I’ve been out of the loop for awhile now too. I knew of the project but only when it was much like the flashboy plus the inkling of the e-ink display.

I like where you’ve taken this, very unique, well above the stock scope everyone looks up to typically someone like krikzz for being saddled to a PC to load up files and all that. This unique choice of having on system buttons to menu pick what you want and then have it flashed being powered off a portable battery or wall jack via USB is genius.

Your device kind of reminds me of my NGPC SD Kit from Saint(RetroHQ) where you have limited storage capacity coupled with the microSD card. His unit has like 20Mbit or so of storage and you can wedge X games into that space, and that’s it, otherwise you re-flash. Yours is just pick one and reflash, a bit simpler but not bad at all. The NGPC by design required it because how the system/game chipset was created. Yours here though seems like a design choice which is fine, but I’m curious how fast is your write routine for say a stock standard 2MB game cart? I know from the NGPC again by the original design it’s slow, flashing it’s smallest games (512kb) takes 30sec from SD to storage, and the 4MB games take 4min each! This is the same range of size the VB has too so I’m curious to compare.

I feel the same way too. I may have newer to the whole community as of this year, but the issue isn’t a VB issue, it’s a hobby wide troll and power issue.

Years ago I even went out of my way in past eras to thwart this kind of garbage as I was once a scener in another decade. There were times in the GBA and earlier NES release era some people felt the need to lord stuff ovesr, and given I had the contacts or direct capability I stuffed a few things out to put a thumb in the eye and I relished it.

I think part of the proto end of it though is simple, people selling prototypes as new releases are basically felons, they’re crooks, selling, trafficking, and mail frauding stuff to buyers they have no legal right to. They’re not stupid, they know it when they buy the board, they own the board, not the contents unless the actual owner licensed or sold it to them. It makes it an even more sour thing when stuff like that gets controlled minimal releases, ROM hiding, and other petty stuff. It infuriates people and they just walk away.

In the case of hyper fighting, it made its money awhile back from the developer. There was no real solid ground reason to hide the thing after the fact other than control freak politics.

I think that up to $250 estimate is a lowball, at least watching what unfolds on ebay, even as a lot value and not pricing it out.

THe problem is there are plenty who are just impatient, stupid, or both (most dangerous) and you’ll see wider ranges with a higher end on the games he listed. Also yeah, it’s solder fixed. Sure it doesn’t have an OEM stand but even those third party ones seem to get about $30. A solder fixed headpiece alone I’ve seen do $150 on average repeatedly on ebay. That’s the head with or without the visor/clip assembly still there.

It wouldn’t be a stretch even with the 3rd party stand, especially with the AC adapter unit and those games to get easily $300 on what he’s got there.

Now if the two most expensive stand alone games were excluded (PB and VF) you still could easily get that with the other 4 titles so it would be like giving those away.

Surprised this finally got put out there. Just had to log in to say thanks. I own an original, but I like to keep backups and lazy easy moments with an emulator too.

Not sure how I forgot to post this but back in late August I managed to knock off the entire set finishing up with the box+game for Waterworld (had a manual already.) Ultimately I’m 3 boxes (Nester, 3D-T, Jack) and 1 manual(Jack) short, but have all 14 games and also a first run Hyper Fighting, Bound High, and V-Tetris in that picture too. Not shown a 2nd VB I fixed myself, lacks a stand but otherwise complete.

This was done all over 7mo of this year, and between smart buys and repairs/resales within it I got all that there for $780.

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I’m curious for those of us without deep pockets to get into oculous, has anyone attempted to convert this (or would it already work) on a non-3D android device. There isn’t much going on good in the world of VB emulation it appears these days.

No I’d say that seems to me that is a rental store one. Some I’ve seen for as far back as the NES got that detailed and with that kind of uniform font. Usually they were affixed into those plastic rental cases, as an included sheet or whatever. It more throws me having the frayed one side like it was torn out.

Yeah I’ve tried on occasion using my iphone8plus and it works, but it’s anything but sharp.

See for yourself.

That was after quite a few attempts to not be downright blurry. I do have a nikon digital camera I could try on a monopod as it’s kind of frisky on its own without being stabilized like that but I doubt it would improve.

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If it’s ebay, unless it was listed as for parts and repair only AND they didn’t mislead you on why it is listed as such, ebay basically screws sellers and forces returns despite what it says.

So it’s kind of up to you if that’s where it came from if you want to fix it or forget it.

It’s fun, but dangerous to the wallet if you’re really serious about the JP library unless you’re loaded and just don’t care. Perhaps a bit less ambitious would be to start polishing off the US library. I got started at the very end of January this year and as of now I’ve got a few aftermarket pieces, but better yet I’m one short of the US library and just been waffling on buying the game (and no, it’s not Jack, I have it.)

It’s fun, and not too bad going after the US library depending the depth of the rabbit hole you’re chasing. But Japan, I hope you have thousands lying around as those last 4 games to come out for it get insane.

Ebay is a bit all over when it comes to the complete unit but not so wide as you put it. A broken bare headpiece is like $50 plus or minus a little bit. A complete unit though as it came from the box (vb, stand, eye shade/clip, tennis, battery box) those aren’t hard to value when unfixed but a fairly easy to peg value would be $150~ because a solder fixed unit would double the value as they can and will sell at $300.

Yet you have a few games, bundling cuts value but not grossly as VB is a small library and desired with smaller numbers to go around. I would think if you just said $200-225 someone would snap it up and just fix it themselves or send it off if they intended to keep it, for resale, nope but for keeps yes.

Virtual Tap is an outlier, how about finding good ways for someone to make a clean picture not using expensive mods. 😀 I’ve tried using cameras of a couple types before, didn’t work out all that well in most cases. I’d have to kill any light source around, then pick one eye piece and try and get a workable angle. Often you’d get a glow and a little blur, but on a rare time it worked it was pretty sharp. I had tried to take some pictures of Hyper Fighting a few months back for someone and got mixed results (and a few other games before that one too.)

pcmantinker wrote:
I purchased my first Virtual Boy which seemed to be defective so I ordered another one. It turns out that the first one was not defective, but likely just had cartridge slot oxidation which was preventing it from booting up. I tested my original console today and was pleasantly surprised to see it working again. My second unit has had the ribbon cables soldered on. Both units work great now!

Good job. Your story sounds familiar. Where did you end up getting your solder fixed unit? I know I’ve read something similar before on one site or another kind of recently.

I’d think if it’s only fixing 1/2 the speakers, then you have a cold/bad solder connection to the spot where that speaker is. Is, is the problem, is could be the ports, the trace between ports, solder at any junction. I’d work your way from A to B to C along the line and figure it out.

I’ve noticed that too, the site here has some strange holes as far as some downloads or even just general images, basic stats, and other reviews or statement pieces go especially with homebrew and prototypes too.

I was wanting to see like for instance what Hyper Fighting had about a week ago and it’s a ghost town.

Well I’m not sure if you were sourcing ebay for those parts, but they do come up cheaper. Problem is there’s this one disgusting piece of garbage on there that strips down units and charges exceedingly high prices per part just to stick it to repair people (lost$$found is the ebay name.)

The audio board if itself is fine but the wheel and the phones jack are fubar, you could just try and pop them off, do a thorough cleaning, and if that fails with fresh solder, see if you have a busted trace to bridge, or find another (not necessarily VB exactly) style wheel and phones jack and put them in as replacements. The left or right speakers on those are detachable with its own plugged in little cable and easily removed, again ebay would be best to just watch for a non-clown seller.

Given the few parts, broken units do turn up and they’ll sell for at/under $50 shipped (USD at least) and given what the audio wheel, audio jack, speaker and your bandaid fixed bits cost you could just gut the parts and get it going again with clean OEM pieces.

Well maybe mellott could help out somehow? He’s the one that seemingly has designed all these interesting toys the VB had intended for it like the link cable, and also new modern VB PCB boards for the various prototype copies, hyper fighting, and the others around. Maybe you could get a deal on some boards and what else is needed to do such a thing.

I don’t have deep pockets, but even I’ve found creative or accidentally creative ways to get some pretty big items for the VB from the blockbuser case to jack bros and even hyper fighting too. If the price isn’t prohibitive and the game looks like it would be fun to me I’d be on board.

In another decade and place I used to both be in the game industry at first with technical standards testing and development ideas then later media mainly for reviews. A lot has come across my hands over the years then and since so I kind of get a decent feel for what is and isn’t good at least in general. 🙂

It would be equally fascinating if not about mind blowing if there was some working code that somehow just appeared in the wild as well. Sure it’s yakuman, but hey mahjong is pretty fun and beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to lost titles or anything new popping up on the system that works.

I forgot to mention since that last post of mine in mid-April I sold my flashboy off.

I’ll be in for this when it becomes a reality. A great person designing what appears to finally be a great kit for the little 3D device that could before its time.

Nin wrote:
The game is still in development. I am sorry for not updating everyone sooner.

I forgot about this one too, thanks for letting us know it isn’t dead. If you ever do get this finished I’d like to grab a copy to play on my system. The new stuff slowly creeping out over the last few years from some competent designers (like hyper fighting for example) are so few and far between it’s like real VB development is happening again. 😀