VBoy Color emulator repaints Virtual Boy games in full colour, in 3D on Quest and now as a RetroArch core

yuk27's open-source emulator colours every Virtual Boy game automatically and ships hand-painted colour packs for over a dozen. Beta 7 adds a RetroArch core and RetroAchievements.

AI-drafted from 3 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Nintendo's Virtual Boy only ever showed red on black. VBoy Color, a free emulator from GitHub user yuk27, puts its games into colour while keeping the stereoscopic 3D. The repository was created on 6 October, and the seventh beta of version 1.0.0 went up on 12 October. It runs in 3D on Meta Quest 2, 3, 3S and Pro headsets, in a window on Windows and Linux, and on Android phones, tablets and handhelds.

How the colour works

The default Auto mode colours each pixel by what drew it: background layers by their depth, from violet far away to sand up close, and characters by their palette. Games that draw without tiles, such as Red Alarm's wireframe world, are coloured by distance, worked out from the gap between the two eyes' pictures. Three other modes give each of the console's four shades its own colour, map brightness onto a gradient, or tint the picture, red included.

On top of that sit hand-painted colour packs, done tile by tile. The README lists built-in packs for Bound High, Dragon Hopper, Galactic Pinball, Innsmouth no Yakata, Jack Bros., Mario Clash, Mario's Tennis, Panic Bomber, Space Invaders Virtual Collection, Teleroboxer, Vertical Force, V-Tetris and Wario Land, plus menus and HUDs for a few more. Packs hold only colours, never game graphics, and players can paint their own on PC.

A RetroArch core and achievements

When Retro Dodo covered it on 10 October, VBoy Color ran on PC and Quest. The beta 7 notes add a RetroArch core for Windows, Linux, macOS and Android with the colour modes and the 3D options for a normal screen, and softcore RetroAchievements. On flat screens, 3D comes as side by side, top and bottom, or for coloured glasses.

The emulation itself is Beetle VB, libretro's fork of Mednafen's Virtual Boy code. The README says it is compiled untouched apart from a hook that reports which tile drew each pixel. The VR app started as a fork of CidVonHighwind's VirtualBoyGo, and the idea of colouring the four shades comes from the 3DS emulator Red Viper, though none of its code is used. VBoy Color is GPL 3.0, is not affiliated with Nintendo or Meta, and includes no games: the README asks players to use ROMs made from cartridges they own.

Sources

• yuk27/VBoyColor (GitHub)
• VBoy Color 1.0.0 beta 7 (GitHub)
• Virtual Boy Games Can Now Be Played In Full Colour Thanks To New Emulator (Retro Dodo)

Image: Image: VBoy Color (yuk27), Wario Land original and in colour