An unofficial Virtual Boy port of VVVVVV · work in progress

Virtual Red Shift

VVVVVV running on real Virtual Boy hardware — 434 rooms, in red and black, with depth behind every room. It is not finished, and it needs testers.

From the published VVVVVV source code, this port takes the game's logic as a reference and the level data: room layouts, entity placement and text. Every graphic and sound is drawn for the Virtual Boy; none of the original art, music or sound is used.

It is built from the source Terry Cavanagh released in 2020. It is a modified version, not the original game, and not endorsed by its authors.

Status

A private beta is under way: beta build 1 goes to a few invited testers, sent by hand, with no download link. The request to VVVVVV's author has been sent; nothing here presumes the answer.

It runs

Emulator captures of the build of 2026-09-20, left eye only, unretouched.

Title screen — **The title screen.** The credit line is part of the ROM, as the licence requires. The VVVVVV logo stays only if VVVVVV's author agrees.

A lab room full of spikes — **Spikes, checkpoints, a trinket.** Laid out from the original level data, redrawn for this display.

A room with moving platforms — **Moving platforms.** Conveyors, crumbling floors and linked platforms all work.

A large room crossed by a gravity line — **A gravity line.** You do not jump in this game. You flip, and fall the other way.

A narrow corridor lined with spikes — **One of twenty trinkets.** The corridor is the puzzle.

A text box reading: Congratulations, you have found a shiny trinket — **Text boxes work.** Dialogue, counters and the script engine are ported.

A room in the Final Zone — **The Final Zone.** Top right: `F013`. Every room shows its code. That is how bugs get reported.

These shots come from the game's room viewer, which names each room top left; in normal play only the room code shows.

The 3D

Everything you interact with sits at the screen surface: floor, walls, spikes, platforms, the player. The depth is behind them.

Each room is a box. The backdrop sits further back and shows through its open parts, deeper in some zones than others. When a gravity line flips you, the room draws back a moment, then settles.

A few things come forward: trinkets float out of the screen, and enemies sit just in front. On the title screen, the six letters recede one by one.

Depth changes are gradual and kept comfortable. Two earlier ideas, spikes and enemies pushed further out, were dropped after console testing.

What was kept, and how close

Measured against Terry Cavanagh's source; what the port does not need, such as items that only exist in player-made levels, is left out of each count.

What	Ported	How it is checked
Rooms	418 / 418	every room of the five zones, collision identical to the original; plus 16 space screens and the Tower
Physics	converted	gravity, fall and running speeds from the original values, 0.07 px drift over a 240 px fall; walking acceleration not yet the original's
Entities	958 / 964	in place; the 163 moving ones follow the original paths
Checkpoints	204 / 204	same place, same facing
Super Gravitron	27 / 27	wave states and delays transcribed; about 1 spawn in 20 dropped for lack of sprite slots
Dialogue	473 / 473	all original boxes; 175 (crew conversations) not reachable yet
Story scripts	158 / 158	converted; 47 play in the game so far
Script commands	90.5 %	3741 of 4133 applicable commands have a port equivalent
Sound effects	23 / 25	wired to the original events
Music	16 tracks	original chiptune; none of the VVVVVV soundtrack
ROM	78.1 %	1 637 880 of 2 097 152 bytes

Missing from the port today: talking to the crew aboard the ship, the ending of the Space Station, the Time Trial countdown, the elephant and the Comms Relay dish.

How it is made

One person and an AI coding assistant (Claude), working through written roles: an architect plans, a coder applies, a tester checks, and a loop runs the three. Nothing reaches the cartridge without the tester's verdict. The method and its record, counted from git and the session logs: How it's made.

How bugs will be reported

The channel is given with the build.

Report the room, not the game

Every room prints a four-character code in the right margin. A report is three lines:

Room F013
Doing walked in from the left, flipped once
Happened fell through the floor

That is enough to find it. Stereoscopic depth cannot be judged on a screenshot: if something hurts your eyes, looks flat or flickers, that goes in the report too. Two depth ideas have already been dropped that way.

If you hold rights

If you hold rights in anything shown here and want it changed or removed, it will be done, without discussion. The quickest route is a reply in the Planet Virtual Boy thread where the beta is announced.

The soundtrack

The port plays 16 original chiptune tracks and distributes no VVVVVV music. The soundtrack is Magnus Pålsson's work; a build check rejects any public ROM carrying even a transcription of it.

Whether a future build should let owners of the soundtrack play their own copy is a question put to VVVVVV's author. Nothing is written for it.

Play the real thing

VVVVVV is a commercial game. It is still for sale at thelettervsixtim.es, and it has the art and the soundtrack this port does not. If you enjoy what you see here, please consider buying a copy.

The source code is at github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV, under its own licence.

What this is not

There is no download here, and there will not be one without permission from VVVVVV's author.
It is not the original game. It is a modified version built from the published source, and says so on its title screen.
It is not commercial and never will be; the licence would not allow it.