Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera • Hacker News Board

Re: Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

#11

Post by voidUpdate » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC

zyx321 wrote: post #8

ljf wrote: post #4

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

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

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...

Re: Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

#12

Post by techknight » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 11:45 AM UTC

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...

Re: Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

#13

Post by donatj » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 11:50 AM UTC

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...

Re: Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

#14

Post by ljf » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

rockbruno wrote: post #6

ljf wrote: post #4

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

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

Thank you! Much appreciated

Re: Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

#15

Post by swq115 » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 1:10 PM UTC

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

Re: Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

#16

Post by gyomu » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

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.

Re: Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

#17

Post by ljf » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 1:20 PM UTC

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).

Re: Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

#18

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

swq115 wrote: post #15

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

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