Nintendo’s VirtualBoy – the strange console-inside-a-pair-of-goggles and arguable ancestor of Nintendo’s 3DS – was a marvelous piece of innovation for its time. In a little tabletop unit, you were able to play true 3D video games at an impressive 384 x 224 pixel resolution. Of program the VirtualBoy was a total failure, however that doesn’t mean hardware tinkerers are leaving this wonderful system to video game collectors. [furrtek] has been playing around with his VirtualBoy as well as handled to add VGA out.
As a 3D system with two displays, any type of kind of video out was rightfully ignored by the VirtualBoy system designers. Still, [furrtek] desired some kind of video out on his system, so he began poking around with a little FPGA board to produce some VGA signals.
The two screens inside the VirtualBoy aren’t your typical LCD screen – as seen in this iFixit teardown. they’re truly two linear LED arrays that produce a single line of 244 pixels, with mirrors scanning the line in the in the Y axis. These LED arrays are managed by the VirtualBoy CPU with a series of shift registers, as well as by carefully tapping the lines of each LED array, [furrtek] was able to copy all the picture data into the RAM of an FPGA.
After stuffing an XESS XULA-200 FPGA board inside the situation of his VirtualBoy, [furrtek] wired up a few resistors for a DAC as well as installed a VGA out port on the underside of his console. whatever worked the very first time he powered it up, as well as he began playing his VirtualBoy on his huge screen TV.
Because [furrtek] is only reading one of the VirtualBoy’s displays, all the 3D data – as well as the primary function of the VirtualBoy – is lost when it’s displayed on a TV. 3D TVs do exist, though, as well as we’d like to see an improved version of this that captures data from both of the VirtualBoy displays.
You can see [furrtek]’s video of his mod in action below.