I would enter but I’m too busy designing the VBSD.

Srimok wrote:
While I personally don’t really see the big deal with adding 3DS to the title, I have listed items like this in the past and they have gotten taken down. I sold a DLP projector and put DLP LCD in the title. Not trying to deceive anyone at all just wanted to attract buyers that may not be familiar with the technology.

That’s because it was against the ebay auction rules.

Lester Knight wrote:
When I turn on the VB the “Saftey Message” seems to change size and shape for a few seconds, after that it looks fine and doesn’t move, is that the mirrors getting up to speed?

I actually have been following your progress on the Flash Kit. I’m really interested in one, even though I have a FlashBoy+ on the way. I love Flash Kits since the GBA days and as a reviewer for GBATemp.net I’ve been able to build a small collection of various kits.

I can’t solder, I actually never have. I’m afraid to screw up my $150 investment. Based on what I have read about you on this forum and your site I would be honored if you had the time to fix my VB. I’m thinking to just get both sides repaired so that I can avoid this problem in the future. Perhaps in the coming months if you have the free time?

Cheers.

Yes, the moving safety message is because the mirrors are calibrating. There is a little speed controller and measurement system that gets the mirrors oscillating at the right speed and some games don’t wait long enough for it to stabilize before they display the warning screen. It’s normal and has nothing to do with the glitchy display problem.

Boy I don’t know, I’m sure I could find the time to do it one night but I would be afraid of messing it up after you paid a good amount of money for it. I’ve only repaired two so far and one of them nearly went wrong, although I managed to fix it. I suppose if nobody else volunteers I could fix it for you.

Yeah unfortunately now is the time when everyone is getting a glitchy display and they aren’t the most fun thing to fix. You definitely have a loose ribbon cable but pretty much every VB that is sold on ebay now has that problem at some point. I would fix it for you but I’m working on the flash cart right now so I don’t really have the time. There are guides on how to do it but personally I didn’t find it very easy and I consider myself a good solderer.

Yes I guess I was thinking about the wrong piece, the visor isn’t the part that causes the blurry edges, it’s the black plastic of the square eye holes on the front of the unit. They should have widened those holes IMO, the blurry edges drive me nuts as well. I was planning on removing the eye pieces, widening the holes and then making new “eye pieces” with red plastic but I haven’t done it.

I don’t think anyone would yell at you for bumping an old post. “Old” is kind of our deal on this forum, haha.

Don’t worry about your eyes, everyone has the same problem with the blurry edges. As I posted earlier in the thread, I did some experimenting and found out that the eye holes in the black visor piece are not big enough, and that’s what causes the blurry edges. I was thinking about expanding them with a dremel but I never got around to it. If you take the visor off you should have a better experience, but obviously you will lose the light-blocking feature of the visor.

The red lenses on the eyes do not seem to affect the blurriness – the picture looked the same to me when I took them out.

As for the depth problems and “warping”, there are many possible ways for the display to fail, and one of them is displaying the same image in both eyes, so you can’t see the 3D depth. I’m not sure if that’s what’s happening to you but it’s possible. The “warping” is probably due to the fact that you are pushing the IPD to its extreme and the lens that projects the red image is curved. You should NOT have to push the IPD to its extreme left or right. Shoot for trying to get all 4 VB logos in the corners in focus as much as possible, and then removing the visor will help with the blurry edges.

Also keep in mind this is one of the reasons why the VB failed – you are not the first person to have issues with the display. I still love mine though, despite its faults.

I just noticed that jumpman’s auction for a brand new VB has the tag “3DS” in the title. Jumpman, that is really poor ebay form. It doesn’t add any value to the auction either, it just shows people you’re trying to desperately pad the price by getting more hits. You can even get in trouble if eBay finds out about it. Poor taste.

*edit* Just noticed you also put 3DS in the title of many of your game auctions. Wow.

I’m really interested to see what the flash boy ends up selling for.

I don’t know, I think it was probably the right move putting the more rare items up for bid rather than buy it now. I personally think rare high-demand items sell for more via auction than buy it now. If you put a flat price on it and someone buys, you will always wonder if someone would have bought it for more.

jumpman wrote:
Yeah, that Flashboy is actually mine. I’m selling off my whole VB collection, except for a few items that I will keep for my personal use. Anyone who is interested, can see my whole collection here: http://shop.ebay.com/thegamesnotoveryet/m.html
and bid if you like. It’s not the biggest or most complete collection, but I think it is very nice, and worth a look.

Impressive collection! How come you are selling everything?

I’m sorry but posting screens of what the game “might have looked like” is pretty misleading. At least put it at the top because I was reading the whole post thinking that the screens were from the game.

Listen to this crap:

“and I haven’t gotten sick to my stomach from playing the 3DS”

Um yeah, THAT’S BECAUSE 3D CAN’T/DOESN’T MAKE YOU SICK TO YOUR STOMACH. For that guy to even write that, he is saying that people out there actually believe 3D can make you sick to your stomach, and that he’s just one of the “lucky people” who didn’t. What is wrong with people, seriously. This guy clearly went into his purchase hating 3D technology and there’s no way the 3DS would have been able to convince him otherwise.

e5frog wrote:
BTW, I bought four of these to build a connector myself:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280541800459

Feels good not having to use or modify the one in my spare VB “head”.

That’s a cool solution with the hard drive connector. I do have some part numbers that “theoretically” should work but I haven’t tested yet, since the board I’m working on doesn’t need them. But that’s something that will be pretty easy to figure out in the future. Again, that adapter board may not even be useful for anyone here, but I think I might make one at least for myself.

Yes, the RAM will work exactly like it does with an actual cartridge – the VB will be able to read and write from RAM. Essentially after the bootloader runs through its algorithms the VB will be able to read a game and it’s associated RAM data identically to an actual cart. But again, this is still untested and will probably require many hours of software and debugging.

Fwirt wrote:
Ah, so you want a way to dump directly to the SD card. I thought you just meant some way to dump an image that you could move to an SD later. Personally, I think that would be the more useful option, since you’re probably going to be wanting to move stuff from PC to SD (or vice versa) more often than wanting to make copies of your cartridges, although that’s just my option.

Also, could you post the part number of the male connector you have to connect to VB games? I’m just curious about the specs in case I want to build something later.

On a final note, I forgot it was a RAM cart… my bad. Well, VBSD still holds then.

I don’t see what the problem is if you dump directly to the SD card – if you’re transferring files to the SD from your computer you will have to move it back and forth between the PC and cart anyway. I don’t anticipate having to remove the SD card regularly unless you are a developer – I imagine most people would put all of their roms on the SD card and leave it.
I don’t have a choice in how to dump a cartridge anyway because there is no USB connector to the PC. To me I think it would be best used for reading save game data that you don’t want to lose (in case of battery failure or if you want to use your existing save games on the SD card). I know the VB games are relatively short, but I think it would be nice to, say, have all of my wario game data on the VBSD so I don’t have to start from scratch.

mbuchman wrote:

I can’t use the word “flash” anywhere though because there is no actual flash memory on the board (other than the micro).

Hah, don’t forget the SD card is flash

If you are looking for a build house, these people would be able to do what you want…

http://www.screamingcircuits.com/

I have not used them myself but word on the street is they do good work.

Yeah but the SD is just used for external storage, it’s not the main component of the system, as the flash memory is on the flashboy.

Fwirt wrote:
The main problem with removing that bottom cover is that you remove the stand grip, which means you would have to set the VB on top of something in order to play it, and then you might bend the PCB or something…

As far as cartridge dumping, I know DogP has tried several methods over the years. I recently noticed that somebody managed to interface one with a Retrode, but the original prototype of the Retrode was just an ATmega168 with V-USB pretending to be a read-only mass storage device. The main issue with all of the solutions over the years has been that getting a cartridge connector either meant destroying a Virtual Boy to get one or building your own… The guy who interfaced his Retrode actually built a connector out of PCMCIA pins. Is there a male counterpart to that connector you decided on? If so, that would be a fantastic thing for the community.

I actually don’t mind the name VBoot, but if you’re looking for more names, how about VBSD (since it loads from an SD card)? Or, since FlashBoy is taken, what about VirtualFlash?

Also, I just wanted to say that what you’re doing is really cool… I wish I had the skills to design stuff like VBoot… Keep up the good work!

Apparently I wasn’t clear but you will not have to modify your VB in any way in order to use this. The only reason I removed the cartridge slot cover is for testing purposes.

Yes I have a male connector that can interface between VB cartridges. The only reason the VBOOT can’t do it directly is because it has no power source – it draws all power from the VB, but when it’s plugged into the VB you obviously can’t plug a cartridge in. So I would need to design an external board with a power supply and some logic that would provide power to the vboot and allow you to dump ROMs of your games. The way I envision it, you plug your VB game into the adapter board, plug the adapter board into the VBoot board, connect a power adaptor and hit a single button to dump the ROM and SRAM into a file on the SD card. Once I get the vboot cartridge working it would be very easy to make a little adapter board that can do that.

I do like the name “VBSD”, that’s a great idea. I can’t use the word “flash” anywhere though because there is no actual flash memory on the board (other than the micro).

I’m not even going to watch this video because I can already tell from your comments that it’s just some attention-seeking douche that is capitalizing on the excitement of the 3DS to get some youtube hits. I’ve already given up trying to defend the VB outside of this community, it is widely considered one of the biggest commercial failures of the 20th century and a horrible product. It’s on nearly every top-10 list for “biggest failures”, “worst inventions”, etc. etc. If those people want to be so close-minded and narcissistic then let them – more VB’s and games for us, haha. Once in a while there is an article I really like, such as the excellent tear-down article iFixit did a while back. but other than that it just makes me mad to read that stuff and I have enough problems to worry about without that.

e5frog wrote:
My thought was that there might be some space left if you extended the board so you had something to grab hold of if you wanted to unplug the board from the VB.

Every time I see the name VBOOT I can’t help thinking of a boot.

Yeah I’m definitely going to give some thought to how the pcb is actually inserted/removed from the system because obviously most people can’t take off the plastic cover and I wouldn’t want them too. There should be some blank space at the end of the board that will stick out and I’ll measure all of that. The user only needs access to the one button and there is also a power LED and a status LED that will stick out of the VB cartridge slot. The button will be used for saving the RAM (save) data to the SD card or various other uses.

I also thought of a possible expansion board that would be easy to make down the road. It would interface between a VB cartridge and the VBoot board, provide power (so the VB system isn’t needed), and then you would be able to make ROM dumps or SRAM dumps of your existing carts and store them to the SD card. I like that idea because right now the VBoot design has no way of retrieving your existing save game data.

Also, I don’t really like the name “VBoot” either, I just picked it for a project name. It might not be called that in the end. “Virtual Boy Bootloader” or “VB Bootloader” are just clumsy to say and don’t roll off the tongue.

Also, I found a local (in my state) PCB service for low-volume production and they have a red PCB + red solder mask board, so that might be the way to go when I start making the first official batch. I’m definitely getting ahead of myself though, there are still a number of things I need to work out. In my head the calculations and the theory make sense but I need to actually get it working like I want.

http://www.custompcb.com/

e5frog wrote:
That button is perhaps why he unscrew the bottom piece.

Great link there, very neat idea letting several people fill up a panel together. Then you can make just a few boards very cheap.

I actually work at a PCB manufacturer, I guess I should ask how much cheaper I can get it…

About that offer of a graphic design, perhaps you can put something on the copper of the PCB, or as silkscreen – or a combination? If you use standard green you can combine silver (pad), light green, darker green and white silk screen. Could perhaps be possible to work out something neat in those four colors.

I did make a quick a little design for the prototype that you can maybe see in some of the pictures, but it’s nothing special. Here’s a pic of it but the word spacing is off (the centering is correct on the silk screen). FYI there is no room on the board anywhere for copper artwork, it would have to be done on silkscreen.

But yeah, there’s probably some tricky copyright stuff with my logo since it resembles the VB logo. I’d be willing to take artwork suggestions if anyone has ideas. Keep in mind there is no “clean” place to put it on the board so it will likely have vias and pads and such through it.

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Fwirt wrote:
Here’s a question: Is that switch on the PCB reachable when the cover is on, or is the current revision too short? It doesn’t look like you would be able to reach it, but I might just be miscalculating the size of the cartridge slot.

As far as the way it looks, I love the look of bare PCBs. Any way you could get them to fabricate boards with the etch resist in red?

Also, where did you get your boards fabbed? Was it BatchPCB or someplace like that? I actually found this place recently, they charge more per square inch than BatchPCB but they send you three copies of your board, shipping is free, and near as I can tell there’s no setup fee, so it’s a way better deal. Just something to think about when you get the design worked out if you decide to go into “mass” production.

Good questions. The button will be accessible from outside the VB cartridge slot when the plastic slot cover is on, but you are right in guessing that in the picture I posted the PCB is too short. It doesn’t even stick out when the plastic cover is on, but that’s fine because that was an old version of the board (the first prototype). I was just posting it to show that it fits into the VB very well with the connector.

Also, thanks for the tip on the fab service, I will definitely check them out. I typically use BatchPCB for prototyping because they are the cheapest option if you only want one or two boards (plus they usually ship you 1 board or so for free, in my experience).

They made a red/black DS so I’m sure they will have a red/black 3DS at some point, and it probably won’t have anything to do with the VB.