January 28, 2026
Red-and-green glasses, red-hot takes
Virtual Boy on TV with Intelligent Systems Video Boy
Nintendo’s 90s headache machine hits TV — and the comments explode
TLDR: A rare “Video Boy” dev unit pipes the 90s Virtual Boy onto a TV, revealing how Nintendo recorded footage back in the day. The crowd split fast: skeptics say the console flopped for good reason, tinkerers love the tech, and many argue a hacked 3DS emulator still beats everything for playing these games.
Nintendo’s infamous red-and-black wonder, the Virtual Boy, just got a glow-up thanks to an ultra-rare dev box called the “Video Boy” — a studio gadget from Intelligent Systems that let magazines like Nintendo Power record gameplay to a TV. Cue the nostalgia brawl. Skeptics stormed in first: one user grumbled that the console flopped for a reason and looked “ugly,” pouring cold water on the rose-tinted hype. Meanwhile, tinkerers are buzzing over how this box spits the headset’s left/right images onto a PAL TV feed — even doing red/green anaglyph for 3D glasses. Retro science fair energy, anyone?
Then the plot twist: the crowd crowned a totally different winner. Fans joked that the best way to play Virtual Boy still isn’t on a TV — it’s a hacked Nintendo 3DS with the Red Viper emulator. That take lit up the thread like a Virtual Boy alarm clock. Elsewhere, a cheeky language debate erupted over the label “プロジェ君,” with one commenter insisting it’s really “projector-kun,” not “project-kun.” Internet etymology fights: unlocked.
Amid the drama, one teardown fan wowed the room describing the Virtual Boy’s wild tech as a “bike wheel display” for your face. Others mourned 3D’s decline outside VR, quipping that people just don’t want gadgets strapped to their heads. Nostalgia vs. practicality — and this rare TV box is stuck right in the crossfire.
Key Points
- •Intelligent Systems built a “Video Boy”/“Video Adapter VUE” unit to output Nintendo Virtual Boy gameplay to TVs/monitors, reportedly used by Nintendo Power.
- •The device provides PAL 50 FPS output via AV multi‑out and an RGB OUT (DB9 to 3xRCA), with a SCANNER port for a development headset.
- •A DIP switch bank (SW1) controls display modes: switch 8 = left eye (red), 7 = right eye (green), both on = anaglyph 3D; switch 5 disables operation.
- •Internally, a monitor board buffers and rotates the Virtual Boy’s scanned image into raster TV format, hosting a Virtual Boy MAI‑VUE‑X8 main board.
- •Key components include two Xilinx XC3064‑70 FPGAs (configured by 1765DPC PROMs), a 1 Mbit NEC D27C1024A‑15 EPROM, and eight 32 KB SRAMs.