After 30 Years, Virtual Boy Gets Its Chance To Shine

When looking back on classic gaming, there’s plenty of room for debate. What was the best Atari game? Which was the superior 16-bit console, the Genesis or the Super NES? Would the N64 have been more commercially successful if it had used CDs over cartridges? It goes on and on. Many of these questions are subjective, and have no definitive answer.

But even with so many opinions swirling around, there’s at least one point that anyone with even a passing knowledge of gaming history will agree with — the Virtual Boy is unquestionably the worst gaming system Nintendo ever produced. Which is what makes its return in 2026 all the more unexpected.

Released in Japan and North America in 1995, the Virtual Boy was touted as a revolution in gaming. It was the first mainstream consumer device capable of showing stereoscopic 3D imagery, powered by a 20 MHz 32-bit RISC CPU and a custom graphics processor developed by Nintendo to meet the unique challenges of rendering gameplay from two different perspectives simultaneously.

In many ways it’s the forebear of modern virtual reality (VR) headsets, but its high cost, small library of games, and the technical limitations of its unique display technology ultimately lead to it being pulled from shelves after less than a year on the market.

Now, 30 years after its disappointing debut, this groundbreaking system is getting a second chance. Later this month, Nintendo will be releasing a replica of the Virtual Boy into which players can insert their Switch or Switch 2 console. The device essentially works like Google Cardboard, and with the release of an official emulator, users will be able to play Virtual Boy games complete with the 3D effect the system was known for.

This is an exciting opportunity for those with an interest in classic gaming, as the relative rarity of the Virtual Boy has made it difficult to experience these games in the way they were meant to be played. It’s also reviving interest in this unique piece of hardware, and although we can’t turn back the clock on the financial failure of the Virtual Boy, perhaps a new generation can at least appreciate the engineering that made it possible.

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Ask Hackaday: How Do You Digitize Your Documents?

Like many of you, I have a hard time getting rid of stuff. I’ve got boxes and boxes of weirdo bits and bobs, and piles of devices that I’ll eventually get around to stripping down into even more bits and bobs. Despite regular purges — I try to bring a car-load of crap treasure to local hackerspaces and meetups at least a couple times a year — the pile only continues to grow.

But the problem isn’t limited to hardware components. There’s all sorts of things that the logical part of me understands I’ll almost certainly never need, and yet I can’t bring myself to dispose of. One of those things just so happens to be documents. Anything printed is fair game. Could be the notes from my last appointment with the doctor, or fliers for events I attended years ago. Doesn’t matter, the stacks keep building up until I end up cramming it all into a box and start the whole process starts over again.

I’ve largely convinced myself that the perennial accumulation of electronic bric-à-brac is an occupational hazard, and have come to terms with it. But I think there’s a good chance of moving the needle on the document situation, and if that involves a bit of high-tech overengineering, even better. As such, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks investigating digitizing the documents that have information worth retaining so that the originals can be sent along to Valhalla in my fire pit.

The following represents some of my observations thus far, in the hopes that others going down a similar path may find them useful. But what I’m really interested in is hearing from the Hackaday community. Surely I’m not the only one trying to save some storage space by turn piles of papers into ones and zeros.

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Skimming Satellites: On The Edge Of The Atmosphere

There’s little about building spacecraft that anyone would call simple. But there’s at least one element of designing a vehicle that will operate outside the Earth’s atmosphere that’s fairly easier to handle: aerodynamics. That’s because, at the altitude that most satellites operate at, drag can essentially be ignored. Which is why most satellites look like refrigerators with solar panels and high-gain antennas attached jutting out at odd angles.

But for all the advantages that the lack of meaningful drag on a vehicle has, there’s at least one big potential downside. If a spacecraft is orbiting high enough over the Earth that the impact of atmospheric drag is negligible, then the only way that vehicle is coming back down in a reasonable amount of time is if it has the means to reduce its own velocity. Otherwise, it could be stuck in orbit for decades. At a high enough orbit, it could essentially stay up forever.

Launched in 1958, Vanguard 1 is expected to remain in orbit until at least 2198

There was a time when that kind of thing wasn’t a problem. It was just enough to get into space in the first place, and little thought was given to what was going to happen in five or ten years down the road. But today, low Earth orbit is getting crowded. As the cost of launching something into space continues to drop, multiple companies are either planning or actively building their own satellite constellations comprised of thousands of individual spacecraft.

Fortunately, there may be a simple solution to this problem. By putting a satellite into what’s known as a very low Earth orbit (VLEO), a spacecraft will experience enough drag that maintaining its velocity requires constantly firing its thrusters.  Naturally this presents its own technical challenges, but the upside is that such an orbit is essentially self-cleaning — should the craft’s propulsion fail, it would fall out of orbit and burn up in months or even weeks. As an added bonus, operating at a lower altitude has other practical advantages, such as allowing for lower latency communication.

VLEO satellites hold considerable promise, but successfully operating in this unique environment requires certain design considerations. The result are vehicles that look less like the flying refrigerators we’re used to, with a hybrid design that features the sort of aerodynamic considerations more commonly found on aircraft.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Finding A Flat Tire

There was a time when wise older people warned you to check your tire pressure regularly. We never did, and would eventually wind up with a flat or, worse, a blowout. These days, your car will probably warn you when your tires are low. That’s because of a class of devices known as tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS).

If you are like us, you see some piece of tech like this, and you immediately guess how it probably works. In this case, the obvious guess is sometimes, but not always, correct. There are two different styles that are common, and only one works in the most obvious way.

Obvious Guess

We’d guess that the tire would have a little pressure sensor attached to it that would then wirelessly transmit data. In fact, some do work this way, and that’s known as dTPMS where the “d” stands for direct.

Of course, such a system needs power, and that’s usually in the form of batteries, although there are some that get power wirelessly using an RFID-like system. Anything wireless has to be able to penetrate the steel and rubber in the tire, of course.

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Marion Stokes Fought Disinformation With VCRs

You’ve likely at least heard of Marion Stokes, the woman who constantly recorded television for over 30 years. She comes up on reddit and other places every so often as a hero archivist who fought against disinformation and disappearing history. But who was Marion Stokes, and why did she undertake this project? And more importantly, what happened to all of those tapes? Let’s take a look.

Marion the Librarian

Marion was born November 25, 1929 in Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Noted for her left-wing beliefs as a young woman, she became quite politically active, and was even courted by the Communist Party USA to potentially become a leader. Marion was also involved in the civil rights movement.

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ISS Medical Emergency: An Orbital Ambulance Ride

Over the course of its nearly 30 years in orbit, the International Space Station has played host to more “firsts” than can possibly be counted. When you’re zipping around Earth at five miles per second, even the most mundane of events takes on a novel element. Arguably, that’s the point of a crewed orbital research complex in the first place — to study how humans can live and work in an environment that’s so unimaginably hostile that something as simple as eating lunch requires special equipment and training.

Today marks another unique milestone for the ISS program, albeit a bittersweet one. Just a few hours ago, NASA successfully completed the first medical evacuation from the Station, cutting the Crew-11 mission short by at least a month. By the time this article is released, the patient will be back on terra firma and having their condition assessed in California.  This leaves just three crew members on the ISS until NASA’s Crew-12 mission can launch in early February, though it’s possible that mission’s timeline will be moved up.

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Clone Wars: IBM Edition

If you search the Internet for “Clone Wars,” you’ll get a lot of Star Wars-related pages. But the original Clone Wars took place a long time ago in a galaxy much nearer to ours, and it has a lot to do with the computer you are probably using right now to read this. (Well, unless it is a Mac, something ARM-based, or an old retro-rig. I did say probably!)

IBM is a name that, for many years, was synonymous with computers, especially big mainframe computers. However, it didn’t start out that way. IBM originally made mechanical calculators and tabulating machines. That changed in 1952 with the IBM 701, IBM’s first computer that you’d recognize as a computer.

If you weren’t there, it is hard to understand how IBM dominated the computer market in the 1960s and 1970s. Sure, there were others like Univac, Honeywell, and Burroughs. But especially in the United States, IBM was the biggest fish in the pond. At one point, the computer market’s estimated worth was a bit more than $11 billion, and IBM’s five biggest competitors accounted for about $2 billion, with almost all of the rest going to IBM.

So it was somewhat surprising that IBM didn’t roll out the personal computer first, or at least very early. Even companies that made “small” computers for the day, like Digital Equipment Corporation or Data General, weren’t really expecting the truly personal computer. That push came from companies no one had heard of at the time, like MITS, SWTP, IMSAI, and Commodore. Continue reading “Clone Wars: IBM Edition”