ShankMods recently completed a pretty epic project of turning a Virtual Boy into a “portable” console. While Shank’s other builds are also really impressive, being a fan of the Virtual Boy made this video extra awesome for me. While I don’t want to spoil anything about this very cool video, I do want to comment on a few things – so, sorta spoiler-y thoughts below the embedded tweet…
Support Shank here: https://www.patreon.com/ShankMods
My Virtual Boy portable is finished, and the video is now live on YouTube. I spent a year making this project, and more work went into this video than any previous video. I hope you all like it. pic.twitter.com/2PAuOjeyop
— Shank (@ShankMods) June 9, 2021
First and foremost, I love that Shank used a broken VB for this mod and made that point clear in the video. While I’m a huge fan of the Virtual Tap, I feel it was a product designed to be added to working VB’s, or used to consolize broken, unfixable VB’s…and there are plenty of those. I was sad to see a few people hack up perfectly good VB’s to consolize and that’s not what Shank did!
Next, this portable VB contains a bunch of custom circuit boards to make this all happen. There’s so much customization going on in this build and building boards from scratch is an impressive addition. Hopefully Shank will consider posting the controller board designs as open source, so people can use his boards to make Virtual Boy “arcade sticks”, or custom controllers. I’ve used broken VB controllers inside an arcade stick, but I’d much rather use a new board without any cannibalized parts.
Anyway, please check out the video if you’re into modding, the Virtual Boy, or just electronics in general!
