I've had plenty of fun with these glasses, but today I finally took them off from the back of PC and put those glasses in to use on MSX.

I noticed that if you don't want to use these glasses on PC you can buy just the glasses without controller. Look here.

Besides of those glasses you will need little bit of wire, one female minijack connector, one female DB9 (joystick) connector and one ~20Kohm resistor (not really sure if you need the resistor, but I didn't want to take risks as I still like this device)

So in general you can get virtual reality environment for your MSX in less than 50 euros. If you have broken radio or useless RS-mouse the price will drop even more.

If you are interested order the stuff and send me a mail. Today I made stereo picture viewer and tomorrow I plan to make 3D application development driver for BASIC (for MSX2) and 3D driver for some existing MSX games (for MSX tR)

Ok today I made first versions of the MSX drivers.

I must say that it was fun to play Toybox version of Operation Wolf in 3D, it really graphically worked very well.
Also the A.T & Mi-chi animation in Swiss demo worked quite nicely in 3D mode. It's kind of problematic as its pretty useless to send screenshots.

Hmmm... I have an older 3D glass from my now defunt ASUS v6600 deluxe, so how exactly does that 3D thing works? Does it need a gfx9000 or a plain MSX? How exactly should someone connect it to the joy port?

And more - it must be implemented so you connect the glass on the SECOND joy port... why? imagine playing pistol games with 3d glasses...

Is it based on merging "green" and "red" dimensional figures?

Using that technique, one could theoritically create a S.T.U.P.E.F.Y.I.N.G. game; even in screen 3!

@DemonSeed No, this method works with all of the colors.
@Slotman Currently minimum requirement is MSX2. You could make this to work somehow also in MSX1 but as you need practically double amount of VRAM to do anything neat in stereo I think it's pretty useless. Currently I use joystick port2 but this kind of sucks with games that also try to access this port. Also BIOS seems to mess up with it in interrupts. Printer port would be a lot better solution, but I don't have spare Centronix 14 connectors at the moment.

The MSX2 "3D application development driver for BASIC" is very simple. It just makes sure that VDP EO bit is delivered to glasses. This makes it easy to handle 3D even from BASIC. Here is example of simple stereoscopic picture loader after loading the driver:

10 SCREEN 8,,,,,2
20 BLOAD"LEFT.SC8",S
30 SET PAGE 1,1
40 BLOAD"RIGHT.SC8",S
50 A$=INPUT$(1)

The MSX tR game driver is based to idea that I read from some MSX book: "Sprites are graphical elements that float on top of the picture" and I thought that this is a neat idea! So this driver puts the picture inside the monitor and leaves sprites to float on normal depht. (done by using VDP register 26)

For maximum compatibility I did it by patching BIOS int-routine.

There is no reason why you could not make these glasses to work with GFX9000 just as well.

Hardware connection is easy:

Minijack:		DB9
-------------------------------
L 		pin 6
R		pin 7
GND -resistor-	pin 9

But in this way you need to
1) switch page 0 and 1 at each frame
2) update both of them according to some 3d algorithm in order to keep the 3d illusion...

IMHO, this trick can work only for static pre-computed backgrounds...
z80 and VRAM I/O do not allow anything more than this

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But in this way you need to 1) switch page 0 and 1 at each frame

As you can see from my previous post VDP can do that by it self. I only ask "what page you are showing?" from VDP and send that information to glasses.

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2) update both of them according to some 3d algorithm in order to keep the 3d illusion... IMHO, this trick can work only for static pre-computed backgrounds... z80 and VRAM I/O do not allow anything more than this

Yes, this is a bit more problematic... How ever "anything more than this" is not true... MSX can easyly show some 3D wireframe graphics and 3D sprite animations... even on top of static 3D backround. To do this you don't need even assembler.

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Hmmm... I have an older 3D glass from my now defunt ASUS v6600 deluxe, so how exactly does that 3D thing works? Does it need a gfx9000 or a plain MSX? How exactly should someone connect it to the joy port? And more - it must be implemented so you connect the glass on the SECOND joy port... why? imagine playing pistol games with 3d glasses...

Alternating Video frames to simulating a Stereographic mode.

There is projects to connect the old 3D Glasses to the parallel port of a Personal Computer (also works with some Brazilian MSX computers). The signal for video synchronization could work with a serial (like the joystick port) or parallel connector, there is no need to use the 9-DB connector used by the mouse or joystick if someone have a RS-232 C or a parallel (DB-25) connector.Like computer robots, there is projects that use the Printer Port (a parallel connector). Since the Controller port (DB-9 Atari compatible) is more common, people use this instead of the parallel one (since there is not much data to carry about, a serial port is just fine). And yes, it is compatible with most 3D Glasses on the market. Even some older models ...

[ps: Are you saying that you don't have the promotional books of R$0.99 and R$1.99 about V.R. and P.C.? Some of them even included the old RED and GREEN 'plastic' glasses for old books!]

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The MSX tR game driver is based to idea that I read from some MSX book: "Sprites are graphical elements that float on top of the picture" and I thought that this is a neat idea! So this driver puts the picture inside the monitor and leaves sprites to float on normal depht. (done by using VDP register 26)

do you men R#13 instead of 26??
or not?

No, I mean R#26... With R#13 whole picture moves and that does not cause stereo effect. This way sprites will get their "own 3D layer". Usually also games and demos use R#13, so that would be bad option.

So you want do just an horizontal Scroll (msx2+) of the background...
Stereo vision is a bit more complex than this, but as first approx it could work,

In any case it is only for msx2+ & TR running MSX1 & 2 applications...

How do you want to feed the control signal to the glasses ?

You'll need in any case to patch the existing application...
(in the interrupt code I guess). So, why not using R#18 ?

In this way it would work also on msx2 for msx1 and 2 application not using that register R#18

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So you want do just an horizontal Scroll (msx2+) of the background... Stereo vision is a bit more complex than this, but as first approx it could work, In any case it is only for msx2+ & TR running MSX1 & 2 applications...

Yes, this is correct. I must remind you that this is no theory, but I've actually implemented and tested this. I know that this is not ultimate solution for 3D gameing, but the stereo vision is very clear as long as there is graphics (Something more to display than white on black, that causes too bad ghosting effect.)

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How do you want to feed the control signal to the glasses ? You'll need in any case to patch the existing application... (in the interrupt code I guess). So, why not using R#18 ?

Control signal is delivered in VDP interrupt, but there is no need for application specific code as in MSX tR you can patch BIOS so that application does not know about it.

what you mean by "you can patch BIOS" ?
You can use hooks, but this is in any MSX and
can interfere with applications.
Do you refer to some HW feature in TR I missed ?

Yes, this feature is called DRAM mode. Originally it is meant to speed up bios calls in R800 mode, but it can be used also to patch BIOS. The program works like this: Check what CPU mode we are running. Switch to R800 ROM mode, patch CHCPU routine so that Z80 ROM = Z80 DRAM and R800 ROM = R800 DRAM, put 3D glass support to unused space left by cassette routines, patch the int routine so, that it will leave the joystic port2 alone, switch to R800 DRAM mode, switch to saved CPU mode.

This is pretty good way as after running the patch you can start game for example by software reseting the computer. If you want to experiment with this feature, use OpenMSX. BlueMSX unfortunately does not support DRAM mode at all.

newer used this feature!

TR offers more than I was thinking
Any docs on this DRAM mode ?