Turning the Virtual Boy 'Virtual Console' Toy Into a Real One
Nintendo's Virtual Boy is one of the most infamous consoles ever made — a tabletop "3D" headset that you peered into like a View-Master. There are plenty of little Virtual Boy toys and replicas out there that look the part but do absolutely nothing. I wanted to take one of those non-functional shells and turn it into a real, playable miniature console: a working screen inside, real audio, and a USB port to plug a controller into.
This post walks through the build at a high level, but the most useful thing for anyone who wants to follow along is the exact parts list. Everything below fit inside the toy's housing and runs off a single Orange Pi single-board computer.
Parts List
Here's everything I used, with links. Prices and availability on AliExpress shift around, so treat the links as a starting point rather than a guarantee.
- Orange Pi with 2GB of RAM — the brains of the build. The 2GB model has enough headroom to run an emulation front-end comfortably.
- 5" HDMI Monitor — small enough to fit inside the housing while still being readable.
- Short A1–D3 micro HDMI to full HDMI ribbon cable — a flat ribbon cable keeps the HDMI run short and low-profile inside the cramped shell.
- Audio jack splitter cable — splits the audio out so sound can be routed cleanly.
- Short USB-C male to female extender — used to bring the USB-C port out to the exterior of the case so it's accessible.
- Small USB-C hub — expands the single port into the connections needed for power, controller, and accessories.
- Small USB speaker — compact enough to tuck inside and give the toy real audio.
How It Comes Together
The core of the build is the Orange Pi, which does all the work of running games and driving the display. The 5" HDMI monitor sits where you look into the headset, connected to the Pi over the short micro HDMI ribbon cable — a flat ribbon is the key to making the connection fit without bending a bulky cable inside the shell.
Power and connectivity run through the USB-C extender and USB-C hub, which let me expose a single external port while still fanning out to everything inside — power in, a controller, and the USB speaker for sound. The audio splitter rounds out the audio routing.
The result is a Virtual Boy that started life as a do-nothing display piece and now actually boots, shows a picture on its little internal screen, plays sound, and takes a controller over USB. Check out the video above for the full teardown and assembly.