- Joined
- Aug 2, 2018
- Messages
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- 22
Alright, long time lurker, long time builder, not really anyone who's made anything original. I would like to change that this year.
I was inspired by Shank's Real Boy build and was initially looking to build something similar myself. After looking at the build I started thinking of how I would want to build a unit and quickly went down a rabbit hole that started with looking at a Virtual Boy motherboard and ended with me installing Quartus and trying to figure out exactly how to even begin working with an FPGA. I am going to jump ahead to the projects essentials and stretch goals and then begin logging my process.
Essential: Fully functional Virtual Boy in a vertical handheld form factor. OLED screen is a hard requirement for me to consider it a success. Cartridge art also needs to be visible when inserted.
Stretch: Admittedly I have a ton of ideas for stretch and hope to be able to build in at least some of them. Controller built on an RP2040 that can communicate with both the virtual boy and FPGA for an on screen menu. Support for original virtual boy battery and AC adapters, magnetic attach screen bezel to allow for a DMG style front or visor view (not an actual VR view, just the virtual boy aesthetic). Super stretch id love to have everything on one PCB including the Virtual Boy hardware itself.
Worklog to date:
I started researching about a week ago how the Real Boy was built and that led me to Furrtek's Virtual Tap. I dug into the resolutions it supported and the output types and quickly realized I was going to have a hard time capturing one of the most important parts to me of the Virtual Boy, its LED array. Because of the Virtual Boy directly driving LEDs, contrast is infinite and blacks are pure. The closest I can capture that today in a panel would be to go OLED. Cool, so lets find an OLED panel and driver board that would line up nicely with the Virtual Tap andddd it doesnt exist. Digging into native OLED panels most of them are driven via MIPI and it was very quickly becoming far too complicated. Finally I did find Samsung made one panel that could fit this project perfectly. The AMS369FG06. It is a 480x800 panel with a 3.7" size and runs on SPI and RGB. Taking the virtual boys resolution and integer scaling it 2x leaves a window of 32 pixels perfectly both horizontal and vertical (stretch goal of bezels?). I ordered a panel last week off AliExpress and locked that in as the first component.
Driving the panel is what I consider to be my main challenge of this project. I need to fork the Virtual Tap project and reuse the logic for taking in the LED array data and writing to framebuffer, but from there have it drive the OLED directly and write out the framebuffer as there is no VGA driver board for this panel, at least that I could find. I started looking at the Virtual Tap and the CPLD it uses and realized I would quickly outgrow the chips capabilities if I started driving an OLED. I would need to bump up the power and work with an FPGA. I have programmed FPGAs for projects but flashing a bitstream and writing verilog is quite the jump in difficulty. I need to learn how to crawl before I run though so at this point I am not even looking at the Virtual Tap code to begin forking it. I just need to be able to turn this OLED on and write hello world or something. After many hours of researching FPGA families, the cost of their associated chips, pinouts, etc. I landed on Cyclone 10. Its truthfully probably way overkill but id rather have the room and not need it than get halfway through and be back to the drawing board. The plus here is that I should be able to leverage the Cyclone's internal RAM and drop the external SRAM from the BOM. I ordered an EK-10CL025U256 dev board from Mouser and it looks at the moment like UPS lost it so I am in a bit of a holding pattern. In the meantime as I type this I realize though that I got the panel in and no breakout board so I have no way to connect it to the dev board anyways, so ill be sorting that out tonight. Once I have everything in I'll do my next wordy writeup on how that all goes.
On the side I also picked up 2 spare virtual boys off Mercari Japan so I have some parts there to work with. Waiting on that to land as well.
I was inspired by Shank's Real Boy build and was initially looking to build something similar myself. After looking at the build I started thinking of how I would want to build a unit and quickly went down a rabbit hole that started with looking at a Virtual Boy motherboard and ended with me installing Quartus and trying to figure out exactly how to even begin working with an FPGA. I am going to jump ahead to the projects essentials and stretch goals and then begin logging my process.
Essential: Fully functional Virtual Boy in a vertical handheld form factor. OLED screen is a hard requirement for me to consider it a success. Cartridge art also needs to be visible when inserted.
Stretch: Admittedly I have a ton of ideas for stretch and hope to be able to build in at least some of them. Controller built on an RP2040 that can communicate with both the virtual boy and FPGA for an on screen menu. Support for original virtual boy battery and AC adapters, magnetic attach screen bezel to allow for a DMG style front or visor view (not an actual VR view, just the virtual boy aesthetic). Super stretch id love to have everything on one PCB including the Virtual Boy hardware itself.
Worklog to date:
I started researching about a week ago how the Real Boy was built and that led me to Furrtek's Virtual Tap. I dug into the resolutions it supported and the output types and quickly realized I was going to have a hard time capturing one of the most important parts to me of the Virtual Boy, its LED array. Because of the Virtual Boy directly driving LEDs, contrast is infinite and blacks are pure. The closest I can capture that today in a panel would be to go OLED. Cool, so lets find an OLED panel and driver board that would line up nicely with the Virtual Tap andddd it doesnt exist. Digging into native OLED panels most of them are driven via MIPI and it was very quickly becoming far too complicated. Finally I did find Samsung made one panel that could fit this project perfectly. The AMS369FG06. It is a 480x800 panel with a 3.7" size and runs on SPI and RGB. Taking the virtual boys resolution and integer scaling it 2x leaves a window of 32 pixels perfectly both horizontal and vertical (stretch goal of bezels?). I ordered a panel last week off AliExpress and locked that in as the first component.
Driving the panel is what I consider to be my main challenge of this project. I need to fork the Virtual Tap project and reuse the logic for taking in the LED array data and writing to framebuffer, but from there have it drive the OLED directly and write out the framebuffer as there is no VGA driver board for this panel, at least that I could find. I started looking at the Virtual Tap and the CPLD it uses and realized I would quickly outgrow the chips capabilities if I started driving an OLED. I would need to bump up the power and work with an FPGA. I have programmed FPGAs for projects but flashing a bitstream and writing verilog is quite the jump in difficulty. I need to learn how to crawl before I run though so at this point I am not even looking at the Virtual Tap code to begin forking it. I just need to be able to turn this OLED on and write hello world or something. After many hours of researching FPGA families, the cost of their associated chips, pinouts, etc. I landed on Cyclone 10. Its truthfully probably way overkill but id rather have the room and not need it than get halfway through and be back to the drawing board. The plus here is that I should be able to leverage the Cyclone's internal RAM and drop the external SRAM from the BOM. I ordered an EK-10CL025U256 dev board from Mouser and it looks at the moment like UPS lost it so I am in a bit of a holding pattern. In the meantime as I type this I realize though that I got the panel in and no breakout board so I have no way to connect it to the dev board anyways, so ill be sorting that out tonight. Once I have everything in I'll do my next wordy writeup on how that all goes.
On the side I also picked up 2 spare virtual boys off Mercari Japan so I have some parts there to work with. Waiting on that to land as well.
