[caption id="attachment_14866" align="alignright" width="255"] "Virtual-Boy-Set" by Evan-Amos. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.[/caption] The Vanguard V Kickstarter is raising funds to bring the sleek virtual reality arcade shooter to a bevy of VR platforms, with the potential to support one platform that hasn't been available for nearly two decades. Developer ZeroTransform has an audacious $1 million dollar stretch goal that's not a joke; the team says they're ready, willing, and able to make a version of Vanguard V for Nintendo's 19 year-old 'VR headset' , the Virtual Boy. When it comes to examples of failed virtual reality platforms (and weird names), Virtual Boy is almost always mentioned. The headset-console, which sat atop a mount and had users peer into it, lasted less than a year before being discontinued by Nintendo. Released in July of 1995, despite projections of 3 million hardware and 14 million software units sold, the Virtual Boy was discontinued by December, 1995 in Japan and March, 1996 in the U.S. I've dug up the figure 770,000 when searching for hardware sales, though wasn't able to confirm it with an official source, apparently Nintendo closely guards the data surrounding perhaps its greatest hardware blunder. Regardless of the specific number, the Virtual Boy is a renowned failure in the world of videogame consoles and virtual reality hardware. Users of the device cited simulator sickness, high cost, and lack of immersion (due to limited graphics, lack of headtracking, etc.) as the leading factors in the system's downfall. And yet the unit could see a new game added to its unofficial library 19 years after discontinuation. ZeroTransform, a newly formed indie-dev studio headed by Justin Moravetz (of Proton Pulse fame), is in the midst of a Kickstarter for one of the most polished VR games I've seen yet, Vanguard V. The studio promises support for just about every consumer VR platform on the horizon: Oculus Rift, Sony Morpheus, Android, and iOS (the latter two for use with VR smartphone adapters). And while the future is bright for VR, ZeroTransform hasn't forgotten about the past. The studio is dedicated to producing a version of Vanguard V compatible with Nintendo's 19-year old Virtual Boy 'VR headset,' if they somehow manage to blast through their $198,000 funding goal to the $1 million stretch goal. See Also: First-look at Vanguard Valkyrie Gameplay – Zero Transform Brings High Impact Arcade Action to Virtual Reality I was curious to see how serious the studio was about this stretch goal. It turns out that Moravetz owns four Virtual Boys himself. He put me in touch in touch Max Maroe, ZeroTransform's Tech Director to learn more. To my surprise, the studio is not only confident that they have the means to create a game to run on a Virtual Boy emulator, they could even run it on the genuine hardware. "Can we make a version for Virtual Boy?" [caption id="attachment_14886" align="aligncenter" width="700"] The 8-bit easter egg mode from the Vanguard V Kickstarter demo.[/caption] "Going back to a 20Mhz system that time forgot might prove quite challenging." "Justin [Moravetz] asked me this question one day while we were brainstorming stretch goals for our Kickstarter," Maroe told me. "At the time, I didn't give him a positive answer, because, quite frankly, I didn't know. I've done a small amount of assembly-level programming in my day, but I've always enjoyed it. Still, I've grown accustomed to the fantastic magical tools we have available for modern platforms, and effectively unlimited processing power. Going back to a 20Mhz system that time forgot might prove quite challenging." Although the system is 19 years old and only ever saw the release of some 22 games, ZeroTransform wouldn't need to start from scratch. In doing research on the feasibility of a Virtual Boy version of Vanguard V, Maroe stumbled upon a document literally called 'The VB Sacred Tech Scroll.' The document, though perhaps sacred, isn't ancient—it was written in 2013. The 95 page 'scroll', credited to 'Guy Perfect,' brings together all of the Virtual Boy's technical development details. "Astonishingly, there’s actually a still-active development community built around the Virtual Boy." "This document alone was enough for me to give an affirmative to our ability to deploy to Virtual Boy. It contains pretty much all the information you need to address the Virtual Boy at a hardware level, and even without further tools and examples, would be all the information I'd need to build the needed tools (image converters, music trackers, and the core game engine)," said Maroe. "Astonishingly, there's actually a still-active development community built around the Virtual Boy. In my travels, I stumbled upon PlanetVB, a site containing information about all things Virtual Boy." As Maroe explored the pioneering Virtual Boy development work done by the PlanetVB community, he found that someone had developed a C-compiler for the Virtual Boy, which eventually lead to the development of a compiler based on the GNU Compiler Collection. "What does this mean? It means that I don't even have to base the game on V810 assembly [programming language], at least not primarily." Maroe said. "This was a relief, because while I've done assembly coding in the past, it's been on small, simple projects (for the Sega VMU); I've never had my mettle tested on a large project. I still may have to (joyfully!) delve in there for certain repetitive functions to ensure optimization, but the basic structure can now be defined in soft, comfy, imperative code." A Modern Retro Game [caption id="attachment_14853" align="alignright" width="309"] Qu, Vanguard V's main character, holds BiT, her AI companion, in the Oculus Rift version of the game.[/caption] Of course, a version of Vanguard V for the Virtual Boy would share little more than conceptual and thematic similarities between it and the slick modern version made for the Oculus Rift. "This is more like a 'port' back in the good ol' days when arcade hardware was significantly stronger than home console hardware. Like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game for NES vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade. Or Robocop NES vs Robocop the arcade, etc," Maroe told me. "Firstly, the control scheme will not be able to carry over into the Virtual Boy easily. While it technically would be possible to add a gyro/accelerometer to the cartridge and address it using the Cartridge Expansion memory space (similar to how Wario Ware Twisted adds motion sensors to the GameBoy Advance) the feasibility of this and the additional cost and hardware R&D time would not be worth it," said Maroe. "Besides, Virtual Boys aren't really designed to be strapped to your head; they are quite heavy and not very well balanced for it! That being said, I am excited about the control scheme because we could unlink movement and firing, putting targeting on one d-pad and movement on the other." Continue Reading on Page 2... 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.