Though Virtual Boy claimed to be a 3D system, the vast majority of the games were more like ‘2D plus depth.’
“…the graphics processor is really designed with sprite-based 2d in mind. While you can build worlds with lines by directly accessing the frame buffer, it’s actually quite slow to do so, which is why the two truly 3D games for the system, Red Alarm and 3D Tetris, ran quite slowly and had extremely simple visuals. Sticking to sprites, we can keep the framerate up, and the visual quality,” Maroe explained. “Imagine a sprite version of Qu [Vanguard V’s main character], from behind, with a sprite targeting cursor. Enemies are sprites that scale in from the background. We haven’t exactly figured out what we are going to do for the projectile lines when you shoot, but Justin is a great particle man and he said ‘Leave that to me’.”
Between Proton Pulse and Vanguard V, ZeroTransform puts music front and center in their titles. Being a chiptune (aka 8-bit) composer himself, ZeroTransform’s founder, Justin Moravetz, has a leg up on most others when it comes to producing a suitable soundtrack for the Virtual Boy’s limited audio processing capabilities. The studio is already working with Jake Kaufman (AKA Virt), a skilled chiptune artist who recently scored Shovel Knight with an authentic chiptune soundtrack.
“…even if we could persuade the system to play them, we’d be exceeding the 16 Mbit of cartridge space with just 2 tracks.”
“There’s no way we could put the soundtrack as wav files on [the Virtual Boy]; even if we could persuade the system to play them, we’d be exceeding the 16 Mbit of cartridge space with just 2 tracks,” Maroe told me. “The VB hardware supports 6 channels, 4 of which are basic wavetable synthesis (think samplers, you put in sound info, and you can shift the note of the sound to create music). The 5th is a sampler plus frequency modulation, which I am sure our audio master Jake Kaufman (AKA Virt) can handle! The 6th is simply a noise generator, good for explosions and percussion. Voice-over obviously will have to be omitted as well, replaced with text-based cutscenes.”
Playing Vanguard V on the Virtual Boy
It wasn’t long after the release of the Oculus Rift that someone released a Virtual Boy emulator compatible with the modern VR headset. VBjin-ovr is an adaptation of the VBjin emulator which allows players to run Virtual Boy games inside the Oculus Rift. Should ZeroTransform reach their stretch goal for Virtual Boy support, the following hilarious scenario would fall into place: A retro version of a new game is built for old hardware (Virtual Boy), to be emulated and run on new hardware (Oculus Rift).
And while that irony is certainly palpable, those with access to the Virtual Boy system and the right hardware could play the title authentically.
“Turns out there’s still some Virtual Boy geeks out there that will convert an existing virtual boy cartridge to one that reads from removable flash media.”
“The question came as to how we would test this on genuine hardware. Turns out there’s still some Virtual Boy geeks out there that will convert an existing virtual boy cartridge to one that reads from removable flash media. While we won’t be providing a cartridge, there will be means for anyone to play our game on [the actual Virtual Boy] hardware,” Maroe told me.
Whether or not ZeroTransform hits their $1 million stretch goal for Virtual Boy support, I wholeheartedly believe the Vanguard V Kickstarter is worth supporting. Great virtual reality content isn’t going to appear out of thin air or be created by someone in their free time. It takes a proper team of developers to make more than a novel demo. Justin Moravetz has dedicated himself and ZeroTransform to virtual reality development and the studio has already produced two defining demos for both the Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2. Just like the grass-roots VR community was responsible for revitalizing virtual reality hardware by supporting the Oculus Rift Kickstarter, so too should we support promising virtual reality content, especially that which is as multi-platform as Vanguard V.
