A few years ago, I ended up getting myself the bizarre little gadget known as the Virtual Boy. I remember that the person I bought it off of delayed shipping it out for a bit in order to fix a problem with it that had popped up at the last second. A very respectable thing for them to do, though considering the unit began having issues for me within about a week or two, I assume they simply tried one of the old-school quick fixes, which never really tend to hold up. So, my Virtual Boy was officially a project piece, and now, like 3 years later, I'm finally tackling it. Here's how it's gone so far...
This is a common problem with the Virtual Boy. Basically, Nintendo did not really design these things with longevity in mind. As such, the ribbon cables which attach the eyepieces to the main board were not soldered down for a solid, foolproof connection as they should have been. Instead, they were stuck on with adhesive, which fails over time.
I used the Virtual Boy Eyepatch from Cardosi Customs, which went on without issue and have a very solid connection. I did what Nintendo should have done to begin with. Some people use the original cables by using the soldering iron to melt away some of the plastic before soldering the metal inside to the board, but mine were in too bad a shape to do this. The replacements I ended up using were much easier to work with, anyway. Unfortunately, while I was installing the ribbons, I must have accidentally caused this next problem...
This drove me crazy for days. I cleaned the mirror and every other lens and surface that the image passes through or bounces off of to get to your eye, but I just couldn't get rid of it. I even broke open a plastic part containing two lenses which was glued together just to wipe down each side of both lenses. The real problem, however, was much harder to see but much quicker to fix.
There were two or three veeeery faint scratches on the clear piece of plastic over the LED. I could just barely see them when I held the PCB right up to the light. Thankfully, just one application of plastic polish (I used Plastx) cleared everything right up. I can still just barely see it if I'm looking for it on a solid bright screen, so maybe if I have to open it back up in the future, I'll do one more application, but it's no longer worth going back in just for that. I'm satisfied!
UPDATE: I did indeed apply it one more time to either very little or no difference. Maybe it'll never be perfect, but it's still a million times better than it was with the untreated scratches.
Another piece of engineering which lacked much foresight is the piece of plastic where the legs and neck of the stand meet. It holds the legs in place, and it's fairly hollow inside, partially in order to allow the legs to collapse inward. With the Virtual Boy weighing down on it, all the pressure put on the medallion results in it cracking over time, leading to the entire stand becoming less reliable or even totally useless if the medallion breaks fully.
On each leg of the stand, there is a triangular plastic brace. I moved one of them to connect the two legs, just under the cracked medallion, in order to take a lot off the stress off of it. I believe I picked this tip up from a forum. However, this is a temporary solution—I ordered a permanent solution in the form of a replacement made of metal. I'm a little annoyed that I couldn't find a single aftermarket medallion made to look exactly like the original, which simply has the Nintendo logo and "patent pending". The metal one I ordered from Video Game Perfection trades the latter font with the Virtual Boy logo, and all the font is in white, so it stands out more than the original, but what's more important is that... it's metal. Aluminum, in fact. It's gonna last for some time. That hasn't shown up yet, so I'll update whenever it does.
UPDATE: I was wrong about the white paint. It's actually shiny, bare metal, which looks pretty swanky, I must admit. Anyway, I've been using it for a bit and I think it was a good choice. Two things to note, though—One, it includes its own hex screws, and you can't use the originals, so be sure you have a screwdriver or allen wrench that'll fit. Two, I'd suggest leaving a little slack in said screws if you ever hope to collapse the stand. It should still look and feel solid when the legs are out, but the medallion will wiggle a little when they're retracted. If you don't plan to collapse the stand, though, go ahead and screw those puppies in tight.
Sometimes while playing, the image will slowly grow and shrink horizontally for a short while. It can be a bit distracting.
I've read that this can be caused by dust or dirt getting onto the small sensors on the eyepiece assemblies which I didn't even notice while working on my system. I assumed it had something to do with low batteries or maybe bad capacitors, but this should be an easy fix. Might do this if it gets bad enough... but I'm getting real sick of disassembling this thing.
UPDATE: The sensors in question are on a small PCB mounted to the eyepiece assemblies. When looking at an assembly, There's a little prong on the back of the mirror part which rests inside the sensor, so if you gently hold the mirror out of the way, you can see a red sensor on the inside of the roughly U-shaped black piece. I cleaned both sensors out by squirting a little isopropyl alcohol over them. I haven't seen the image distory itself in a few days, so I'm guessing that did the trick!
Okay, maybe this isn't as much of a problem as it is an annoyance, and one that was common at the time, as well... but still worth doing something about!
The Virtual Boy can use a Super NES power cable instead of the battery pack, but doing so requires an adaptor to attatch it to the controller. I finally bit the bullet and ordered one online, but it hasn't shown up yet. I'll update when it does. In the meantime, I've been using rechargeable batteries with it. They work fine, of course, but it takes almost all of the rechargeable AAs I own. Actually, I might have bought these batteries for the Virtual Boy, since I remember getting them around the same time...
UPDATE: I've been using the AC Adapter Tap exclusively since it arrived and it mostly works well. It was a little hard to adjust to at first because it weighs so much less than a fully loaded battery pack. I kind of miss the weight, but I think I'd rather not have to worry about my batteries dying mid-game. I will say, the Tap seems to have a common problem where the tab which is meant to secure it to the controller gets bent inward, rendering it useless, and allowing the tap to freely slide off if, say, you rest the controller on a table, or accidentally nudge it from below. I bet this could be "fixed" by jamming a piece of plastic or wood or something behind it while it's connected to the controller, or more permanently by heating the plastic and bending it back, but this one isn't a huge problem for me, personally. If it becomes one, though, I might have to come back here for update 2.
UPDATE 2: Oh, yes. So, I crammed a bunch of wooden toothpicks behind the tab until it was even with the back of the adapter again, and then I gave it a short blast with my hot air station set to 300°C with the narrow tip attached, keeping it moving over the tab. I used toothpicks because I didn't want to use something metal that might get too hot and melt the plastic, or something plastic that might melt itself. Maybe one of those would have been okay, but I just used wood because it felt the safest to me. I also had the Tap disassembled for this, but I don't think that was entirely necessary. Anyway, I let it cool off for a bit before I took out the toothpicks, and now the AC Adapter Tap is good as new!
This is one I also did to myself as a result of constantly disassembling and reassembling the console, but it was an obvious and easy fix, at least.
Almost all the wires were looking rough by the end of it, to the point where the eyepieces moving inside and nudging the wires while adjusting the focus was enough to make the sound cut out. I just trimmed off a tiny bit of each one, stripped the tips and re-soldered. Nothing to it!
So, those are the misadventures of my Virtual Boy and I. Maybe some of this info is useful to someone out there. Resources for this console seem kinda hard to come by, in my experience. There just aren't enough Virtual Boy die-hards out there to document problems and solutions, so I had to figure out some things myself. Had I not read about the thing with the sensors, I may have gone ahead and done a full recap. Not like that's a bad idea, but it wouldn't have fixed the issue.
After all the updates I've made to this page, I think I'm officially out of things to repair or improve on my Virtual Boy. I'm so happy that this console went from unusable to practically perfect in just under a month. Now, I just need to get some more games for it!
In closing... Stay virtual and game on!