Retro console modders iFixRetro recently undertook the thankless task of rehabbing an old, beat-up Virtual Boy and transforming it into a painless console they could sit on a shelf and play games on their TV with. Who doesn’t wish they could go back and play Virtual Boy Wario Land without burring their face in Nintendo’s archaic VR headset?
“Consolizing” a Virtual Boy isn’t the easiest due to the 1995 hardware’s intricate display, but iFixRetro’s elegant results were made possible thanks in part to a newly designed 3D printed case.
In it the iFixRetro crew placed a motherboard from an original Virtual Boy headset along with a Virtual Tap board and servo emulator. Designed by console modder called Furrtek, the servo emulator effectively tricks the Virtual Boy hardware into thinking it’s running off of the original headset display while actually outputting to a TV. The Virtual Tap, meanwhile, gives you the option of outputting the Virtual Boy graphics in a larger ratio to better fit TVs.
The Virtual Boy is one of gaming’s most notorious flops, but as a result of not selling well it also has a tiny library of games most people have never touched and were never ported. That includes Virtual Boy Wario Land but also Jack Bros., an action adventure spin-off of Atlus’ Megami Tensei series, and Hudson Soft’s vertical-scrolling shooter Vertical Force. None of these games were amazing but necessarily deserve to get chucked in the dustbin of history either.
And now at least there’s a solid solution for playing them without straining your neck and having your eyeballs bombarded with red lines at point-blank.