Essentially all that illustrates is what it would look like hypothetically, as that video does not feature my work on changing the rendering resolution, generating the 3D effect, etc and I feel even the colors displayed needs more work. Looking a bit more forward, I have some ideas around perhaps highlighting edges in-game to really make it clear where ledges and such are, as there is a fair loss in detail and the last thing you want is to be surprised by a platform ending or some such.

So where am I at currently with this project? Asides from some preliminary work with the software for this, right now I’m just waiting on some packages (see: one Virtual Boy for parts, one Virtual Boy in decent shape) while I do some investigative work into how the hardware-end of this will actually work. Pretty much the first thing I did was begin looking into whether or not anyone had already modded a video input onto a Virtual Boy (unsurprisingly I’ve found nothing on such a mod) so I looked into just the opposite: modding a video output onto a Virtual Boy.

You can see Furrtek’s mod in action here with Mario’s Tennis!

Thankfully, I found such a thing not only has been conceptualized, but has been done! A certain modder that goes by Furrtek has completed this mod, and seemingly more than once. His mod allows the Virtual Boy to render out to a TV. At a first glance, you might wonder why this is even helpful, but you’d maybe be surprised just how much data needed for making a video out mod can be useful in making a video in mod! In any case, I reached out to Furrtek and found out he has a heap of documentation available about how he performed this mod, going right down to the signals involved with the displays, which has been fantastic for getting me going with this project.

At least for now, that’s my initial update. You can look forward to future posts about this as I move through the development process! Let me know what you think! Am I insane? Or are you excited by the possibility of playing your favorite 64 games on the Virtual Boy?