Ben Heck's Virtual Boy Part 1: Teardown
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- Ben's seeing double this week with a retro virtual reality console that was ahead of its time, the Virtual Boy (codename VUE) by Nintendo. The technology behind the Virtual Boy was ahead of its time, and didn't prevent some of the dizzying problems that still affect VR today, as Ben quips "It's like a trip to the eye doctor!". Of course, this means Ben has to take it apart in a traditional teardown to find out what makes the Virtual Boy tick, inside we find a 32bit processor and graphics chip combined along with some very clever mechanical decisions.
Unfortunately, as clever as the mechanics are, this hasn't prevented failure and Ben has to design and print a part using Autodesk Fusion 360 to help repair it. Though, now that it's repaired, it's time to improve it! Make sure you catch the next episode, meanwhile let us know what you think of VR technology on the element14 Community!
Enter to win Ben's Raspberry Pi Laptop! - bit.ly/2fM6eAS
Are you bit by a love of Technology - bit.ly/2gnmuvI
I'm not ashamed to admit I love the Virtual Boy. I even have one of the store display kiosks.
That kiosk was boss, I remember sticking my face into that display it was awesome. They have one on ebay for over $2,000
don't be ashamed. it's a piece of history, it was fun to play and only 1.5% of anyone ever got a headache (seriously, you're weird if you got a headache from this thing. i just don't see that happening).
Waterworld had great music and Teleroboxer, Tetris and Warioland were must haves! Too bad this was rushed onto shelves to compete with the Saturn and the PS1. It had a unique charm to it. Even if it did make everything look weird as hell when you took your eyes out of the machine after 20 minutes of gameplay
Kavya It hurts your eyes from long playing sessions but yeah, I never got a headache from it. And I too love it. Especially sense every game on it is an exclusive. Plus you can't emulate it so having the actual hardware for it means something. Plus the controller is overhated in my opinon. It works way better then it looks. Not perfect, but not as bad as everybody makes it out to be.
Kavya yeah my eyes do get sore though, loads faster than even ps vr
Ben... I wanted to take a moment and thank you for these amazing videos. Not only are they informative and nostalgic, often connecting me to my nerdy youth... you are like the geek engineer Bob Ross with the calming vibe your videos can project at times.
Jeez, watch the audio on your videos. You have softer, quieter audio, suddenly louder, then back to quieter. Then the Element14 midway commercial plays and is stupid loud.
Video editing apps have waveforms for audio in clips while you create your video project. Smaller waveform (shorter) = quieter, bigger (taller) = louder. So yes, you can "watch" sound.
Heaps of youtube channels have this problem, it's the single most annoying thing ever. Especially when you're dosing off to sleep and all the sudden 10dB LOUDER (over-exaggeration). A bit of compression never killed anybody, I have double compression going on (windows volume equaliser and compression in my receiver) just to combat this bullshit. Just have to remember to turn it off for music ;)
I really really wish someone would take Ben's ramblings and run with them. Make it into a full blown animated series
Let's do it.
Great Idea
In 2005 I sold mine to a pawn shop and my pal was trying to change my mind because the screen only worked half of the time when you turned it on, so he was worried I'd get into trouble for selling a broken videogame for $20 claiming it was in working condition... now the joke's on me, since the flat cable is pretty easy to repair and the console would fetch 10 times what I was paid for it.
At 13:10 you say that blue LEDs didn't exist in 1995 which then sent me off on a Google adventure, fascinating how difficult it was to invent them and now they're so cheap I decorate my garden in strings of hundreds at Christmas :D
And so paved the way for LED cubes and flat screen monitors.
A massive change for the world and technology, yet all I think about is Christmas lights haha well 'tis almost the season. I've read about the inventors winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 2014 too, really is amazing the changes it brought about. Thanks for pointing it out so I could learn more!
Hopefully they weren't crossing the road at the time..
I remember seeing articles in Popular Electronics in the late 1980s talking about blue LEDs. You could buy them, but they were $20 a pop.
Yellow LEDs were. Because the blues were to dim to actually indicate the hi-beams....
can we get the drawing for the 3d printed clips?
A lot of us have issues with the virtual boy and it would be great if those clips were available to print
The Virtual Boy isn't dead. There is a online community dedicated to keeping it alive and making home-brew games. They recently made a near perfect Street Fighter 2 clone called Hyper Fighting that looks and plays amazing. www.planetvb.com
That’s actually really dope.
So, what aboutmultiplayer with cable?
I had no idea that blue (LED's) didn't exist, back then. Interesting how time changes things.
I do remember Nintendo publishing the fact that had they made this thing do color, it would have tripled the cost. ($180 X 3 = $540) Maybe inventing that color would have been why. (???) Yet, I just bought this tiny MP3 player with a tiny price tag that includes a raver light. It's one of those LED's that has multiple elements inside that produce all kinds of light frequencies. And I'm sure that the LED probably cost like next to nothing to produce. Oh, had these been around back then, I wonder if that $180 price tag could have dropped at all.
Another thought hits me. If their image trick uses only one row of red LED's, now I am curious if the Virtual Boy could be rigged to work with one of those novelty 'free floating word' things to create a non-3D free floating game screen. After all, some of these games barely did much with the 3D to begin with. In fact, I think Ben even created one of those free floating LED grid displays in the past.
Sorry but 1994 for the bright blue LEDs and 1989 for the non bright blue LEDs is before the virtual boy.
Uhm... 1989 and 1994 are before 1995 are they?
This thing released the same year as the N64, meaning it was probably in development from about 1992-1995...
Besides, there would be other ways to do this besides blue LED's...
LCD displays technically already existed.
Prototypes for systems can go through many revisions...
Watch Ben Heck slowly go insane as he takes apart the virtual boy. Great stuff.
0:25 "...Or take a portable and consolize it..."
YES! But Ben has never done that. :(
Unless you call the giant Game Boy a console... But don't. :P
allluckyseven a consolised PSP would be awesome.
James Higgs
As would a consolized GBA.
+James Higgs there is a cable to connect the PSP to a TV, I have one some where, it connects RGB I believe,i know it's not standard RCA or HDMI
a while ago a guy consolized a GameGear. it was awesome.
[clears throat]
The Super Game Boy and the Game Boy Player.
Y'know, when Karen first came to the show it was awkward, she didn't really seem to fit in very well... But now I just kind of adore her.
allluckyseven But I sometimes get some Major Cringe Attacks because of her...
+Llonk “LlonkNomis” Nomis same, every time I'm reminded of her existence
ben gives me just as many cringe moments. I don't want religiously, who is she? just someone he hired, or is that his wife or daughter or whatnot?
Still hard to believe that Nintendo didn't use a head strap for this.
The thing is actually quite heavy. You wouldn't want it on your head even if you could.
I own one. It wouldnt really make sense to strap it to your head. The console itself doesnt make sense. It wasnt built for long play sessions.
However, it is still a very cool piece of tech, and the Wario game on there is awesome.
*****
Still would be a better option than the stand that makes you feel like taking an eye exam.
Please stop quoting AVGN...
Petter Fröling
Well it's pretty much the most accurate way to describe the horrible design of this thing.
This video is 50% about the Virtualboy, 50% about Dioptaclops
Do you know what it's like to have a Virtual Boy diopter setting that is .05% different than the national average!?
lol
I was actually working my very first real job when this came out, at the game store Babbages (later bought out by Game Stop). We got a unit in for the employees to test and we all hated it.
You should take apart both the Atari Jaguar and the Jaguar CD to see the guts of those systems :)
And perhaps even fix the cd because i chances are, it won't work.
itsGeorgeAgain I second. I'm curious as to just what makes those things fail so regularly.
xnamkcor X they're not as famous for mechanical failure as they are for the red screen of death. meaning that there's some error in its circuitry.
I think jagfest just happened recently. The nostalgia nerd made a video about it not too long ago as well.
The reason why I lot of them don't work is not because they failed, but because about half of the patch of 20,000 units didn't work from the factory.
At 23:02, Felix is in the background thinking, "Ugh, I can't get any work done with Ben going on and on about Diopter Man. I wonder if Dave Jones is hiring?"
Don't turn it on - take it apaaaaahhht!
I wonder how many times Ben has loosened or tightened a screw in his lifetime... Methinks it's probably a high number.
When are you going to consolize the R-Zone?
ben heck does have a sense of humor. The eye doctor joke made me laugh out loud for real.
I am falling in love with this channel more and more
"... or take a mobile and consolize it"
lmao
Samüll Look up BennVenn's DMG Entertainment System (DES). It's a Gameboy made into a full console.
Isn't that almost what the gameboy viewer is for the gamecube?
Void of Space and Time Yeah, but it's GBA only and can't play GB or GBC games, iirc.
I'm probably sure Game Boy Player can play GB and GBC games. Game Boy Player is basically a Game Boy Advance without a screen after all.
P.Scoop True, but the way the original GBA and GBA SP played Gameboy games was it used a small switch inside the cartridge slot to detect whether or not a GB or GBC games was inserted, then switch to that bios and chipset as opposed to a GBA one. That's why the Gameboy Micro couldn't play GB/GBC games.
ive spent the last 3 hours watching videos from this channel and started to love electronics. but damn i feel it is hard to know it piece by piece i thinking of joining some sort of school to teach me :D
This is such a common fault now with these. I'd love a set of clips to sort mine out somewhat more permanently.
There exist an VGA mod for it. A portable ... well a new Portable... or hey combine it with an VR Headset O_O
Cabbage Head Someone should put a VR headset into a Virtual Boy shell :D
i actually like the virtual boy.
If Nintendo decides to make a VR add-on for the Switch, they should consider making a virtual boy virtual console... Doubt they will because they want to forget it ever happened. It isn't even listed on their website or anything...
I loved my VirtualBoy. Mario Tennis, Tetris 3d, and Red Alarm were the games I had; all three really fun. The only really bad things about it were battery life, and the fact that it wasn't really portable; tried taking in the car once and put the legs on my inner thigh, but we hit a hard bump and I squeezed my legs together and got my frank and beans smashed really good by the virtualboy legs so I never tried again.
I liked this episode very much. Here are a couple of ideas I'd love to see in the second part:
- Combine the vibrating mirrors from both optical assemblies with a laser to make a virtual boy projector
- Replace the LED arrays by modern RGB strips and drive them with the microcontroller of your choice to create color images
Damn Ben, you just pull a ribbon cable clip out of your ass like it's nothing. My 60G PS3 needs a ribbon cable clip replaced because it's stupid hinge broke. The one that connects the drive to the board.
Another option you could take to fix the displays is to solder the points on the ribbon cable. It's what majority of the VB collectors do. I had it done to both of my systems. The soldering definitely requires a lot of skill and a steady hand but finding someone in the community that does it isn't too hard. I can't wait to see what you do with it. I'm a huge fan of the Virtual Boy. My second one is a custom Virtual Girl. I wish I could get the Pink LEDs to make it complete.
New idea I came up with..................A portable headset Virtual Nintendo 64 Boy console, with a wireless controller and you can connected to play it on your tv or live stream it
The talk like they're reading off a sheet of paper :D
We need someone to make these clamps available for purchase. Would love to get the my VB going again!
Please sell some of those clips!
Every Virtual Boy has that problem (or will soon).
make this in different colors since now we have different led colors now in 2016! :D
Please add the ribbon clamp to thingverse, I need a set for my virtual boy!
You're missing a huge opportunity to make a steam link portable HANDHELD with the steam controller it would be a great video and project
Is there anyway we can get the file to print our own? It would be much appreciated.
I bet it's great to work with Ben, he's hilarious with his random quips and references.
2:20 to skip the intro
Like those "thank me later" jokes.
I really love your channel, And seeing how they made old and new hardware. Thanks for this and keep up the good work ! :D
"When in doubt, jiggle the cable" -Ben Heck
Words to live by.
the virtual boy was nintendo's 32 bit system
How the hell do you not got the Nintendo screw bit yet?!
"for us old-schoolers, Nintendo means NES"... Couldn't you just call it NES then? Just 3 characters.
It wasn't about the size of the word. You had an Atari, you had a Hoover (even if it was from another company) and then you had a Nintendo (cause the first thing you saw was the red wording on gray that said Nintendo.)
It would be awesome if those custom clamps were produced, the ribbon cable issue is a common problem with the Virtual Boy. Anyway, great episode! I'm looking forward to Part 2.
Hey Ben, love this video series! Can you give more clarity on how to fix the display, you used a heat gun... for how long? How careful of the other pieces do you need to be? How much pressure and do how long do you need push down on the connection after you've heated it? Any other pro tips would be super appreciated, I'm about to do this to mine!
hi Ben ..you way over engineered the display glitch fix. you just needed to solder the flex cable to the display 100% bypassing the old glue used to hold the cable to the display board.
VR, naw waiting for Holodeck. lol
enjoy getting a headache if you ever play one
I have two virtual boys. Luckly I got one at a yard sale for $5 and one at a thrift store for $10 in box! What luck!
I would pay for a couple of those foam clips
I got mine on clearance for $20.
Hahaha, the Mario imitations and fake movie lines! I'm dying here! :D
Why can't I watch this video? "Unavailable on this device" on everything I've tried... This is an outrage!
Same here
Seems to be corrected, yay!
I wonder if it could be adapted to display colour by replacing the red LED's with RGB ones?
Obviously the existing games wouldnt display in colour but you could maybe try to get something displayed on it?
Hey Ben, how about sharing those clamp plans for the led emitters? Currently the only two methods of repairing the ribbon connectors are painstakingly soldering each lead, or heating them up like you did and hoping they stay for a while.
Blue LED's did exist in 1993 but were very expensive. (Company I worked at used them around then and were about $20 each)
I did buy mine back when they were trying to get rid of stock after it was discontinued.
You could take Teensy and interface it to the display drive ports and just read the raster data in, then reformat it and send it out to a pair of OLED or LCD displays, get rid of the scanning red LEDs.
The new back to the future movie...
MARTY! I WENT BACK THROUGH TIME! AGAIN!
“Wow dock what for?”
TO SELL DVD PLAYERS MARTY!
“Uh... okay?”
SO I COULD BUY APPLE PRODUCTS!
“Okay, and do what with them?”
I DONT KNOW! Do I look like some genius to you Marty?
“You know what forget I said anything doc...”
The end.
Now you have the makings of another back to the future movie.
Damn Ben, is there anything you can't do electronically? :)
Screw this...I want to see the Virtua Boy colorized and made useful. I wonder if the carts have additional RAM on them as 4K just isn't going to cut it.
I was working at a MicroPlay and we had two customers buy one each. They returned them the next day that was on release. What's really kind of stupid is we had a demo unit so there was no excuse. I called it the Virtua Boy warning kit. Once you played it you generally knew better than to buy it. I also remember throwing away tons of Sega Saturns' and Virtua Boys' in late 1997. That's where I got a ton of my truly rare Saturn games from. Can you imagine that today?! "Yeah, I'm making room so I'm going to crush these copies of Panzer Dragoon Saga!" -This actually happened.
Apple stock....no, more like Microsoft stock in 1985 then move it to Google. You know the "Do no evil" Google we once knew.
I think the next big project should be trying to figure out how to connect the Power Glove to the Virtual Boy. THE ULTIMATE IN EARLY 90S VIRTUAL REALITY!!!! lol
I dont care what anybody says. Im from the UK and love the Virtual Boy, such an underrated console with a tiny and fairly easy to collect complete games library. I have a brand new sealed US system (even the Duracell coupon on the front is untouched!) and a full US game collection, a boxed mint Japanese system and all but Mario Clash and space invaders Japanese games collection. RedAlert and WarioLand are brilliant! WarioLand on the VB is by far the best version of the game! And the mind boggles if it had been a success and wed have got the games promised, I think about the RareWear made VB-GoldenEye or Nintendos VB-Starfox/Wing! Amazing!
Wow, this has more ports that a Macbook!
(sorry I just had to say this)
Went blue LEDs created in the 90's?
Professors Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura made the first blue LEDs in the early 1990s.
Hey Ben! Love your content. I have a Virtual Boy. It works well and i have all games except Mario Clash, but I digress. So my issue is that the left eye works fine, but the right eye has the grid line glitchy look you would see on NES when the cart wasn't fully inserted. Do I need a whole new display/mirror assembly? Or can I possibly just make sure there's not a loose connection?
Edit: Actually, farther into the video I think I have my answer!
Neah Ben, why waste ur time buying and selling old DVDs or VRboys, write down all winning lotto numbers for last 10y, go back 10y and play them all & win BILLIONS! =)
PS: should have changed the LEDs to white while there so brain would not get pummelled :P
WHAT THE BEN HECK!!! How do you not have nintendo security screwdrivers! I have them, they're dirt cheap on ebay. You are KNOWN for all this console stuff!? Why would you not have a set!?!
The virtual boy was just too far ahead of it's time I suspect.
They already knew about the nausea risks, which explains a lot about how the screen and other features are designed.
It's clearly rather heavy though, to design it on a stand like that.
The red screen though? Pure cost cutting. It had a colour screen for a while, but it was deemed just too expensive, and red was the cheapest option apparently.
This isn't a huge surprise, since consoles frequently have corners cut along the way to reduce costs.
Both the Snes and Mega drive are confirmed to have the hardware capability to support more VRAM, even in the finalised designs for instance. (as in, there's enough left in them to mod the extra RAM into the system if you really feel like it.)
This is understandable given how expensive RAM was at the end of the 80's and early 90's...
(The snes in particular seemed to have higher specs all round but was way too expensive to release that way.)
So... Specifications can change over time, either upwards to make a system more competitive, or downwards to make it more affordable.
Design isn't static, that's for sure.
You don't just create a list of specs and then end up selling exactly what was on your list...
Here is a project for you: create a portable Virtual Boy that works with a autostereoscoptic screen, like a parallax barrier. First, get the CPU, controller and board to be portable - that should be the "easy" part. Second, get the red LED data to buffer (simulate the mirror), render and come up with two images for each eye, and send that into any cheap out of the mill parallax screen (a 3DS, a cell phone, create your own). Ta-da, a portable virtual boy with 3D capability you can play without hiding your face!
Is it me or does Ben increasingly look like Dracula from Bram Stokers Dracula, as portrayed on the big screen by Gary Oldman?
www.blastr.com/sites/blastr/files/styles/rectangle_960x480/public/Bram-Stoker-s-Dracula-bram-stokers-dracula-10765534-1024-576.jpg?itok=F3l_Qg0m×tamp=1443710690
Pop Question, why was VB in red. Hint: Something was not invented yet. The technique of VB dates back over 60years ago
2nd pop question, why do most of us play with stuff instead of creating something new. Hint: Your ancestors set the foundation which in-turns allows you just to play. So what will happen when you had no foundation... you have to work hard and come up with award winning ideas.
So it was basically a game boy in red since the graphics and all was a small improvement and nothing more,it was the time nintendo started to go down on us really slowly.
Greetings. VR Developer here and I love old VR tech as a look back to the origin of current VR. Anyways, I have a few Virtual Boys that have been placed in storage because I was tired of the display going out. I've repaired one but my fundamental fear of ribbon cables prevent me from keeping a Virtual Boy on display at the studio I run. Can I get the STL of the wonderful clip you made? I'd love to have my Virtual Boys singing again.
I just bought one today at Long Island Retro game show but I need the stand. Can I buy it from you if you sill have it?
Oh, I remember when blue LEDs hit the market... everything was silver plastic with a glaring blue power indicator.
Virtually everyone I've shared this video with agrees: This is one of the best Ben Heck Show episodes! I love this project! The tear down was super helpful and your non-destructive fix really made me happy. A lot of retro game fixes permanently alter original hardware. I've seen people strip and solder the ribbon cable. I'd like to see more things like this in the future to help preserve our video game history! Looking forward to the next part!
Pffft... 144Hz gaming monitors, what a waste of money!
The human eye can´t see more than whatever the refresh rate of this led flipping mirror thingy is... just ask 1995 Nintendo :D
Teardown? I'd prefer to watch a Virtual Boy Meltdown where Ben Heck makes a three part video using different instruments of heat to torch the Virtual Boy down methodically until it's a puddle of bubbly brown goo.
Just in case anyone cares:
The black and yellow ratcheting screwdriver he's using is a Lutz 15-in-1. It's easily the best ratcheting multi-tip screwdriver I've ever owned.
Please make Virtual Boy 2.0 with N3DS internals. 3D print a new head mounted case with straps and a separate cabled controller. Comfortable enough to wear while lying back on a couch. Glasses friendly too!
i'd like to see you make the virtual-Pi-Boy.
Raspberry Pi running emulator and driving two Color led strips for 8bit color fun :)
I'm sure you could pull it off, all you really need is an array of leds, then remove the focusing lense to make room for your bigger array of rgb smd leds and your own lense, some coding and a Pi.
It can be done. :)
also speaking of time travelling and re-selling, I would buy out all the copies of SNES RPGs such as earthbound and chrono trigger then they came out in the 90s, then come back to 2016 to make some solid cash online
Good video, but Jesus H. Christ, that element 14 ad halfway through felt like an anti-piracy as from fifteen years ago. Whoever made that for them should be fired. I mean, it's better than I could do, but it's not my job.
This thing is probably the last mechanically complex device Nintendo ever made. All the holdovers from the days of N&B Blocks and the Duck Hunt toy got one last hurrah.
also did some research on blue LED, google this "RCA Had the First Blue LED in 1972", and the first bright blue LED was made in 1990!.
The VB was basically something to hold gamers over between the SNES and the N64. And Nintendo did try to do something different, so kudos to them for that. The problem was that the VB was bad in almost every way. The red-black colors were limited to say the least, the list of games was very small and the list of must-have games was even smaller, 3rd party support was almost nonexistent, it wasn't really portable, using it stationary was borderline retarted and using it for more than a few minutes really hurt the eyes.
It was essentially an idea that was too early on the market to be sucessful.
18 yrs ago when I was pregnant (and not super mobile or flexible), I had a Virtual Boy. I would lay on the couch and put it over my eyes to play. The stand would prop against my chest/collarbone area and keep it steady. It was totally worth the $20 or so I paid for it.
the acting ... top noch 😂😂
notch
The other night I was literally thinking of a proper consolized version of the Virtual Boy that had a LED screen with switchable viewpoints (either left or right) and colors (White, Blue, Red, Green, etc).
PHAB 2 PRO TEARDOWN ??? .. TANGO, first AR phone ETC.. grr caps... "ahead of it's time".. lol
There are a lot of movies & TV series where you see people play consoles or handhelds but the only movie I remember showing someone playing Virtual Boy was "Erin Brokovich" (starring Julia Roberts).
There should be little fans in the modern VR headsets to add a little bit of realism and difficulty to your gameplay. Say when your character runs, the fans will spin a little faster which causes you to blink more than normal as opposed to just standing in one place. Explosions and if the environment is windy should the fans be affected for a better VR experience, or any other effects that cause your player to be affected in a game. I think it would take a bit to get used to but of course it shouldn't be overly exaggerated that one stops playing VR all together. Just an idea I had. What do you guys think?
Look I get trying to get some revenue for the amount of work you put into these videos. But two unskippable ads mid video sees excessive. I don't move the pre roll stuff. I get it. You guys work hard on this stuff. But the mid roll (and unskippable garbage) needs to go please
Why didn't they just put two small CRT displays in it to display full color? We know CRTs could be small enough from old tiny CRT camcorder view finders.
ah vr... when it gets to the stuff they used in the jonny quest mid 90s show, it'd be worth using, however not like the popular concept in manga/anime of dive systems , sword art online showed the danger of such a system.. needing to logout to literally stop using a game.
im from argentina, i hope someday the automatic subs, be more accurate, i chosse english to a better understand, i dont know english, my is very basic, but i understand somethings.. you are very tecnique.. but stilllove when you do things like this. i own 2 virtual boys a long time ago, now a dont have them :( . i cant wait for the second part :) sorry my not google english. saludos.