⚠️ WARNING: this article is not complete, and is still being added to. I will announce this one on Mastodon when it is complete. The plan is that it is going to become a Zine.

I was only 11 years old when the Gameboy Camera dropped in Summer of 1998. At the time, all us kids thought it was a silly little toy that wasn't much of a Camera, and wasn't much of a Gameboy game either. It sort of came and went like a prevailing wind, leaving a bit of a mark on the gadget world for being something of a technical footnote — taking and printing pictures with a Gameboy? How novel! It was sold as a toy, it looked like a toy, and in all regards, it worked like a toy.

But, the thing is, it actually was more than a toy. It left an indelible impression upon millennials everywhere because it offered something that toys scarcely did at that time: it gave us a glimpse into adulthood. It allowed us to take an unlimited amount of photographs (tiny as they were), and print them, for almost no money, with virtually no parental oversight. In an era when kids were only just starting to come online, this was as close to freedom as it got.

The medium was limited, and cramped, but as time wore on, we never lost our attachment to this weird little experiment. Some kids' carts went into a junk drawer, others went into yard sales, but most of us kept a candle lit for this little slice of scifi.

Since its inception, kids were asking the obvious question — how do I get my digital images from my Gameboy Camera to my computer? And, unfortunately, the answer has been 'you have to either buy or build a device called a cart dumper' for like 25 years. That turned Gameboy Camera photography into a very niche pursuit for creators, but a very popular one for audiences.

Writing Scraps

Links I've Collected

• https://ko-fi.com/s/4d6768a0ee -> Gameboy Camera photo frames, 3d printable
• https://2bittoy.carrd.co/ - 2BitToy - Zoom Lens for a gameboy Camera. It's a 3d printable housing for the cartridge, meant to be a drop-and-replace.
• https://insidegadgets.com/ - Makes lots of customized Gameboy Camera flash boards, some that are pre-assembled.

Outline

I would like to rewrite this blog post I wrote so that I can start rebuilding the post as a census of aftermarket Gameboy Camera technology in 2025. I’d like to have the following sections, so please fit what I’ve written below into this outline. If there is no content that fits that outline point, please just leave it blank.

The Outline

1. Introduction:

   • What is the history of the Gameboy Camera? Why am I doing this? What’s the TL; DR of the entire article?

2. Understanding the Gameboy Camera’s limitations:

   • The resolution
   • The color palette
   • The diffusion pattern
   • The capacity
   • Other software features (like editing, stamps, adding captions and taker info)
   • Getting photos off of the cartridge is difficult; originally, they were meant only to be printed, or transferred using a link cable.
   • Understanding the file format the images are stored in (4 colors in data, then 2 colors as prints)

3. The original way the Gameboy Camera ecosystem worked:

   • Gameboy Camera
   • Gameboy Printer
     • Printed on thermal paper
     • Thermal paper is made of ABS, which yellows and fades. Few original Gameboy Camera prints survive today unless they were scanned at some point.
   • Link Cable

4. These days, Gameboy Camera photography has bifurcated into two similar, but different, approaches towards the artform:

   1. The Traditional Approach
      1. This is an approach where real hardware is used as much as possible. This means images are taken using the actual CMOS hardware (with all of its limitations), and then are processed using the actual on-system processing.
      2. Getting images off the Gameboy Camera requires one of the following:
         1. an original Gameboy Printer to print images,

5. The Traditional Approaches to Gameboy Camera Photography:

   • Drop the Gameboy Camera cartridge into a Super Gameboy and a Super Nintendo, and either take a photograph of the screen, or use a capture card. People have also output the Super Nintendo onto a projector, then used that to copy the grid onto a larger surface, like painting a wall. Neil Young famously used this method for an album cover.
   • Another approach has been to use a ROM dumper to grab the SRAM from the cart, then re-encode the images in binary format into a bitmap format (. BMP). This can export the photos in their original resolution, as well as images with the full 4 color palette (which is crushed for printing to thermal paper).

6. Modern Approaches to Gameboy Camera Photography:

   • Buy the actual cartridge on eBay (roughly $30 USD per cartridge at time of writing), using original Gameboy hardware (modified or unmodified)
   • Buy the actual cartridge
   • Load the ROM and Gameboy Color BIOS on a computer emulator, using a webcam (this also allows for using the Gameboy Camera as a live webcam on your computer)
   • Load the ROM and Gameboy Color BIOS on a smartphone, which uses the phone’s cameras as a camera source for the ROM

Gameboy Camera Photography in the 21 st Century

Over time, people have figured out all kinds of neat tricks for doing this easier. In order of appearance:

8. A SNES + Super Gameboy + a capture card - one of the classical methods, the go-to for many years was to simply find a way to take a picture of a TV's output. Some people did it with more conventional digital cameras, some with capture cards, both of which were very expensive and fairly specialized equipment at the time.

9. Emulators + Webcam - In XXXX, {developer} released mGBA, which was the first emulator to offer a simple but obvious idea: what if we just mapped the webcams attached to people's computers to the camera input that the ROM was expecting? This meant that you could take a lot of photos, and easily get them out as an image with a screenshot of the emulator's output, but you were also tied down to your computer. Sure, some laptops had webcams, but if you had a computer in the early aughties, it was usually a desktop.

   This worked well, but purists felt that unless you could fit the camera in your pocket, it didn't really represent a photo taken with the limitation of the form in mind.

   (Fun fact: you could use the video output of the video as a live video feed version of the Gameboy Camera for meetings. These days, OBS Studio ships with a virtual webcam driver that makes this easy)

10. Arduino-Based Gameboy Printer Emulator - this idea was based on the discovery that Gameboy Camera photos were sent for printing to the Gameboy Printer in a basic binary format. Someone discovered that one could use an Arduino (or similar SoC) to listen to the Gameboy, pretend to be Gameboy Printer hardware, and then save the output to a bitmap file.

These come in the form of neat little sandwiches that use micro USB for power, have traces laid out for the Gameboy's link cable, and then offer the resulting pictures up on a local wifi access point, including any frames, decorations, or extra text provided to the printer.

Additionally, these can be used as an 'unlimited hard drive' of sorts for an unmodified Gameboy Camera cartridge. Original Gameboy Camera cartridges only have enough memory on board to store 30 images, which basically necessitates external storage if you want to do anything more than treat it like a disposable camera. This project appears to be based on the ESP platform. You can grab the schematics and software here.

11. 2 BitToy

12. PicNRec - A rather new approach to this age-old problem, this modder built a hardware solution that sits in between the Gameboy Camera and the Gameboy's cartridge bus. It extends the profile of the Gameboy up by a few inches, but in exchange, it enables plug-n-play dumping of photos, as well as video recording from the humble little toy. It's not fast video (their docs specify a maximum of ~3-5 FPS), but it's live, and it's enough to do some video effects with. It can also store up to 18,000 photos on its flash memory, meaning it can function as external storage as well.

I thought this made it especially well suited for VJs and people who are chaining together several analog video devices to make neat effects. I understand that you can use camcorders with delay effects and their digital zooms to do all kinds of neat sweeping 'flight simulator' style effects.

The software appears to only run on Windows, due to the drivers needed. Not sure if it'd run on WINE because of that, but perhaps a VM would work.

... And finally ...

13. Smartphone Emulators - this is where everything finally came together for me, after 14 years of trying. At some point during the lockdown period of the COVID-19 Pandemic, there was a surge of interest in these little cameras, and we saw a flurry of development. Photo! And 2-Bit Pixlr Studio appeared in 2021, essentially rebuilding the camera's software from the ground up from scratch with a focus on professional photographers. These have all kinds of neat features (add new print borders to print with, export automatically to printer and PicNRec, adjustment of the diffusion pattern technique, and more), but I think the coolest is that they have support for emulator-only environments, which allows access to all kinds of speed hacks, like automatically saving to the Printer, and doing so at double speed (since software printers don't need to wait for the actual mechanism to move).

So, all of this to say, at some point during all of this, emulators on smartphones started supporting that ol' Webcam-mapping trick we talked about beforehand. That means it has access to your phone's giant, gorgeous, sensitive CMOS sensors. Pair that with an onboard Printer emulator that exports directly to your phone's gallery, and boom, you've got a portable authentic Gameboy Camera in your pocket at all times. No shitty replicas, no resolution or palette-inaccurate half attempts, just pixely goodness.

I have been using Pizza Boy C on Android. I'm not sure if any of the emulators on iOS support this, but let me know on the Fediverse at @mitch@posts.dumb.stuff.donaberger.xyz if it does.

Wait , Mitch — what about the actual Gameboy Printer?

From my research, it seems like these are still out there and still functional! Because they utilized a

Hopefully this knowledge dump sets someone out there on the path of making art with what everyone called a toy. You don't need a lot of money, or a lot of time, or even a lot of specialized knowledge to play with the past — all you need is an open source Gameboy Color ROM, and a $5 emulator.

Gotta admit, 10-year-old Mitch could never have seen this one coming. ✨

Some Example Pictures