Virtual Boy

The Virtual Boy is the one machine in RetroXR that arguably works better here than it did in 1995.

The Virtual Boy on its bipod. Lean in and look through the eyepiece.

The stereo actually works now

The original was a tabletop visor you pressed your face into. It genuinely rendered a separate image per eye — real stereoscopy, not a trick — but you had to hold your head in one exact position to see it, which is a large part of why nobody remembers it fondly.

RetroXR runs the core in side-by-side mode, so it outputs both eyes in one frame, then feeds the left half to your left eye and the right half to your right. You get the depth the hardware was aiming at, with no sweet spot — lean in, move your head, it stays correct.

This is the same mechanism as the 3DS top screen

Both use per-eye sampling of a side-by-side frame. See DS and 3DS.

It is not a handheld

Despite the visor, RetroXR treats it as a console:

• One controller port — spawn a pad and plug it in.
• A video-out cable that works, so you can put it on a television as well.

On a television, still in stereo

This is the detail worth knowing. A television does not get the raw side-by-side frame — that would read as two squashed copies side by side, which is useless.

Instead the TV is handed the left half, plus the offset that makes your right eye sample the right half. So a connected television comes out in stereo too. The machine is stereo end to end.

On desktop

Without a headset there is no second eye to feed, so the eyepiece shows the left eye’s image flat. Everything else works normally.

Red on black

The Virtual Boy’s display was red LEDs on black — no other colors existed. That is the hardware, not a filter, and it is what you will see.

Two shells, neither a fallback

There are two models: a detailed shell and the bipod stand-in authored in the scene itself. The shipping build uses the stand-in. Neither substitutes for the other — they are separate models.

Cores

Set the default in CORES → Manager — see downloading and managing cores. The side-by-side output mode is forced for you, so there is nothing to configure to get the 3D working.

Needs an in-headset pass

The stereo path, the TV behavior and the port layout are read from the source and are accurate. How comfortable it is to lean into the eyepiece has not been checked against a running build.