game boy camera

17 Articles

Gameboy Camera Becomes Camcorder

November 3, 2015 by 13 Comments

[Furrtek] is a person of odd pursuits, which mainly involve making old pieces of technology do strange things. That makes him a hero to us, and his latest project elevates this status: he built a device that turns the Nintendo Gameboy camera cartridge into a camcorder. His device replaces the Gameboy, capturing the images from the camera, displaying them on the screen and saving them to a micro SD card.

Before you throw out your cellphone or your 4K camcorder, bear in mind that the captured video is monochrome (with only 4 levels between white and black), at a resolution of 128 by 112 pixels and at about 14 frames per second. Sound is captured at 8192Hz, producing the same buzzy,  grainy sound that the Gameboy is famous for. Although it isn’t particularly practical, [Furrtek]s build is extremely impressive, built around an NXP LPC1343 ARM Cortex-M3 MCU processor. This processor repeatedly requests an image from the camera, receives the image and then collects the images and sound together to form the video and save it to the micro SD card. As always, [Furrtek] has made all of the source code and other files available for anyone who wants to try it out.

For those who aren’t familiar with his previous work, [Furrtek] has done things like making a Speak & Spell swear like a sailor, adding a VGA out to a Virtualboy, and hacking a Gameboy Color to control electronic shelf labels.

Continue reading “Gameboy Camera Becomes Camcorder” →

8-bit Digital Photo Gun

April 3, 2015 by 23 Comments

One of the first popular mass-produced digital cameras was the Game Boy camera, a terrible black and white image sensor stuck inside a highly modified Game Boy cartridge. With a Game Boy, the camera, and the Game Boy printer, it was able to produce low-resolution but still surprisingly usable images. Combine all these parts together with the best of hacker art from [vtol] and what do you get? The Game Boy Instant Photo Gun.

There aren’t many details for this build, but it looks like this is an uncased Game Boy Brick, a Game Boy camera, and Game Boy Printer assembled into something that looks dangerous and won’t get past a TSA checkpoint. That might be fixed by repurposing an old NES zapper.

We’ve seen [vtol]’s work before with a machine that probably doesn’t steal your credit card info, a levitating speaker, and something that doesn’t reference [Tarkovsky] enough. This build is right up there with the rest of them.

Thanks [Itay] for the link.

ArTICam Interfaces Game Boy Camera With TI Calculators

November 29, 2014 by 4 Comments

[Christopher Mitchell] has given Texas Instruments calculators the ability to capture images through a Game Boy Camera with ArTICam. First introduced in 1998, The Game Boy Camera was one of the first low-cost digital cameras available to consumers. Since then it has found its way into quite a few projects, including this early Atmel AT90 based hack, and this Morse code transceiver.

TI calculators don’t include a Game Boy cartridge slot, so [Christopher] used an Arduino Uno to interface the two. He built upon the Arduino-TI Calculator Linking (ArTICL) Library  to create ArTICam. Getting the Arduino to talk with the Game Boy Camera’s M64282FP image sensor turned out to be easy, as there already are code examples available. The interface between the camera sensor and the Arduino is simple enough. 6 digital lines for an oddball serial interface, one analog sense line, power and ground. [Christopher] used a shield to solder everything up, but says you can easily get away with wiring directly the Arduino Uno’s I/O pins. The system is compatible with the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus family of calculators. Grabbing an image is as simple as calling  GetCalc(Pic1) from your calculator program.

So, If you have an old calculator lying around, give it a try to enjoy some 128×123-pixel grayscale goodness!