[ectoglow]

I don’t even know how many members are active Forum participants, but I’ve always been curious how many VB display units survived. There is a shop near me that has one (and they have both the floor AND desktop feet) and I’ve always wanted it, but its “not for sale” which means I’d have to offer them $850+.

But how many true VB fans (the members of this forum have one, and WHICH one?

• This topic was modified 11 years ago by ectoglow.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

DogP wrote:
They’re not quite identical… you can see that they modified the mold for the US version, to change the text “PLAYLINK” (on the JP systems) to “EXT.” (on the US systems).

DogP

I actually checked my several Virtual Boy systems out after writing that, and only one of my Japanese units says “PLAYLINK” in that area. The other two Japanese units (one of which is the in-store demo system) say “EXT.” like the North American ones. Surprisingly, my North American demo system with a serial number under 1000 also says “EXT.” so I have no idea why some of the later systems had “PLAYLINK” and then they got rid of it.

wait, So they started as “EXT”, then went to “PLAYLINK” and then went back to EXT? does that mean there could be some US systems out there that say “PLAYLINK”?

ectoglow wrote:

wait, So they started as “EXT”, then went to “PLAYLINK” and then went back to EXT? does that mean there could be some US systems out there that say “PLAYLINK”?

“Yes” to the first question and “possibly” to the second one.

It would be interesting to find out who all owns a Virtual Boy system that has the “PLAYLINK” label next to the link cable slot and what the serial numbers are on the systems that have the “PLAYLINK” label, but I imagine that if we tried to ask people from the Virtual Boy community about this, almost nobody would check their Virtual Boy system and respond.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:

DogP wrote:
They’re not quite identical… you can see that they modified the mold for the US version, to change the text “PLAYLINK” (on the JP systems) to “EXT.” (on the US systems).

DogP

I actually checked my several Virtual Boy systems out after writing that, and only one of my Japanese units says “PLAYLINK” in that area. The other two Japanese units (one of which is the in-store demo system) say “EXT.” like the North American ones. Surprisingly, my North American demo system with a serial number under 1000 also says “EXT.” so I have no idea why some of the later systems had “PLAYLINK” and then they got rid of it.

Well, I double-checked all of my systems again, and it turns out that the Japanese Demo system does in fact say “PLAYLINK” and not “EXT.” as I mentioned before in this thread. My Japanese Retail system numbered at 84,459 says “PLAYLINK”, and my other Japanese Retail system numbered at 178,013 says “EXT.” All of my other systems are North American systems, and they all say “EXT.”

I’m not sure of what to make of this data. It could be that a limited number of Japanese systems early on were made to say “PLAYLINK”, and then they decided to make all the rest say “EXT.” like the North American systems. Or, perhaps, my one Japanese unit that says “EXT.” could be a fluke.

I guess I will try to start another thread to see if others might contribute to this topic and give us a better idea of what may have went on here.