Virtual Boy games in color - in 3D on Meta Quest, on PC, and on Android phones and handhelds.

VBoy Color is a free, open-source Virtual Boy emulator. On a Quest headset it shows games the way the Virtual Boy was meant to be seen, in stereoscopic 3D, but in color instead of red on black. On Windows and Linux it plays them in a window, no headset needed, and on Android phones, tablets and handhelds with touch controls or a gamepad. It is also a RetroArch core, for Windows, Linux, macOS and Android.

▶ Watch the demo - eight games, the original red next to VBoy Color (2 min)

VBoy Color is an independent fan project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Nintendo or Meta. "Virtual Boy" is a trademark of Nintendo. No games are included - use only ROMs you made from cartridges you own.

Left: the original. Right: VBoy Color (Auto mode with the game's color pack).

_{Galactic Pinball - the Colony table: bumpers, rails and targets each in their own color.}

_{Mario Clash - green pipes, grey ledges and the brick wall behind them.}

_{Wario Land - the cave in warm orange, the blocks in teal.}

_{Teleroboxer - the robot in steel, gold and red.}

_{Jack Bros. - Jack Frost in blue and white, his face touched up by hand to match the Virtual Boy's drawing.}

_{Mario's Tennis - a clay court under a green skyline.}

_{3D with colored glasses (Teleroboxer, PC and phones) - red / cyan on the left, amber / blue on the right; green / magenta too.}

_{3D side by side (Vertical Force, PC and phones) - the left eye's picture next to the right eye's, for a 3D TV or parallel viewing; also squeezed for a 3D TV, cross-eyed, and top and bottom.}

• Color, four ways (Settings → Color mode):
  • Auto (default) - every pixel is colored by what drew it: background layers by their depth (far to near: dusk violet, brick, amber, sand), characters by their palette, each with dark/light/lightest steps. What a game draws without tiles (Red Alarm's wireframe world, 3-D Tetris's well) is colored by how far away it is - the distance between the two eyes' pictures - from indigo far away to gold up close. Every game shows many colors with no setup.
  • Multicolor - each of the Virtual Boy's four shades gets its own color (in the spirit of Red Viper's multicolour mode), from a set of palettes.
  • Gradient - the game's brightness mapped onto a color gradient (Jade, Ocean, Sunset, Ember, Frost, Toxic).
  • Tint - the classic look: red, or any color you mix.
• Color packs - hand-painted colors for a game, tile by tile, shown in Auto and Multicolor modes. Packs for Bound High, Dragon Hopper, Galactic Pinball, Innsmouth no Yakata, Jack Bros., Mario Clash, Mario's Tennis, Panic Bomber, Space Invaders Virtual Collection, Teleroboxer, Vertical Force, V-Tetris and Wario Land are built in, plus the menus and HUD of Red Alarm and 3-D Tetris (their 3-D worlds are drawn without tiles, so Auto colors them by depth), Virtual Bowling's HUD, gauges and menus over its Sunset lanes, and Golf's menus and hole maps (its rounds are drawn without tiles too). Packs hold only colors, no game graphics. A .vbcp file next to a ROM overrides the built-in one, and you can paint your own on PC: see docs/COLOR_PACKS.md.
• Colors per game - every Virtual Boy game starts in the scheme that suits it best (picked game by game: Red Alarm's wireframes by depth, Golf's fairways green, Virtual Bowling's lanes in Sunset wood...), and remembers yours once you change it.
• A library of your games - each one a card with its box art, downloaded from libretro's thumbnail collection (keep playing while it comes). A game without box art, or with no internet, gets its title screen in its own colors instead, made on your device (nothing of any game ships with the app); Settings → Download box art off shows title screens for all. As a list (Y) or last played first (X), and all games or only those with a color pack (the chip at the top, or Settings → Only games with color packs). Pick with the sticks, a gamepad, the mouse, or by pointing a Quest controller and pulling its trigger.
• Real 3D on Quest - each eye gets its own picture, as on the hardware, and both eyes always show the same colors. The display runs at the headset's highest refresh rate, so scrolling stays smooth.
• Save states - several slots per game, with thumbnails in color.
• RetroAchievements - log in with your RetroAchievements account (Achievements in the menu: an on-screen keyboard types your name and password - or a real keyboard on PC; Paste takes them from the clipboard, and the eye shows the password as you type it) and earn each game's achievements as you play. An unlock pops up over the game; the Achievements page lists the game's achievements with their badges, unlocked and still to get. Softcore: save states and everything else stay on (a save state keeps the achievements' progress too). Only the login token the site hands back is kept, in the settings folder - never your password. A game needs the ROM version RetroAchievements lists (the usual No-Intro dump).
• Gamepads everywhere - in the PC window, in PC VR and on Android, with the usual emulator layout (the Virtual Boy's A and B where they are on its controller: right and bottom); every pad connected works, and pads plugged in later are picked up.
• Button mapping - Quest controllers, gamepads and keyboard, all remappable - for all games, or per game (hold a game's card in the library).
• Screen looks - Settings → Screen → Look: Sharp pixels, Smooth (OmniScale's rounded edges and diagonals) or LED (the Virtual Boy's own rows of light, with a soft glow). Both eyes always get the same look, so the 3D stays clean.
• Screen placement - size and distance of the screen in VR; on PC, Settings → Screen → Size: as big as the window allows (Fit) or Whole pixels.
• 3D on a normal screen (PC and phones) - Settings → Screen → 3D, then its format: side by side (3D TV - squeezed, as a TV's Side-by-Side mode expects -, full, or cross-eyed), top and bottom (3D TV or full), or colored glasses - red / cyan, green / magenta or amber / blue (mixed with Dubois' method, which keeps the games' colors as true as the glasses allow). Pictures of both at the top of this page.
• Your room as the background (Quest) - Settings → Adjust screen → Show your room around it: the game floats in your room (passthrough) instead of in the dark.
• Updates - VBoy Color looks for a new version when it starts (About → Check when VBoy Color starts) and shows Update available in the sidebar; About → Update installs it. On PC the app replaces its own files (your games and saves stay) and restarts; on Android the system's installer takes the new APK (allow VBoy Color to install apps once; on the Quest it installs when the app next starts). A beta looks for betas too, a full release only for full releases.
• Your own folders - Settings → Folders: choose where your games, saved games, save states and settings go (a synced folder, say). On PC you pick them right in the menu, with the mouse, a gamepad or in VR; on Android with the system's folder picker (on the Quest, when the app next starts). The files already there are copied over - newer ones win, the one replaced is kept as .bak, and the originals stay where they were.
• Video recording (PC) - F12 records the original red and the colored version side by side, frame for frame, for comparison videos (F12 again to stop; it stops on its own after ten minutes).
• Tool-assisted runs (PC) - drop a Virtual Boy run from TASVideos (a .bk2 file) on the window, or open it with VBoyColor.exe: its game (from your roms folder) plays the whole run by itself, in color - press F12 to record it. Your own save stays untouched; when the run ends, you take over.

1. Download VBoyColor-<version>-quest-android-arm64.apk from Releases.
2. Install it with SideQuest or adb install VBoyColor-<version>-quest-android-arm64.apk (the headset must be in developer mode).
3. Copy your .vb ROMs to a folder on the headset (for example Download/VBoyColor). The color packs are built in.
4. Open VBoy Color from Unknown Sources in the app library and pick that folder when it asks.

Smoother on Quest 3: the Virtual Boy draws 50 frames a second, and Quest 3 can refresh at 100 Hz - two refreshes for every frame - but an app isn't allowed to pick that rate itself. Quest Games Optimizer can, or adb shell setprop debug.oculus.refreshRate 100 (until the headset restarts); VBoy Color then keeps it instead of asking for 120 Hz.

The same VBoyColor-<version>-quest-android-arm64.apk works on phones, tablets and Android handhelds (Android 10 or newer, 64-bit ARM, with Vulkan - nearly every device from the last several years). Install it, open VBoy Color and pick the folder with your .vb ROMs when it asks. The game fills the screen's height, with the Virtual Boy controller beside it: the left D-pad with Select and Start (and the menu button under them), B and A with the right D-pad above them (only in the games that use it - Red Alarm, Teleroboxer, 3-D Tetris and Golf), L and R on top. Settings → Touch controls → Edit lets you drag every control where you want it and make it bigger or smaller (the buttons are Kenney's Input Prompts) - and a game can have its own layout (hold its card in the library). Connect a gamepad and the on-screen buttons step aside until you touch the screen again. Back opens the menu, and Back (or Back to game) returns to the game. With no game loaded, the menu sits inside a Virtual Boy.

Download VBoyColor-<version>-windows-x64.zip from Releases, unzip it, put your ROMs in the roms folder and run VBoyColor.exe. You can also drop a .vb file on the window, or open one with VBoyColor.exe. VBoyColorVR.exe is the VR version for a PC headset (Quest Link, Virtual Desktop or SteamVR).

Download VBoyColor-<version>-linux-x64.tar.gz, unpack it, put your ROMs in roms and run ./VBoyColor from that folder. Needs a Vulkan driver.

VBoy Color is also a RetroArch core (or for any other libretro frontend): the same emulation and colors, with the 3D for a normal screen. Download vboycolor_libretro-<version>-<platform>.zip for Windows, Linux (x86-64 or ARM64), macOS or Android from Releases, then:

1. Copy the core (vboycolor_libretro.dll, .so or .dylib) into RetroArch's cores folder (Settings → Directory → Cores shows where it is), and vboycolor_libretro.info into its core info folder (Settings → Directory → Core Info). Don't skip the .info: RetroArch's file browser only lists the file types that the installed cores' .info files name, so without it Load Content shows a folder's .zip files but hides its .vb games. On Android, use Load Core → Install or Restore a Core and pick vboycolor_libretro_android.so.
2. Load Core → Nintendo - Virtual Boy (VBoy Color), then load a game.
3. Quick Menu → Core Options: Colors (the game's own, Auto, Multicolor, Gradient or Tint, and their palettes), Color packs, and 3D - side by side (also cross-eyed or half width for a 3D TV), top and bottom, or red / cyan, green / magenta and amber / blue glasses.

The color packs are built in; a .vbcp file beside the ROM, with the ROM's name, takes the place of its game's pack. RetroArch's save states, rewind, run-ahead, shaders and RetroAchievements work as with any other core. On macOS, if RetroArch won't load the core, clear the download's quarantine first: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine vboycolor_libretro.dylib.

Menu: the left controller's Menu button, a gamepad's Select + Start held together (or Guide), or Tab or Esc on PC. Some PC VR runtimes keep the Menu button for themselves - there, hold the left stick click for a second. In the menu: sticks / D-pad / arrow keys move, A (Enter) picks, B (Esc) goes back - out to the sidebar, or back to the game. The mouse and the Quest controllers' lasers work too: a quick trigger press clicks, holding the trigger and moving drags (scrolls lists and the library).

The gamepad column is the PC window's and the phone's. With a gamepad in VR (VBoyColorVR.exe, or a pad paired with the Quest), A is on A and B on B. Everything can be remapped in Settings → Button mapping - and per game: hold a game's card in the library (a finger or a Quest laser held still on it; right-click with a mouse) for its own button mapping and, on a phone, its own touch controls. On PC, Alt+Enter toggles fullscreen.

See docs/BUILDING.md - Windows, Linux and Quest, all from one CMake project. Every push is built by GitHub Actions.

https://github.com/sponsors/yuk27

VBoy Color is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (see LICENSE). The emulator core, Beetle VB, is GPL-2.0-or-later. Other components and fonts are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

• VirtualBoyGo by CidVonHighwind - VBoy Color started as a fork of its OpenXR + Vulkan rework. The VR app, renderer, menu, save states and button mapping come from there. Thank you for building it and sharing it.
• Beetle VB - libretro's fork of Mednafen's Virtual Boy emulation, the emulator core. It is compiled untouched, apart from a generated hook in its video code that reports which tile drew each pixel (cmake/PatchBeetleVip.cmake).
• Red Viper - the Virtual Boy emulator for the 3DS, for the idea of coloring the four shades (its multicolour mode). No Red Viper code is used.
• RetroAchievements and its rcheevos library (MIT) - the achievements, made by its community for every Virtual Boy game it covers.
• Super Bit Shader by Ashley the Pikachu - RetroArch shaders that color the Virtual Boy, the Game Boy and the other monochrome handhelds, with side-by-side 3D for the Virtual Boy in VR. Thank you for keeping the colored Virtual Boy scene going with your great work. Super Bit Shader implementation is WIP.
• The libraries and fonts listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.