdfvwdmdt...

> プロジェ君

I think that's more likely to mean projector-kun than project-kun, though it's hard to explain why I think so and it would be just a speculation.

I had the same thought, and I think it's the -kun suffix that makes the "puroje-" prefix more likely to be a verb than a noun, i.e. "12th incarnation of The One Who Projects" or "Mr. Projector #12".

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