Virtual Boy


Water World for the Virtual Boy? The greatest movie of all time on the greatest system of all time? I'm in heaven.
 
If anyone takes on this task, I think the best way of displaying the games would be in greyscale (or choice of colour, eg. green for the golf game), and displaying the two screens side by side so the viewer can cross his eyes or stare into the distance (this is easier on the eyes and the Pandora's screen is small enough that it should be possible without having to diverge the eyes). So a choice of whether the L screen is on the L side or on the R side.

Say, I wonder if anyone will make a "3D" game on the Pandora itself? There should be enough screen space on the widescreen for L and R screens, and honestly it's a pretty cool effect.
 
Esn said:
If anyone takes on this task, I think the best way of displaying the games would be in greyscale (or choice of colour, eg. green for the golf game), and displaying the two screens side by side so the viewer can cross his eyes or stare into the distance (this is easier on the eyes and the Pandora's screen is small enough that it should be possible without having to diverge the eyes). So a choice of whether the L screen is on the L side or on the R side.

I already mentioned this:

nubie said:
He has a very good point, at normal playing distance on a screen this size crossing your eyes (converging) shouldn't be a problem. My brother can diverge his eyes! That I can't do, it freaks me out! (To be fair he is also the brother of mine that exercises separate control over his eyebrows, creepy.)

nubie said:
We have a widescreen, it would be possible to draw a left and right eye and use a slide viewer lens to see full 3d. See http://www.berezin.com/3d/viewers1.htm for the kind of viewers I am thinking of.




Esn said:
Say, I wonder if anyone will make a "3D" game on the Pandora itself? There should be enough screen space on the widescreen for L and R screens, and honestly it's a pretty cool effect.

I say I say, +1 for me.

That link has a bunch of cheap viewers if you can't or don't want to converge or diverge your eyes. One more way to stand out, it should be able to do Quake just fine in 3D, or a homebrew 3D game.
 
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Virtual Boy, why it was horribly flawed by its design due to rush production ::cough::360::cough:: majority of the games were fun. The reason you'd feel sick was because the screens were actually rapidly moving back and forth which if you have a virtual boy still like I do you can hear the motors moving around. If my programming skills were better, I'd tackle porting a virtualboy emu.
 
novaslogic said:
Virtual Boy, why it was horribly flawed by its design due to rush production ::cough::360::cough:: majority of the games were fun. The reason you'd feel sick was because the screens were actually rapidly moving back and forth which if you have a virtual boy still like I do you can hear the motors moving around. If my programming skills were better, I'd tackle porting a virtualboy emu.
Um, what? That is news to me. Must check on this.

Edit, this is too crazy, I didn't think that Nintendo was this dumb:

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2007/06/h...the_virtual_boy

Basically a single long screen or two small screens was "too much" for them. Damn. With two screens it could have been small enough to wear on your head, and might not have made people sick (although looking at bright red for long periods can't be good for you.)
 
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nubie said:
novaslogic said:
Virtual Boy, why it was horribly flawed by its design due to rush production ::cough::360::cough:: majority of the games were fun. The reason you'd feel sick was because the screens were actually rapidly moving back and forth which if you have a virtual boy still like I do you can hear the motors moving around. If my programming skills were better, I'd tackle porting a virtualboy emu.
Um, what? That is news to me. Must check on this.


I know it sounded like bullocks, but as you see its true. Terrible design idea... I still like the idea of kids walking around and smacking into stuff better though..
 
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It would be great having emulators for every single videogame system so even the Virtual Boy should have a chance.

WizardStan said:
Just display them in red/cyan so you can use standard monochrome 3D glasses.

I think this is the best idea for emulating the 3D effect. There's not a single colour more harmful than the original red so doesn't matter having a monochrome emulator.

The old 3D glasses can be made easily by even a first grader so you needn't to spend a lot of money for playing some shitty Vboy game. Just put the content of both screens, one of them in cyan an the other in the original red "mixed" on the same place (is like having 2 layers with black as the transparent color or something like that, I dunno) so when you use the glasses you see the red screen from the cyan eye and vice versa. That should give the impression of a 3D image in only one screen like those 3D photos.

PS: I don't want to harm my eyes by crossing them a lot (And also I never managed to see those images at the cereal's box)
 
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How well does the existing Windows based Virtual Boy emulator work? Does the 2d translation of 3d images work well enough to play a game successfully? If so then great and I hope someone ports it. If not then...
 
elinscheid said:
How well does the existing Windows based Virtual Boy emulator work? Does the 2d translation of 3d images work well enough to play a game successfully? If so then great and I hope someone ports it. If not then...
I was just curious about that myself so I went and checked it out. The transition is nice, its like a higher resolution gameboy. One of the emulators I used called red dragon has a mode that actually uses red and blue to simulate 3d. As long as you have 3d glasses that is. It be interesting to see.
 
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latiosu said:
PS: I don't want to harm my eyes by crossing them a lot (And also I never managed to see those images at the cereal's box)

I don't think you'd harm your eyes, especially if it's "parallel viewing" (which just mimics what your eyes do normally).

Here are some parallel viewing photos:
http://www.vision3d.com/sgphotop.html

(stare further into the distance than the computer screen until the images merge)

sgphp13.jpe


sgphp15.jpe
 
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I think it's a cool idea. I would definately try it out, even for just five games. Like I said before, if a system has at least one good game it's worth it by my standards.
 
latiosu said:
WizardStan said:
Just display them in red/cyan so you can use standard monochrome 3D glasses.

I think this is the best idea for emulating the 3D effect. There's not a single colour more harmful than the original red so doesn't matter having a monochrome emulator.

The old 3D glasses can be made easily by even a first grader so you needn't to spend a lot of money for playing some shitty Vboy game. Just put the content of both screens, one of them in cyan an the other in the original red "mixed" on the same place (is like having 2 layers with black as the transparent color or something like that, I dunno) so when you use the glasses you see the red screen from the cyan eye and vice versa. That should give the impression of a 3D image in only one screen like those 3D photos.

PS: I don't want to harm my eyes by crossing them a lot (And also I never managed to see those images at the cereal's box)
At minimum both modes should be supported, see Red Dragon for the PC as a standard, it does everything (except support my Planar Monitor :( )

novaslogic said:
elinscheid said:
How well does the existing Windows based Virtual Boy emulator work? Does the 2d translation of 3d images work well enough to play a game successfully? If so then great and I hope someone ports it. If not then...
I was just curious about that myself so I went and checked it out. The transition is nice, its like a higher resolution gameboy. One of the emulators I used called red dragon has a mode that actually uses red and blue to simulate 3d. As long as you have 3d glasses that is. It be interesting to see.
It is very good, supports everything but my Planar, just played it a bit last month with my eyes crossed :).

Esn said:
latiosu said:
PS: I don't want to harm my eyes by crossing them a lot (And also I never managed to see those images at the cereal's box)

I don't think you'd harm your eyes, especially if it's "parallel viewing" (which just mimics what your eyes do normally).
Well, technically it is easier for you to physically cross your eyes (most kids practice crossing your eyes, and you can look at your finger and bring it near your nose easily to practice, it is nearly impossible to get something to travel quickly to infinity to practice diverging your gaze. Diverging your eyes is indeed the way you look to infinity, but in practice any image equal to the distance between your eyes will be "infinity", this doesn't work well. It is easy to swap the left and right image to change from converge to diverge though.) Edit:, even the website you linked to agrees with me:

QUOTE
If you visit the CROSS-VIEWING sections of the 3D Gallery, you'll notice that the stereo images there are larger. That's because your eyes can angle inward much more than outward.
(I found this visiting the cross-viewing section so I could see the 3D in the pictures you linked to, and I think the added size is a nice bonus :p, but in practice swapping the images is fine for an emulator, and allows both to be supported, and hey, it is a small screen.)

I personally cannot diverge my eyes, they just don't do it, probably something best learned as a child (the way acrobats train from practically toddler age.) I don't doubt I could learn, with enough time and effort, just seems a lot of work for no payoff, except perhaps seeing magic eyes properly instead of inverted :rolleyes: , but I have grown used to the look of magic eyes as "paper cut outs" instead of "paper pop-outs".

I don't think red/blue is really the only way to go, it should probably at minimum support converge/diverge and anaglyph. At the best it would be cool if you could use the output and some shutter glasses, or use the LCD for one eye and an external screen for the other eye in a "HMD" configuration.

What would be neat is separate colors for different sprites and the background, like the GBC emulators do for GB games, with simple colorization.
 
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well, I found the source for red dragon if some one is interested. Unfortunately he hasn't updated it in about 2 years so it still doesn't support the full library of virtualboy games as far as all the games released in other countries but the line up is still pretty damn impressive.
 
I picked up a Virtual Boy a few weeks ago got a few games with it Vertical Force and Red Alarm.
It aint bad at all also got hold of a rare rom called Bound Highwhich which i can play via emulator untill i recieve The flash cart for the virtual boy :)
 
Just tried Red Dragon on my PC with the red/blue 3D glasses. Pretty cool! Not a big fan of the Virtual Boy but it has now been added to my emulator collection. So break out those Hannah Montana 3D glasses (mine are Spy Kids 3D) and have a look. This would be cool on the Pandora.
 
Re: nubie

I can't diverge my eyes either. However, when you stare at any object that's far away, your eyes get further apart; this is a very natural and common movement. So those types of 3D images feel more "right" (at least to me) than the ones that require crossing the eyes. Even though it means that the images have to be smaller as a result. But the Pandora screen will be fairly small anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem.
 
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