¶ Technical data
- Manufacturer: Nintendo
- Year of release: 1995 (July in Japan, August in North America)
- Units sold: around 770,000
- Best-selling game: Mario's Tennis (bundled)
- CPU: NEC V810 32-bit @ 20 MHz
- RAM: 1 MB of DRAM + 512 KB of PSRAM
- Display: two scanning red LED arrays, 384x224 per eye, 4 shades of red
- Sound: 16-bit stereo
- Media: cartridge
- Power: 6 AA batteries or a mains adapter
¶ Presentation
The Virtual Boy is the most unusual console in Nintendo's history: neither portable despite its batteries, nor really a home console despite its table stand, it takes the shape of a headset resting on a tripod, into which the player looks. Each eye receives its image from an array of red LEDs scanned by an oscillating mirror, producing genuine stereoscopy — the depth is real, but the display is exclusively red and black.
Designed under the direction of Gunpei Yokoi, the father of the Game Boy, the device was released in July 1995 in Japan and in August in North America. It never reached Europe. The uncomfortable playing position, the eye-strain warnings, the lack of colour and a skeletal library (around twenty games) killed it in less than a year: production stopped in 1996, after roughly 770,000 units.
What remains of this commercial shipwreck is a handful of genuinely inventive games — Virtual Boy Wario Land, Teleroboxer, Jack Bros., Galactic Pinball, Mario's Tennis — and an active homebrew scene. The machine is now a collector's item, and a textbook case regularly cited as the first mainstream attempt at home virtual reality.
¶ Emulators
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro Mednafen_VB | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Mednafen_VB is the only emulator for this system, and it is available on every board. It supports neither netplay nor softpatching, but it declares CRT display support. RetroAchievements are supported on this system.
The core offers several ways to render the stereoscopy and several palettes, configurable in the core options from the RetroArch menu while a game is running: flat 2D rendering of a single eye, anaglyph modes (red/blue, red/cyan…) to be viewed with coloured glasses, or side-by-side / interlaced output for 3D displays. The original palette remains red on a black background, but a black and white rendering is offered as well.
By default, games are displayed in red and black, in 2D. To get the depth back, pick an anaglyph mode in the core options and grab a pair of red/cyan glasses.
¶ Roms
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/virtualboy/
Supported extensions: .bin .vb .vboy .zip .7z
As the library is tiny, a complete No-Intro romset fits in a few megabytes: one .vb file per game, cleanly named, which makes scraping much easier. Games can stay compressed as .zip or .7z, with a single game per archive.
Also have a look at the Virtual Boy — getting the 3D back guide for game preparation, configuration and system-specific tips.