Planet Virtual Boy

M.K. has uploaded a new short video clip to his semi-secret Youtube channel. It shows a spaceship made of filled polygons, flying through some gates in a nice, fluid motion. A hint at his next game perhaps? Excitement!

VirtualChris' homebrew fighting game "Insecticide" has recently seen a physical release, featuring artwork by Jacek, winner of the label content. The game was available at Uncle Tusk for $90 + shipping, but the small batch of 25 copies has sold out quickly.

Like numerous other Virtual Boy titles, Mario's Tennis was going to support the GameLink Cable to offer multiplayer modes, a fact that was even mentioned in an early In-Store promotional video. After the GameLink Cable got cancelled, naturally none of the commercially released games contained any type of simultaneous multiplayer mode.

It was long believed that Mario's Tennis did not even contain any leftover multiplayer code - until M.K. went to great lengths to find and restore exactly that! He just released a patch that restores 2 of 3 game modes (P1 vs P2 and P1/COM vs P2/COM) to a fully working state. The third mode (P1/P2 vs COM/COM) is buggy and won't be fixed until any Virtual Boy emulator implements full link cable emulation to shorten debugging and testing times to a healthy amount. While Reality Boy does offer network-based link cable emulation, it lacks support for the respective interrupts, which Mario's Tennis' multiplayer modes depend on.

Check out the release thread for a brief summary of the discovery and restoration process as well as the patch download.

If you're eager to play some Mario's Tennis multiplayer now and got a friend with another Virtual Boy and flash cart nearby, you might be interested in Kevin Mellot's fantastic homemade link cable. For everbody else, M.K. has released a video of the Mario's Tennis multiplayer in action.

Howdy there, would you like some dinosaur on your Virtual Boy?

StereoBoy has released a brand new homebrew he has been working on recently with Jorgeche and me. "DaumenKinosaurier - VUEdition" is a Virtual Boy port of an awarded stereoscopic flip book StereoBoy made as a student in 2009, realized in the VUEngine.

More information about the project, ROM download as well as sources can be be found in the release thread.

In the nineties, Canadian company VidPro made game retail displays that were used at a number of retailers, most notably Toys'R'Us. The system was simple: instead of the actual game boxes, VidPro displays had cards showing the boxart for every title the store sold, which the customer could browse. If they wanted to make a purchase, they grabbed a slip of paper and brought it up to the cashier to receive the actual game.

Due to VidPro cards being produced prior to a game's retail release, there were also cards made for unreleased games in rare occasions. It has been known for a long time that a card exists for the unreleased Dragon Hopper, and we have even had super-low res scans which were found in 2002 on half.com.

Now the elusive gem has finally been found by vuefinder83! Enjoy high-res scans of the VidPro cards for Dragon Hopper and a few other Virtual Boy games, including early versions, here.