VBoy Color, an emulator for Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, replaces the system’s four shades of red with full-color graphics, Ars Technica reported on Oct. 22.
The beta includes built-in color packs for 15 games, covering a substantial portion of the console’s limited official library. Players can also edit the packs with built-in video tools, assigning colors to individual graphics tiles that the emulator recognizes when they appear elsewhere in a game.
The changes reach down to details such as Luigi’s hat in Mario’s Tennis: He no longer has to wear red. Rather than applying one replacement palette to the entire image, the tile-based approach lets different parts of a screen take on different colors.
It doesn’t always work. In the current beta, the coloring system sometimes misses individual tiles, leaving flickering, uncolored squares among the recolored graphics, according to Ars Technica’s account.
The method also has a limit: It doesn’t work with games such as 3-D Tetris and Red Alarm, which use wire-frame graphics rather than the tile-based images the color packs depend on.
For those games, VBoy Color offers a separate option that applies palettes or color gradients according to each line’s apparent depth. Ars Technica said the treatment makes the three-dimensional effect easier to distinguish, particularly when playing on a flat monitor.
VBoy Color builds on earlier emulators, including VirtualBoyGo and Beetle VB. Alongside its color tools, it supports full stereoscopic display on VR headsets and 3D monitors.