I wish I could! I’m far too out of money right now, though. Paying off the credit card’s gonna hurt for a loooong while. I blame Jack Bros., haha.

Someone’s got the big 4 up for auction, individually. They all look like super nice boxes, too.

VBowling is *only* $400 at the moment; Lab is $250.

Should be a few to watch…

Definitely keep at it! It’s fun to see what everyone does; some of the best creative output comes from friendly competition.

This is PHENOMENAL. I don’t believe the video! I can’t wait to get home and check it out tonight or tomorrow. It just looks so, so good!

I really hope you’ll be willing to share some source code with the community. A game that looks this good can only benefit other homebrew authors!

Great job!

Yes! Thank you very much!

Mr. Halloween wrote:
There doesn’t seem to be anything negative I can see about this cart. I have to get one of these eventually!

What would you say is the best cart to buy for a donor cart?

Agreed with Lester — probably Mario Tennis or Baseball since there are lots of those around.

It could be a problem with connections on the board. You should PM minestorm — he’ll repair it for you.

I can imagine a sort of cheap replacement being made out of a stiff felt or something… It’s not a bad idea at all!

I very likely will! haha.

I still have an extra Galactic Pinball for sale if you want it. Sorry I didn’t get scans for you earlier, but home was kind of busy, haha.

I don’t need RA, though, so if you only want a trade I can’t help.

I recently ordered that set from Amazon and they work great. They were REALLY worth the $7 compared to the previous troubles I’ve had with my VBs.

In terms of the repair, you should probably check out DogP’s newest fix, which seems to be the best plan. If you’re not comfortable soldering small things, there are a few forum members who are that you should talk to.

Thanks again for your guys’ hard work and dedication. If I had a Gold Medal of Virtual Boy-ing, you’d all have been awarded many moons ago.

That release schedule sounds great. I can probably squirrel away ~$80+ over 1.5-2 month separations. Just… don’t tell my girlfriend.

Continuing the saga of the misaligned VB display, here’s what I’ve run into so far:

1. Using the Left, B, Down, A, UP test pattern, I was able to determine that my defective unit was very much out of alignment. The vertical bars were sitting atop the horizontal bar with room to spare. Yikes! No wonder my eyes hurt trying to use this thing!

2. Checking the Torx screws as DogP pointed out, they were still pretty solid. Adjusting them had little to no effect on what was going on.

3. It seems like the unit itself was, well, torqued. So, I torqued it back. Holding the insides of the unit in my hands and with the test pattern showing (which, by the way, is easiest to do from the title screen of Galactic Pinball in my opinion), I twisted the unit in my hands. The steel construction of the insides of the VB is similar enough to a computer case that I have a decent feel for the limits of what should and shouldn’t screw it up. A little bit of trial and error and I got the displays aligned quite good! The last step is to put the guts back into the housing and see if all is still well.

As a side note, I feel that I’m experiencing the slight expansion/correction of the displays on this unit, too. More testing required; maybe it needs to “warm up” for lack of a better term.

Please accept my apologies.

I certainly didn’t mean to offend anyone nor suggest anyone was somehow lesser for not having come across the Oculus Rift.

Insofar as the nuances of the term “trolling”, perhaps that’s for another thread, but the point is taken.

Insofar as the future and preservation of the Virtual Boy’s legacy is concerned, my opinion is that it would be easier/better to have the most accurate VB emulator available functioning on some sort of 3D display — be it a Rift or a 3D TV with shutter glasses. When I talk about an accurate VB Emulator, I’m talking something in line with the ideals behind MAME or bsnes. (Here’s an excellent read about bsnes and why it’s a worthwhile goal if you haven’t read it: Accuracy takes power: one man’s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator). Of course, being my opinion, the best solution would be “get out and write one!”, but I unfortunately can’t code my way out of a 2D plane, let alone even know where to begin writing a clock-accurate emulator. And maybe that’s not even really necessary… but for preservation, in my opinion, it’s the best path. Given time, all Virtual Boys will fail in some capacity or another — that’s just entropy for you. But an emulator, perhaps open source, can live on and be adapted for future display technology (holograms!!!111).

Insofar as TVs are concerned (a separate discussion?), I actually do quite like widescreen and HDTVs. I wish the resolution were greater (bring on 4K displays!), but LCDs do feel superior to CRTs in my eyes. The images are definitely more crisp. I have a 5 year old Toshiba 42″ that I sit about 8 feet away from. The display is on the low end of what the human eye generally can resolve at that distance, and as my eyes are quite good still I would prefer a larger TV… but that’s a luxury for another day.

That said, I *love* my CRTs. There are certain tasks and applications that *require* them. Any video game up to and including the Wii should be played on a CRT for the best possible image quality. I have a video game collection starting with an Odyssey 2 and featuring current systems, but I keep 2 CRT TVs in my basement for everything prior to a PS3/360. I also keep two CRT computer monitors at my work area for older DOS/Win98 games that are just SO much better at lower resolutions. Nothing beats a good scanline, either. There are just certain things that don’t look right without it. My dream display still runs about $75 on Craigslist last I looked — it’s a widescreen CRT that Sony made at one point. Some Gamecube, PS2, Wii and original Xbox games really rock the widescreen well; I just need a proper display to dedicate to my retro gaming area.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Here is a good article about eye resolution, with this nice quote:

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.

Surely you’re just trolling us yes…?

That’s a unique item if I’ve ever seen one! Very nice.

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.

I think someone made a 3D model that was able to be printed via Shapeways at one point, but the only link I can find is this one, which says “not for sale”.

They were a little pricey — about 4 Euro each — but it’s another avenue to consider.

bigmak wrote:

1. Faceball: Remastered
2. Fishbone
3. Space Squash

If so, does this mean that I can expect a deadline for the Space Squash Instruction Booklet to be more than several months from now? I’ll try to get one done for Faceball: Remastered within a month or so, and I’ll try to make it as different as possible from the one for the Prototype version, so that people have something new and exciting to look forward to.

Yea..with Gundam coming first…maybe 1.5 – 2 months in-between releases. Or, this was my thoughts.

-Eric

I’d prefer that just for the sake of my wallet! Hahaha

Wasn’t Mindstorm 3D printing some link cable ends for exactly this purpose?