Classic Film Camera Goes Digital With Game Boy Tech

April 5, 2023 by Robin Kearey 8 Comments

Despite having been technologically obsolete for a decade or two, analog photography is still practiced by hobbyists and artists to achieve a particular aesthetic. One might imagine a similar thing happening with early digital cameras, and indeed it has: the Game Boy Camera has seen use in dozens of projects. [Michael Fitzmayer] however decided to combine the worlds of analog and early digital photography by equipping a Holga with the image sensor from a Game Boy Camera.

The Holga, if you’re not familiar, is a cheap film camera from the 1980s that has achieved something of a cult following among retro-photography enthusiasts. By equipping it with the sensor from what was one of the first mass-market digital cameras, [Michael] has created a rather unusual digital point-and-shoot. The user interface is as simple as can be: a single button to take a photo, and nothing else. There’s no screen to check your work — just as with film, you’ll have to wait for the pictures to come back from the lab.

The sensor used in the Game Boy Camera is a Mitsubishi M64282FP, which is a 128 x 128 pixel monochrome CMOS unit. [Michael] hooked it up to an STM32F401 microcontroller, which reads out the sensor data and stores it on an SD card in the form of a bitmap image.

With no film roll present, the Holga has plenty of space for all the electronics and a battery. The original lens turned out to be a poor fit for the image sensor, but with a bit of tweaking the Game Boy optics fit in its place without significantly altering the camera’s appearance.

[Michael] helpfully documented the design process and shared all source code on his GitHub page. Holgas shouldn’t be hard to find to find, but if none are available in your area you can just roll your own. The Game Boy Camera is actually one of the most versatile cameras out there, having been used for everything from video conferencing to astrophotography.

Creating A Game Boy ROM From Pictures

March 23, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

There are very few legal ways of obtaining ROM files for video games, and Nintendo’s lawyers are extremely keen on at least reminding you of the fact that you need to own the game cart before obtaining the ROM. With cart in hand, though, most will grab a cart reader to download the game files. While this is a tried-and-true method, for GameBoy games this extra piece of hardware isn’t strictly required. [Travis Goodspeed] is here to show us a method of obtaining ROM files from photographs of the game itself.

Bits can be manually edited to fix detection errors.

Of course, the chips inside the game cart will need to be decapped in order to obtain the pictures, and the pictures will need to be of high quality in order to grab the information. [Travis] is more than capable of this task in his home lab, but some work is still required after this step.

The individual bits in the Game Boy cartridges are created by metal vias on the chip, which are extremely small, but still visible under a microscope. He also has a CAD program that he developed to take this visual information and extract the data from it, which creates a ROM file that’s just as good as any obtained with a cart reader.

This might end up being slightly more work especially if you have to decap the chips and take the photographs yourself, but it’s nonetheless a clever way of obtaining ROM files due to this quirk of Game Boy technology. Encoding data into physical hardware like this is also an excellent way of ensuring that it doesn’t degrade over time. Here are some other methods for long-term data storage.

Breadboarding A Game Boy From Scratch

February 15, 2023 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

The original Nintendo Game Boy is a stout piece of hardware in a solid plastic enclosure. [Raphael Stäbler] recreated the popular handheld on a breadboard instead, in a fully-functional way, to boot.

[Raphael]’s build doesn’t rely on a real Game Boy CPU or components. Instead it’s emulated with the aid of a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller. [Raphael] coded up an emulator from scratch, instruction by instruction, something he’s documented on his own blog. The Teensy is placed on a breadboard, and hooked up with a series of 8 buttons to serve as the controls. Audio output is via a LM386 acting as a simple audio amp, hooked up with an original Game Boy speaker for more authentic sound. Display is thanks to a FT81x display driver running a small LCD. Games are loaded via an SD card formatted in the FAT32 file system.

While it’s not as ergonomic as the original Nintendo console, it works, and works well! It’s an impressive project to see the Game Boy recreated from scratch inside a powerful microcontroller. We’ve seen other projects go to similar lengths before. Video after the break.

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DIY Game Boy Games Make The Perfect Christmas Gift

January 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Sometimes, the best gift is the one you make yourself. [Pigeonaut] decided to whip up a few Game Boy games of their very own creation to gift to the special people in their life.

The games were crafted using a platform called GB Studio. It’s a tool that allows the drag-and-drop creation of games for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color handhelds. It’s capable of creating ROM files to run in an emulator, within a web page, or they can be flashed to a cartridge and played on real Nintendo hardware.

For the full effect, [Pigeonaut] went with the latter method. Four games were created: Phantom Shock, Climbing Mount Crymore, Cozy Cat Cafe, and A Tiny Hike. Each was flashed onto a real cart and given a high-quality label to make a lovely tangible gift. Upon gifting, [Pigeonaut]’s friends and partner were able to play their way through their personalized titles on a GameCube running the Game Boy Player accessory.

It’s hard to imagine a more touching gift than a personal game crafted from the ground up. Getting to play it on a real Nintendo is even better, and we’ve seen hardware that can achieve that before. Try out the games in your web browser via the links above, or send us in your own cool homebrew hacks to the Tipsline!

An Epic Quest To Build The Ultimate Game Boy

January 4, 2023 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

If you didn’t grow up clutching Nintendo’s original DMG-01 Game Boy, it might difficult to see the appeal in 2023. It had the ergonomics of a brick, the system’s unlit LCD screen utilized a somewhat nauseating green color palette, and when compared to its contemporary competition like the Sega Game Gear or Atari Lynx, it would certainly appear to be the inferior platform. But despite its faults there was just something magical about the machine, and those who have a soft spot for the iconic handheld are always eager to relive those glory days.

Now, thanks to the incredible work of [Bucket Mouse], playing the old “brick” Game Boy doesn’t have to be nearly as austere an experience as it was in 1989. That’s because he’s developed a set of replacement PCBs for the handheld that not only implement all of the features of the later Game Boy Color, but sprinkle in some modern niceties as well. The result is a handheld that looks like the original on the outside, but plays all your favorite games even better than you remember them. Continue reading “An Epic Quest To Build The Ultimate Game Boy” →

GB Interceptor Enables Live Screen Capture From Game Boy

December 22, 2022 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

[Sebastian] had a tricky problem to solve. Competitors in a Tetris tournament needed to stream video of their Game Boy screens, but no solution readily existed. For reasons of fairness, emulators were right out, and no modifications could be made to the Game Boys, either. Thus, [Sebastian] created the GB Interceptor, a Game Boy capture cartridge.

Thanks to the design of the Game Boy, there’s plenty of access to useful signals via the cartridge port itself. [Sebastian] realized that a non-invasive capture device could be built to sit in-between the Game Boy and a cart, and send video to a computer. Unfortunately, there’s no direct access to the video RAM via this port, but [Sebastian] figured out a nifty workaround.

The build uses a Raspberry Pi Pico. The chip’s two cores emulate the Game Boy’s CPU and Picture Processing Unit, respectively. Doing this, while having the chips keep up with what’s going on in the Game Boy, required overclocking the Pico to 225 MHz. The system works by capturing data from the cartridge’s memory bus, and follows along with the instructions being run by the Game Boy. By doing this, the Pico is able to populate its own copy of the video RAM. It then spits this out over USB, where it can be displayed and streamed online as desired.

There are some edge-case limitations, but for its intended purpose, the system works great. Currently, the hardware is usable on Linux and Windows, though it does require some fiddling in the latter case. Files are on Github for those eager to build their own. If you simply want to dump carts rather than stream from your Game Boy, we can help there, too. Video after the break.

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Dumping Game Boy Cartridges Via The Link Cable Port

December 14, 2022 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

When it comes to vintage consoles like the Game Boy, it’s often nice to be able to dump cartridge ROMs for posterity, for archival, and for emulation. To that end, [Francis Stokes] of [Low Byte Productions] whipped up a rather unique method of dumping Game Boy carts via the link cable port.

The method starts by running custom code on the Game Boy, delivered by flash cart. That code loads itself into RAM, and then waits for the user to swap in a cart they wish to dump and press a button. The code then reads the cartridge, byte by byte, sending it out over the link port. To capture the data, [Francis] simply uses a Saleae logic analyzer to do the job. Notably, the error rate was initially super high with this method, until [Francis] realised that cutting down the length of the link cable cut down on noise that was interfering with the signal.

The code is available on GitHub for those interested. There are other ways to dump Game Boy cartridges too, of course.

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