Game Boy Camera

I remember seeing people use a Game Boy Camera years ago, and with my interest in lo-fi tech (and probably spurred on by 8bitMKE) I ordered a Game Boy Camera for $11.97 on eBay almost two years ago (Hey, sometimes projects take a while.)

Last fall when my daughter moved out we found her old Game Boy Advance, and after a good five minutes of Tetris I popped the camera into it and took a few photos. But alas, with no way to transfer them out of the Game Boy, they were stuck there…

After some digging around I found some posts that mentioned using an Arduino to transfer the photos from the Game Boy to a computer. Arduino you say? That’s my jam! But even then it took some time before I did anything.

I finally got the cable I needed (a “Two Player Link Cable Cord for Nintendo Game Boy”) for $3.99 on eBay after first ordering the wrong cable, and I quickly grabbed an Arduino Nano, one of my breakout boards that was already soldered up, cut the cable in half, stripped the wires, grabbed a multimeter to figure out which was which, and got it all wired up.

The arduino-gameboy-printer-emulator repo on GitHub proved the most useful to me in getting this all set up.

The process to transfer involves connecting the Game Boy and “printing” the photo you want while the Arduino serial monitor is open and set 115200 baud. The data will flow into the serial monitor window, then you copy it and paste it into the decoder and you get your image.

While I’ve got a DSLR, a phone, a Raspberry Pi camera, and other ways to capture images, the Game Boy Camera is definitely one of the more esoteric methods of doing so. Stay tuned to see what I actually do with it.