Planet Virtual Boy

My question would be, are the cameras the right distance apart? They looked too close together in the pictures to get a good VB shot to me. As far as the POV issue, you're probably going to see "scanlines" as the camera refresh overlaps with the time when the display is in the middle of the frame. (But will they be vertical in the VB's case?) It's still a cool idea though.

Of course, this whole problem would be resolved in a way if Nintendo would release some of the VB games they still have the rights to on 3DS. I really think Teleroboxer has further potential...

Or you could do some craaaazy green wiring on the SRAM since it's only a prototype. Good to hear it's coming along. I guess we'll hope to see some screenshots soon!

If multiple media sources are doing this, then I'd say the 3DS is having the same problem the VB did, but to a lesser extent. The difference between the two is that the 3DS is capable of games without 3D, and is essentially a more powerful DS, so it will still sell. I don't understand how people see touch and motion controls (which I kind of hate) as "revolutionary", where 3D is relegated to a pesky gimmick. Wii bowling has probably hurt me more than VB ever did.

Hmm, I've obtained a couple new systems in the last few years so I guess it's time to update the list.

SNES (Model 1 and 2)
NES (Model 1)
Gamecube
Sega Genesis (Model 1 and 2)
Sega CD
Dreamcast
N64
Virtual Boy
Game Boy
Game Boy Color
PSP-1000
DS Lite
Sega Game Gear
Atari 2600
Commodore 64

Huh, looks like a lot of people use Amazon. I'm not much of a collector, and I've always found Amazon really pricey. I've gotten almost all of my stuff from eBay, but because of the way prices shot up in the last couple years, I haven't bought anything recently. When I bought my first VB, I paid $20 shipped, and it came with the foam eyeshield, an unbroken stand, a controller with battery box, Teleroboxer and Mario's Tennis. A couple weeks later I got a set of 5 boxed Japanese games for $25 shipped. NOw it seems like you can't even find an incomplete system for less than $50...

The weirdest place I ever got VB stuff was a free box that a friend found at a garage sale and brought to me. It had a copy of VB Wario Land and a controller with a chewed up cord in it. It also had a Dreamcast arcade stick and 4 regular controllers... I kinda wonder if the rest of those systems were at the garage sale.

Hey, looks like we have a new user!

Thanks for the heads-up, but we already have a thread for noteworthy auctions. Appropriately, it's called "THE NOTEWORTHY AUCTION THREAD™". That's probably the best place to post this kind of thing.

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.

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!

I wonder how companies come up with their logos. Somehow I doubt it's red because of the VB (since even Nintendo seems to hate the VB on some level) but I guess we'll all keep dreaming that it's true. On a side note, I've always thought the base DS logo was dumb. It doesn't even say "Nintendo DS", it says "Nintendoods" (or now I guess it says "Nintendoo3ds".)

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.