Virtural Boy buyer's guide (longish)

[P3D Bob Wier <wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, I made it over to the Tx NSA meeting in Fort Worth on
Saturday. It was a small but extremely pleasant meeting. I got
to meet several of the list members, and take a look at a variety
of formats. Such as cattle auction VM reels projected (now, there's
a lot of bull!:-) Also bought a couple of views (one pre-civil war -
which I will be putting on the ftp site for it's unusual subject 
matter).

Anyway, the other major reason I made the 250 mile round trip was
to locate a Virtural Boy system. It becaume a fair size undertaking,
especially considering I'm not located in the DFW telephone area. What
I did first was to grab www.switchboard.com and get the phone number
of every Blockbuster video along the route I was taking. Starting
at 9 pm the night before, I called them in sequence. Some places
said they'd sold all of theirs, some said they had not started selling
them yet, and a few said they had one.

One of thos places was up at Paris, Texas,
40 miles northeast of here. So I jumped in the car, drove up there
and guess what - no unit. The manager said they had all been sold.
This happened to me twice at different stores, so if you are calling
around, ask the teenager who answers if he/she/it has actually SEEN
the unit with their own eyes before going out of your way to try to
buy it. Also be careful because several stores are also clearing out
Sega Playstations, and for some reason people think they are inter-
changable (!).

Apparently each store has a lot of choice as to how they handle the
sale. Some said they had sold theirs *months* ago, some just started
this week. The price varied around a bit also (from a low of $29 to 
a high of $50). As did the games ($8 - $20). 

Here are some things to look for (thanks to Al Lewis for pointing
some of these out, and those who have mentioned them previously).
The weak point of the design is at the point where the legs of the
support stand join together to support the platform on which the 
display mounts. It's pretty cheap, weak plastic. If a kid has too
enthusiastically pulled apart the support legs, it probably has fractured
the plastic. It might be repairable by epoxying (using STRONG) epoxy and
a metal plate on the front, similar to that which is on the back.
The cracks are hard to spot - you have to tilt the top of the stand
away from you and look carefully at the bottom beveled edge of the plastic
clamp. Al said he feels that the detent positions on the clamp might
aggrivate the problem by making people tug hard to get past the 
bump on the housing, and then you have so much force on the leg
that it crashed into the side of the clamp fracturing the plastic, so
he filed the bumps off (jump in here Al if I'm misstating it).

Also, you probably want to make sure that the power supply boxes are 
present. I ended up buying 3 units to get a complete set of parts
to make up two (more or less). One of them came with only a battery
box but was missing the AC power adapter (they say 6 AA size cells
will last 7 hours - but I bet this thing will chew thru them like
a buzzsaw). The other two units have the AC adapter but lack
the battery box (they are mutually exclusive as far as mounting on the
display are concerned). I don't know whether they normally came with both,
or if the store ordered some with one, some with the other, or people
just stole/lost some of them.

I did manage to get a complete instruction manual with one of the
units. The most useful information is how to check the LED alignment
in the view. To do this, load any game pack. When the game
title is on the screen, press Left (on the right side + Control Pad),
B, Down, A, Up.

This should show you a horizontal line with two shorter vertical
lines. The vertical lines should be centered (or at least cross)
the horizontal line. If not (one of my units is pretty far off)
then presumably you have a vertical alignment problem. They say to
call the service number for instructions. It may be "field adjustable".

So far, I like the Jack Brothers best (sort of a Pac Man with multiple
levels). I also tried lying in bed with the display unit placed over
my eyes (it's well enough balanced that you can do this) but it's
heavy enough that it eventually smushed down my nose and made
breathing a bit difficult :-)

Now, the big question - if ANYONE has technical information on this
unit (programming, display electrical parameters, it would be extremely
interesting). PLEASE drop me a note so I don't have to reverse 
engineer everything.

Lastly, in searching the net, I find that there is a lot of speculation
in the game groups as to whether Nintendo is getting ready to introduce
a full color version, or RE-introduce this unit with different programming,
etc. Also Crystal Eyes(?) has introduced a lower cost version of their shutter
glasses, which appear somewhat similar to the discontinued SEGA glasses.

THANKS

   -------- Bob Wier ----- wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -----
  East Texas State University Computer Science Dept.
   keeper of the Motorola MC68HC11, ICOM Radio, and
   Overland-Trails mailing lists and the LDS Genealogy
                     State Research Outlines 
         "Con*gress - n. - the antonym of Pro*gress"
               stereo smiley      : -)        :  - )



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