This is super interesting, great find! I have never heard about this display before. Looks refreshingly different from the Design Phase displays that Nintendo eventually used to display the Virtual Boy in stores. Looks more simple and streamlined, and seems very robust. In general I prefer the design of the Design Phase display but it’s a cool twist how the bottom part of this one resembles an original VB stand.

Note how the infinity mirror on top and the info sheets on the sides are the same as on the Design Phase displays. Seemingly Nintendo provided those and asked for them to be included in the designs as mandatory elements.

I am doing a little break right now from working on PVB, but I’ll add this to the database when I am back.

I attached the full res version of the image, also here’s the link to the tweet. I will try and ask ImagiCorps for more info. https://twitter.com/ImagiCorps/status/1017530652256694272

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Video Boy – only $15,000… https://www.ebay.com/itm/133555458767

From the archives of a video game magazine editor. Obtained legally from a liquidation asset.

Nintendo Virtual Boy TV Boy Intelligent Systems Prototype Demo System

This was used by Nintendo Power magazine to take screenshots of Virtual Boy games in the 90s. This was acquired from Intelligent Systems from an old asset auction awhile back. There are very few of these known to exist. This will allow you to get the highest quality of images and play Virtual Boy games on your TV (via PAL tv format) I have only seen this for sale once in 20 years. Very rare and impossible to find.

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Merged into previous thread about the same spammer.

After deleting a dozen of “aanna something” spam profiles, I have now implemented some filter as counter measure. Hopefully this will keep them away.

The PVBEmu project has been rebooted some weeks ago and can now be found here: http://git.virtual-boy.com/PVB/pvbemu

You can get the builds from last year’s version here: https://www.virtual-boy.com/tools/pvb-emulator/

Indeed, must have been that spambot that reappered a few times under different names in the past days. Please do not react to those messages!

Welcome, Jim! What a pleasant surprise. 🙂

Thanks for the confirmation that Bound High, Dragon Hopper and Zero Racers went through and were approved by lotcheck. At least that means that ROM images should be safely stored somewhere. Maybe we will see them one day.

This is quite the awesome find, really interesting information!

So… only 100 copies of SD Gunam were made? That is extremely low, I would have expected a few times that much. Imagine, it’s only 5 factory boxes of 20 pcs each… Well, according to his last reply in this thread, 100 was the minimum order Nintendo would do; looks like they went with the bare minimum to at least recoup some of the development costs.

BTW, he mentions reproductions of the game being sold overseas a few times, probably referring to the translated release. 🙂

For archival, following are all of @Yoshidamian’s tweets in this thread:

えっとですね、バーチャルボーイの『SDガンダム』って当時販売店から受注が全然なくて、仕方なくバンダイが最低ロット数の100本だけ作って市場投入したのみなんですよ。海外でパケまで作られたキレイな偽物コピー品売られているらしいですが……世界で100本のみと覚えておいてください。マジ話です。
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折角なので追記しておきます。デザエモンや麻雀極シリーズでお馴染みのアテナの社長からも当時VBのボウリングゲームの話伺ったんですが、こちらも受注がなくって数百本しか作らなかったと。会社に在庫すらないと言ってたのを社長から20程前1本だけ貰ってしまいましたが、具体的な生産本数は不明です。
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あー、やっぱり小売り店側も卸問屋へ受注かけてなかった証拠ですねぇ。海外では120ドルほどでパケまで再現された完全偽物のVB『SDガンダム』が闇ルートで出回っているそうなので大量にどこがが販売していたら偽物と思ったほうがいいっすねーｗ
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レトロゲームにあんまり興味ないんでわからんけど、20年前の時点で5万円ぐらいしていたからなぁ～。
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さすがにゲームソフト1本に10万円は出せないなぁ～。10万円あれば生活費の足しに、って家庭持ちだとどうしても現実的にそっちへ頭が行ってしまうｗ
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1996年には偽物作られてないから本物ですよｗ

某国へ毎月仕事で日本と行き来している友人からVB『SDガンダム』が30個ぐらい新品状態の箱付きでゲームショップのレジ奥にあったそうで「日本でも全然見かけないのにおかしい」と連絡があり、100個しか作られてない話を。結局売ってくれなかったとのこと
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今アジアでは日本のプレ値ついているゲームソフトをパケ、取説、ハガキなど付けて完コピして販売もしとるようなので（ファミコンとメガドライブのみだけど）油断できないですよね。

100本中のうちの1本、大事にしてください♪
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バンダイの知り合いに聞いたのを裏付け取るために任天堂の営業マンから聞いても、やっぱりミニマムロットの100本っていうのが事実だったと判明。任天堂のソフト始まって以来の受注の少なさって言ってた！他の任天堂製VBソフトは本体と抱き合わせで卸していたので数が本体以上に余りまくっているとｗ

An interesting opinion on this from Twitter user @feidian, https://twitter.com/feidian/status/1307697182087102464:

These aren’t “unreleased”. This all the sprite data for the levels, but it stores the palette data in separate TIM files for some strange reason. Even the baseball level’s sprites, which is exclusive to the PSX version, has the red palette. They jumped the gun with this.

Yet again, nice detective work! I followed the same route and found some additional info in his Discord profile (Megutan#1623).

– Link to a Youtube channel, empty unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIKRt7u_S2CL_kM0rrLe4BA
– Photo as profile picture

Below is his introductory post from July 11, 2020. His only post in the Discord. Screenshot also attached.

・名前：綾瀬めぐみ(ID:MegumiAyase)
・自己紹介:VR環境がなく棒立ちです‪・ﾟ・(*ﾉДﾉ)・ﾟ・‬頭撫でたいー:sweat_drops:
フレンド居なくてランク低いまま、まだアバターupできません!
中の人は50過ぎおっさんですがお願いします:;( ∩´﹏`∩ );:
twitter:Derekmegumishin

Since “Megumi Ayase” is a female name, it is likely a nickname, named after an anime character. What about the Twitter handle, Derekmegumishin? One way to interpret it would be that his real name is Derek, as in “Derek loves Megumi”, since “Shin” can mean “Heart” in Japanese!?

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she was reported to be in hospital for a coronary artery surgery

Oh, shit, hope he/she is OK. 🙁

BTW, Megumi posted a photo on Twitter once which shows a woman, but it has been put through FaceApp, which has the ability to do almost everything with portrait photos, including changing the gender, so it doesn’t tell us much.

Fantastic find, thank you for the great detective work! Virtual Lab was the only released game left that we had no staff credits information on. Some very interesting insights there as well. A bit shocked that the jiggly boobs mascot is supposed to be 13 year old girl…

Where did you find the name, Megumi Ayase? What’s that in Japanese? It’s probably just a nick name referring to the anime character, is it?

If we wanted to shoot some more questions at her, would you be up to ask them?

First thing that comes to my mind: Was he/she, besides the box/manual artist hired by J-Wing, the only developer at Nacoty? Was Nacoty basically just a one person contract develoment studio?

Thanks, Cosmoliner, it was a lot of fun to build the site and I am a bit proud of it. 😉

BTW, I only just noticed that the news forum was closed to new replies, although it should only be closed to new topics by regular users. That would explain the lack of replies so far… Fixed that.

Indeed, Top Gear Rally was ace, I have fond memories of it! Most of all, my friends and I enjoyed the car panting feature.

Boss Game Studios is defunct and presumably it is unknown who is now the owner of their intellectual property? I doubt that, whoever owns it know, would have a problem with the prototype being released. Nintendo certainly should not have any business with this. I am in contact with Seth and will ask him.

Nice, I love mockups! I hope you can get this made. Avoid a few mistakes the original made and this has the potential to be a pretty fun game.

Oh, I see now. I didn’t even notice before. 🙂

Yamagushi, it’s this, right? https://www.virtual-boy.com/forums/t/official-vb-release-list/ 🙂

There is a document out there with lotcheck lists for the systems. This contains also Virtualboy.
This list mentioned 5 unreleased games. Since it is lotcheck this games in question should be final.

There were unreleased VB games listed? I must’ve missed that one. The list I have seen, vue_data.xls, did only have released games on it. Could you share the document?

Awesome! Updated the list.

Split out your reply to a separate topic to stay on discuss these issues separately.

I noticed that there were two replies of yours in the “pending” state. After some digging, the issue seems to be that these were considered possible spam due to including two links. That setting was a bit tucked away, so I am glad you brought up the topic and forced me to find it. Set it to 100+ links now instead of 2+, I hope this solves the issue.

Now, hearing about old posts missing is unsettling, however I have not seen this to be the case anywhere, yet. Could you give an example?

Regarding the user ranks and badges, I agree. I want to bring those back eventually, but I’d like to have a better system to determine a user’s rank than just the number of posts. This feature is not very high up on the TODO list currently, though.