Hey guys, I’m new to the forum but I’ve been a proud Virtual Boy owner since Christmas 1995. Have all of the North American games except Jack Bros., Vertical Force, and Waterworld, and I defend this system to everyone I can. Only recently though has my Virtual Boy been having problems, and I wanted to pick everyone’s brain to see if I’m having the same problem as others have had.

My Virtual Boy is in good exterior shape, but now, the right lens (that my left eye looks into) shows absolutely nothing. If I close my right eye, it’s just black. Through the left, the display’s fine often, not blurry, but I sometimes have a vertical line problem that distorts the display, not the common horizontal one I’ve seen fixes for. Last time I tried it (with Galactic Pinball), the vertical lines seemed to inch up the screen like weeds when action started happening.

The startup screen only shows two of the corner squares, the top right and bottom left squares, suggesting to me that the right lens generates the missing squares. When I ran the Left-B-Down-A-Up code for the alignment screen, it only showed the vertical lines, no horizontal line of any kind. Again, I believe the horizontal line is generated with the right lens, but I’m not a techie to 100% prove that.

Does anyone know what the specific problem is in my case? Could it be a loose wire, dust buildup, or basically a variant of the horizontal line problem that would require the oven or soldering techniques? Thanks for any advance help!

Its always something wonderful to hear of someone who got a Virtual Boy during 1995 or 1996… and kept it! 😎

Anyways, it sounds like you have the common ribbon cable problem to me (so this will require either the oven fix or the permanent solder fix to get it working again)

It is the common ribbon cable problem. “The VB Glitchy Display Problem” Planet VB’s forum it the best place to start. Oven method will most like work best unless your realy good at soldering.