Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

https://swiftrocks.com/digitizing-photos-from-the-1998-game-boy-camera

by rockbruno • 4 months ago

68 15 4 months ago

You can also dump GB Camera photos with GBxCart RW. Those can also be used to dump ROMs/saves and reprogram flash carts. The cheap GBC games off Ali express are flash carts in reality.

rockbruno2• 4 months ago

Oh yeah I forgot to mention that, it was the first option I considered but getting it shipped to Sweden was super expensive. So it didn't make sense considering I just wanted the camera dump feature. Buying the pcb and port on the other hand only costed me about 10 bucks since I already had an Arduino laying around, and also served as some necessary soldering practice :)

ljf3• 4 months ago

Interesting article, but shame the images are blocked in the UK - guessing imgur?

rockbruno2• 4 months ago

I had no idea they blocked imgur on the UK. I'll move it to self-hosted!

ljf3• 4 months ago

Thank you! Much appreciated

zyx321• 4 months ago

Since when is that a thing? I'll presume they're boycotting the new age verification laws?

voidUpdate• 4 months ago

Its been a thing since September 30th 2025, and apparently its just embedded content on third party sites, and account features on imgur itself that are blocked. I think its a "we don't want to adhere to your data protection laws" instead of an age thing

https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/41592665292443-Imgu...

Tommix11• 4 months ago

Great work! I have a GB camera (and printer) in my collection

anthk• 4 months ago

MGBA emulates the GB camera too.

techknight• 4 months ago

The JoeyJr is also a great tool for this. It can dump and write GB carts but specially detects when you plug in a GB camera and gives you a folder of image files.

https://bennvenn.myshopify.com/products/usb-gb-c-cart-dumper...

donatj• 4 months ago

The GB Operator will let you dump photos from a Game Boy Camera as well as stream video from the camera in real time. It's a fun little device.

They'd promised a webcam driver, but that never materialized and instead just gave instructions on using OBS to use the video stream window as a camera.

https://www.epilogue.co/product/gb-operator

https://www.epilogue.co/support/playing-games/gb-camera-webc...

swq115• 4 months ago

The Game Boy Camera was 128x112 pixels with 4 shades of gray. The fact that people are still finding ways to pull images off these things almost 30 years later is peak hacker energy

kevin_thibedeau• 4 months ago

I recently played through a battery backed DMG game I last played in 1994 and the saved games were still good.

gyomu• 4 months ago

This is very neat!

Some parallel thinking here, but it feels like it should be possible to build a software only version of this running entirely on a smartphone.

Take a picture of the GameBoy screen, and the app reconstructs the source image. It's only 128x128 2-bit depth pixels after all - the information content there seems well within the bounds of what can be reconstructed from a modern high resolution smartphone camera sensor.

Would be a cool computer vision project.

ljf3• 4 months ago

These look brilliant and remind me of the pictures from my Casio watch camera: https://www.casio.com/intl/watches/50th/Heritage/2000s/

I really need to dig that out, from memory the software only worked with Win98 or ME - but I guess there must be a way of getting it running elsewhere (or getting my ME laptop running).

Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

Related Stories