Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

68 pointsposted 5 days ago
by rockbruno

17 Comments

chocochunks

5 days ago

You can also dump GB Camera photos with GBxCart RW. Those can also be used to dump ROMs/saves and reprogram flash carts. The cheap GBC games off Ali express are flash carts in reality.

rockbruno

5 days ago

Oh yeah I forgot to mention that, it was the first option I considered but getting it shipped to Sweden was super expensive. So it didn't make sense considering I just wanted the camera dump feature. Buying the pcb and port on the other hand only costed me about 10 bucks since I already had an Arduino laying around, and also served as some necessary soldering practice :)

swq115

2 days ago

The Game Boy Camera was 128x112 pixels with 4 shades of gray. The fact that people are still finding ways to pull images off these things almost 30 years later is peak hacker energy

kevin_thibedeau

2 days ago

I recently played through a battery backed DMG game I last played in 1994 and the saved games were still good.

ljf

2 days ago

These look brilliant and remind me of the pictures from my Casio watch camera: https://www.casio.com/intl/watches/50th/Heritage/2000s/

I really need to dig that out, from memory the software only worked with Win98 or ME - but I guess there must be a way of getting it running elsewhere (or getting my ME laptop running).

gyomu

2 days ago

This is very neat!

Some parallel thinking here, but it feels like it should be possible to build a software only version of this running entirely on a smartphone.

Take a picture of the GameBoy screen, and the app reconstructs the source image. It's only 128x128 2-bit depth pixels after all - the information content there seems well within the bounds of what can be reconstructed from a modern high resolution smartphone camera sensor.

Would be a cool computer vision project.

ljf

2 days ago

Interesting article, but shame the images are blocked in the UK - guessing imgur?

rockbruno

2 days ago

I had no idea they blocked imgur on the UK. I'll move it to self-hosted!

ljf

2 days ago

Thank you! Much appreciated

zyx321

2 days ago

Since when is that a thing? I'll presume they're boycotting the new age verification laws?

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

Tommix11

2 days ago

Great work! I have a GB camera (and printer) in my collection

anthk

2 days ago

MGBA emulates the GB camera too.