When the Game Boy Printer was released back in 1998, being able to produce a hard-copy of your Pokémon diploma or your latest Game Boy Camera snapshot at the touch of a button was was pretty slick indeed. But in our modern paperless society, the GB Printer somehow sticks out as even more archaic than the other add-on’s for Nintendo’s iconic handheld. Even among the folks who are still proudly playing the games that support the Printer, nobody actually wants to print anything out — although that doesn’t mean they don’t want to see the images.
The TinyGB Printer, developed by [Raphaël BOICHOT] and [Brian KHUU], could be considered something of a Game Boy Non-Printer. Powered by the RP2040 Zero development board, this open source hardware device plugs into your Game Boy and is picked up by all the games as a legitimate Printer. But instead of cranking out a little slip of thermal paper once you hit the button, the image is displayed in all its 240×240 glory on a 1.3 inch TFT display mounted to the top of the board.
Now, there’s a couple neat things going on here. First of all, because the whole process is digital, [Raphaël] and [Brian] have managed to pull out all the stops and believe they are reproducing these images in the highest fidelity possible. The images are also being simultaneously stored (as PNGs) to a micro SD card on the board, which given the file size of these images, essentially gives you unlimited storage capacity. The documentation says the code might start glitching once you’ve put tens of thousands of images on the card, but surely your sanity would give out before then.
The documentation looks fantastic on this project, and we love the different variations that are possible depending on how you want to build it. For example you can choose to power it with AA or AAA batteries (to match whatever your Game Boy uses), and there’s support for removing the display if you’re more interested in banking the images than viewing them on the go.
If this project seems a bit similar, it’s probably because the duo were involved in the NeoGB Printer we covered back in 2021. Between the two this new version is considerably more polished, and it’s interesting to see how the team has improved on the basic concept over the last few years.
They ‘believe’? They are recording the highest fidelity? They are. There aren’t that many pixels and it’s easy to check. This is 1:1 not sure why the doubt cast lol it’s an awesome project.
Hello Hatch. Well, technically, there are not that many converters able to handle every printer protocol trick. Apart from project emanating from the Game Boy Camera nerds community, most decoders just handle the Game Boy Camera in standard mode (one image at a time) and assume that any game will work, which is not the case at all. But I see what you mean.
Just connect an esp32 uart and use the wifi Lan printer on the network too and save the image to SD card
Hello Clancy. This is what the NeoGB printer does. I was also involved in this other project made with Rafael Zenaro. My idea here is to propose a zero configuration device like the BitBoy. Solder it and it works. And to dismiss the ESP32 as well, I’m not a big fan of this platform for various reasons explained in the repository.
Using the esp32, you would just listen to the Gameboy link port with uart, and emulate the gb printer, just like an arduini, use one core to emulate the gb printer and the SD card, the other handles the wifi stack
Use a raspberry pi zero w (a bit over kill) or stm32, or Pic mcu
Any modern microcontroller would work
Probably can do it using an atmega 8515 or attiny depends on your use case and what parts you have
I use an esp32 to both Emulate 8 floppy drives on my atari 800xl and doubles as a printer and wifi modem on the sio port can’t be that esp32 can’t be that difficult
Amazing piece of work, perfect accompaniment to the projects improving the GB camera?
Back in Staten Island circa 1990 there was a guy named Otis Higgins who had a small concrete building on his property and he set up a Minolta camera and would try to photograph all of the top video games of the times. All good, except Otis would hand out Konica film for Halloween. That was weird at 8.