[HN Gopher] Virtual Boy on TV with Intelligent Systems Video Boy
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Virtual Boy on TV with Intelligent Systems Video Boy
Author : hcs
Score : 89 points
Date : 2026-01-28 08:32 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hcs64.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hcs64.com)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Why is everyone suddenly getting so excited about the Virtual
| Boy? (Other than that the games are now showing up on the Switch)
|
| I picked one up cheap with some birthday money. It was fun for
| awhile, but I never developed the emotional attachment to it that
| I got to other tech like my NES, SNES, or Game Boy.
|
| The Virtual Boy flopped for a very good reason: Not only were the
| games ugly because they were not in color, but it was very
| uncomfortable to play, and there was no "spectator" aspect to the
| games. The games also weren't very original, nor memorable.
|
| (I do remember trying to strap mine to my head with my belt. That
| lasted about 3 minutes before I gave up and got bored of the
| games.) Honestly, I would have enjoyed the games more on a TV
| with red-green glasses, like shown in the article. (When I was a
| kid I loved everything and anything 3d.)
|
| Did anyone fall in love with theirs? Is anyone really nostalgic
| for these games? Or is this something like CED, where the lore,
| because it's rare, makes it interesting even though it flopped
| for a very good reason?
| ljf wrote:
| For me it is like an appendix - or a route we could have taken.
|
| As a child of the 80s and 90s, all things VR held a special
| place in my heart, even if they were terrible.
|
| I never had one, never even played the real hardware, but
| owning one would excite part of my psyche for sure!
| colanderman wrote:
| I have nostalgia for Wario Land, because I played it for 5
| minutes in a Toys'R'Us, and it's a good game which I never got
| to play in full until decades later. But I never owned one, so
| everything else you said rings true to me.
| biofox wrote:
| Never used a Virtual Boy, but I'm somehow nostalgic just for
| the development tool -- grey metal boxes with vents, LEDs,
| and rocker switches transport me into an optimistic future of
| the past.
| dallen33 wrote:
| Several reasons:
|
| 1. Nintendo is releasing Virtual Boy - Nintendo Classics in
| February 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVvaCe4esCQ
|
| 2. Nintendo are also releasing a Virtual Boy shell compatible
| with the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 which will allow
| you to view the games in 3D, although I'm guessing it won't
| look as sharp or bright as the original.
| https://www.nintendo.com/en-ca/store/products/virtual-boy-fo...
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| I had one at the time, got it for my birthday as a teen. It's
| terrible. It caused nausea, the "headset" was uncomfortable and
| if the stand broke or was lost you were screwed. The controller
| was clunky and hurt my knuckles. The screen wasn't an issue for
| me though. In fact I really loved the deep red, but then I used
| to spend hours in a darkroom printing pictures so the red felt
| like home. That said, some of the games were amazing especially
| because of the depth. Worth it? Not a chance. But it worked. It
| did what it said on the tin and the part that sucked wasn't the
| image, it was everything else related to interacting with that
| image.
|
| I'd love to see someone take the lo-fi VR concept further with
| modern tech. It's proof that VR doesn't require color to be
| functional. There were ideas there we haven't fully explored.
|
| The big question it opens up for me is:
|
| - What happens if we ditch color and focus on clarity?
| - lower memory and compute requirements. - Dot pitch
| on screens can be smaller since no sub-pixels. -
| Optics can be tuned to a specific wavelength instead of having
| to fight with chromatic aberration due to the compressed
| optical pathway.
|
| So much of VR today is focused on veracity, reproducing vivid
| worldly images. But what if we look elsewhere, the artificial
| and abstract. I want to see the kinds of sci-fi UIs and VR
| experiences brought to life pulled from the minimalism and
| simplicity of a time when cpu budgets per frame counted in
| understandable integers of cycles and color palettes you could
| count on your fingers.
| aduty wrote:
| I really liked Red Alarm but it was a really tiring game to
| play. But overall I agree with you about the Virtual Boy. It's
| not a system that was received fondly for very good reasons.
| evanelias wrote:
| Yeah, definitely this. It was just not a compelling platform.
|
| When Virtual Boy first came out, Blockbuster Video allowed you
| to rent the system with some games. We played it a few times
| and got sick of it before the brief rental period even ended.
| Fwirt wrote:
| I was an active member of the VB community back in college. I
| did really fall in love with mine. I never experienced any
| nausea or headaches, and when properly adjusted I didn't think
| it was terribly uncomfortable. The "screen" technology was
| actually very cool, two arrays of very small LEDs are swept
| across your field of vision by two rapidly fluttering mirrors,
| so in essence it's an LED display. The picture is very bright
| and crisp. If you listen closely to a running Virtual Boy you
| can hear what sounds like fan noise, that's the mirrors moving.
|
| The first party games were (as usual for Nintendo fare) fun and
| quirky, but other than than Wario Land served more as tech
| demos. The one actually "3D" game for the console (Red Alarm)
| ran at a pitifully low frame rate. And also as today, there
| were no games for the platform that "didn't work" in 2D, but
| they were for the most part enhanced by the stereo experience.
|
| It was, as with most "virtual reality" experiments in the 90s,
| crippled by lack of processing power and cost constraints. It
| didn't live up to its lead designer's ambition and was rushed
| to market with little expectation of success.
|
| I am excited for the games coming back, I really enjoyed
| Teleroboxer and Wario Land.
| wk_end wrote:
| Wario Land VB is really, really good. It's a bit slight but
| seriously one of my favourite Nintendo platformers.
|
| There's always been a very very small and intense VB fandom,
| but outside of them I don't think there's a ton of real
| nostalgia for it. The thing sold less than a million units;
| most people at the time either never played it or maybe tried
| it at a K-Mart demo kiosk for a few minutes.
|
| To whatever extent that people are getting excited about the
| Virtual Boy now, I'd pin it on its very unique retro-future
| aesthetic. In the same way that people who weren't even alive
| for the 80s got really into synthwave, there's something about
| visions of the future from a time when the future was actually
| exciting that people find aesthetically compelling.
| T-R wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of it - I was never able to get one while they
| were officially available, I only managed to rent one from
| Blockbuster a few times. I eventually picked one up on eBay in
| the early 2000's for $60, before they became collectors items.
|
| The appeal is definitely somewhere between intrinsic and from
| the rarity - there's not just been no official way to play
| these games for the last 30 years, they've barely even gotten a
| passing mention, and even emualators have been few and far
| between. It was sad that Teleroboxer, Wario Land, and Mario
| Clash were basically lost to time.
|
| The games definitely weren't up to to NES/SNES quality, but
| they were at least up to par with the average portable game at
| the time, which I think is what they were meant to be compared
| against. I see the Virtual Boy games as Game Boy games that
| suffered from the mechanics of the platform the platform they
| were released on. In that light, I think they compare pretty
| favorably to similar lesser-known games of the time; most
| WonderSwan games I've played, hell even a lot of Game Gear and
| Game Boy games, had much more serious gameplay issues, even
| though they were on hardware that was arguably less...
| challenging.
| MBCook wrote:
| I loved it. Not SNES levels, but I had a lot of fun.
|
| Caveat: I got it near the end of its life when blockbuster was
| selling off the ones they were renting. So for like 50 or 100
| bucks we got the console and 4-5 games.
|
| Was it perfect? No. But it was a Nintendo system and had some
| quite entertaining games. And some terrible ones of course.
|
| It was a very interesting experiment. I'm sorry it was Gunpei
| Yokoi's last project at Nintendo and he felt he had to resign
| from the failure.
|
| I don't know what "modern" people who weren't around at the
| time think of it. And back then a lot of people really wanted
| it to be what it wasn't. They really just wanted to judge it
| for not being the GameBoy Color.
|
| It was a neat try at something totally different.
|
| I hope having it available on the Switch virtual console means
| more people will play the games and find out just how good a
| few of them were.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| It's funny to me how a hacked Nintendo 3DS ended up being the
| best way to play Virtual Boy titles, many decades later, thanks
| to the Red Viper emulator.
| cubefox wrote:
| I think there is also a Virtual Boy emulator for VR headsets.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > purozieJun
|
| I think that's more likely to mean _projector-kun_ than _project-
| kun_ , though it's hard to explain why I think so and it would be
| just a speculation.
| omoikane wrote:
| I had the same thought, and I think it's the -kun suffix that
| makes the "puroje-" prefix more likely to be a verb than a
| noun, i.e. "12th incarnation of The One Who Projects" or "Mr.
| Projector #12".
| cubefox wrote:
| It's a bit of a shame that stereoscopic 3D consoles, like the
| Virtual Boy (or this "Video Boy" here), are no longer a thing
| outside of VR. And even VR is looking bleak with Meta recently
| closing their game studios due to huge losses.
|
| I guess people don't want to wear things on their faces. And
| autostereoscopic screens, which don't require glasses, don't work
| so well for stationary TVs. The Nintendo 3DS was the only
| successful system with (auto)stereoscopic 3D so far.
| Unfortunately its first hardware iteration wasn't quite there
| yet, and the generally low resolution was an issue.
|
| But I think it could easily have been an optional feature of the
| Nintendo Switch 2, if they had built in a movable lenticular lens
| array and a head tracking camera, just like in the "New Nintendo
| 3DS" (the original 3DS used a simpler but worse system).
|
| To get to the original 1080p resolution, they would also have
| needed a screen with double the horizontal resolution (3840x1080
| rather than 1920x1080), since autostereoscopic screens
| effectively halve the usable resolution. Games that don't support
| 3D would just show the same image for both eyes.
|
| It could have been an optional feature even for games that
| support it, with a choice between a 30FPS 3D mode and a 60 FPS 2D
| mode, which comes down to the same amount of rendered pixels. An
| ML system similar to Nvidia's DLSS might even generate the 3D
| effect (left and right frame) from a single rendered frame by
| using the depth buffer. For a smaller performance cost.
|
| But I guess the additional hardware cost doesn't justify a cool
| feature like that.
| wk_end wrote:
| The thing is, the 3DS was a success mostly _despite_ the 3D,
| rather than because of it. No one was excited about it or all
| that impressed - remember that initially the 3DS was such a
| flop at launch that Nintendo needed to pull a Hail Mary,
| cutting the price and launching the Ambassador Program. Or
| consider how successful the 2DS was.
|
| The 3D on it is a very neat trick, but it's mostly a
| distraction and there's something "uncanny valley"-like and
| unpleasant about it. I almost always play with the 3D slider
| off; it's easy for me to see why Nintendo gave up on it.
| MBCook wrote:
| The second revision with the better "head tracking" screen (I
| don't remember how it worked) was much better than the launch
| model.
|
| But mostly, you'd just turn 3D off. It was a gimmick, cut the
| resolution in half, and doubled processing requirements.
|
| It just worked way better as a 2D screen. As you said, 2DS
| was good.
|
| They should have just made the DS2, not gone for 3D. But such
| was the time.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| I would add, I've always felt the addition of the 3D screen
| also held it back because the touch screen became relegated
| to always being secondary (so that the main display of the
| game could be 3D). Many games that were sequels to touch-
| focused DS games did this, they had you touching the bottom
| screen to interact with something on the top screen and made
| those games feel a lot worse to me.
| coryrc wrote:
| IIRC they required all games to work without 3D (because some
| people couldn't see it? or it gave them motion sickness?), so
| it could never be a core mechanic and thus doomed to be a
| "neat trick".
| toast0 wrote:
| > But I think it could easily have been an optional feature of
| the Nintendo Switch 2,
|
| It is an optional featue of the switch/switch 2. There's a
| virtual boy headset you can buy! (Ships in february)
| bsimpson wrote:
| I saw a teardown of the Virtual Boy recently. Wild tech:
|
| The screens are each a bar of micro LEDs. Each eye has a mirror
| that oscillates every frame to smear the LED bar across your
| field of view.
|
| If you've ever seen those bike wheel displays, where the light-up
| spokes make a pattern when the wheel spins - it's that, but as a
| VR headset.
| zh3 wrote:
| Unfortunately you can't get the LEDs any more - they were
| originally from LED printers and those all now use infrared LED
| arrays. I'm actually working on something similar, and am even
| using a few VB scanner mechs in development (driven by a
| raspberry Pi).
|
| For further background, they were developed from an earlier
| system called the "Private Eye" - still a few references to
| them on the web e.g. [0]. I've built a circuit to drive one
| from a Pi Zero - amazing gadgets for 90's tech.
|
| [0] https://www.loper-os.org/?p=752
| terhechte wrote:
| I tried a virtual boy the first time some months ago. I was
| super impressed with the quality of the graphics. I've used a
| Quest 3 and a Vision Pro and obviously these are very different
| beasts, but its just impressive that in terms of sharpness,
| this 90s device felt as good.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| Here's the Slo Mo Guys teardown. Very impressive tech.
|
| https://youtu.be/jW7M8H99x7Y?si=9xjafT2tCresYC9l
|
| What was fun for me was the fact that when this thing came out
| everybody I knew thought it worked by shooting red lasers at
| your eyes. There was very little internet to use to look it up
| either so I was shocked when this video showed how it really
| worked.
| titzer wrote:
| Wow, that was awesome. They had to crank up the FPS of the
| high-speed camera into the millions of FPS to see that
| brightness control over every individual LED was done by
| flashing it multiple times per scanline. Very cool.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I think that was the video!
|
| Was a random YT recommendation, so I didn't know the source
| off the top of my head.
| somat wrote:
| A question for the mech engineers: why the back and forth
| wobble? My first thought when I saw that mechanism was "that
| sounds harder than it should be. Wouldn't a spinning 6 sided
| mirror work better?"
| vikingerik wrote:
| I'd guess a 6-sided mirror would be too big. The mirror needs
| a certain width for its reflection range to span across the
| viewport, and so a hexagon of that side length would be too
| big, particularly considering both eyes (the hexagons would
| have to overlap across the center line.)
|
| Another problem would be that 60o between sides is too little
| angular separation. When the current frame approaches the
| right edge of your vision field, the next side of the mirror
| is already in position to be reflecting the LEDs into the
| left side of the vision field.
|
| A 2-sided rotating mirror might work, but that's more
| complicated to manufacture and mount, such that I'd guess
| they found the back-and-forth simpler. Or else they found
| that rotating mirrors would impose a torque on the whole
| device and that wasn't workable. You could rotate the two
| mirrors in opposite directions, but that would mean the
| viewports are scanning in opposite directions (one right-to-
| left), and I don't know what that would do for the
| perceptions of 3d and persistence-of-vision.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Coincidentally two "lost" unreleased Virtual Boy games are being
| released by Nintendo imminently:
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/wario64.bsky.social/post/3mdfvwdmdt...
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