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Let’s go retro: Lately, we’ve seen a lot of emulators popping up in Apple’s App Store. Thanks to overseas antitrust pressure, Cupertino has loosened its stance on hardware emulation, resulting in everything from NES to PlayStation emulators flooding the marketplace. Now, an app for the Vision Pro brings Nintendo’s Virtual Boy back from the dead.
Developer Adam Gastineau recently launched “VirtualFriend – VB Emulator” for the Apple Vision Pro to bring back the games from Nintendo’s shortlived VR experiment of the 90s – it’s also compatible with iPhone and iPad but without the 3D effect. While it sounds like a recipe for failure, Nintendo’s hardware put Virtual Boy sales in the toilet, not the games, which is what VirtualFriend is all about.
The Nintendo Virtual Boy (NVB) was only on the market for one year before it was discontinued, so there were only 22 games created for it. However, Gastineau said the emulator also plays homebrewed titles, too. Whether reliving the old originals or exploring some games made by enthusiasts, there should be plenty to try.
The app also corrects the primary downfall of the original NVB. Players who bought or tried the quasi-VR console in 1995 and 1996 complained of headaches. This side effect was likely a combination of the monochrome red-and-black graphics and the parallax 3D viewing technique it employed. The Vision Pro has a stereoscopic display but renders apps on a virtual screen. This distancing from the viewed material helps eliminate the eyestrain associated with isolating the eyes, as in contemporary VR or the NVB.
– Adam Gastineau (@iam_agg) August 8, 2024
The app also has an option to view games in the traditional red-on-black motif, or fully customizable color schemes. Users can change the two primary colors to whatever they want or go with the app’s handful of presets. The Game Boy preset’s black-on-green theme is particularly soothing. These features should help alleviate eye strain associated with NVB headaches.
It’s also important to understand that the NVB wasn’t true VR. That is to say that it didn’t employ motion or head tracking to allow users to “look around” the game world. It was more like a Mattel View-Master, except with images in motion – games appeared to have depth, but that was as far as the immersion went.
The only real drawbacks of VirtualFriend are that no games are pre-installed, and there is no intuitive way of browsing and importing titles to the iPhone. You’ll have to find the ROMs online and download them on the iPhone, then use VF’s file browser to import them into the app’s library. However, that’s par for the course with most iOS emulators, and it’s a free app. So, who am I to complain?
VirtualFriend’s release coincidentally (or not) arrives only five days before the Virtual Boy celebrates its 29th anniversary. The novel gaming platform was ahead of its time and might not have done well in 1995, but that’s precisely what makes it a hot item today. Working NVBs are hard to find and can sell for between $300 and $3,000 on sites like eBay or JustPressPlay.
Image credit: Dokokade
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