One of Nintendo Switch’s many ancestors include the Game Boy Camera, which is an add-on accessory paired with the Game Boy console released in 1998. Fast forward to 26 years later, you may soon be able to use a device to output that peak 90’s imaging glory into a video call.
Game Boy’s 16-Kilopixel Camera
For a camera circa 1998 that pretty much predates any laptop with a webcam onboard (unless you pay a hefty sum for it at the time), it’s certainly not going to win any awards with its rather abysmal specs by today’s standards. For one, it only outputs a resolution of 128×128 in monochrome format, totaling exactly 16,384 pixels – that’s 0.016 megapixels, to give you a rough idea. Today, smartphones can capture up to 12,500 times the pixel count of the Game Boy Camera via a 200MP sensor with all the colors included.
So, a company called Epilogue developed a device called GB Operator, a USB dock that allows various Game Boy cartridges to be played on a PC via a dedicated app plus the use of emulators. The company posted on X (Twitter) hinting that it will soon be able use the Game Boy Camera as the webcam for PCs, in all of its 16-kilopixel glory. “We now have a live feed from the Game Boy Camera, but still need to fine-tune some things and allow for configuration options,” it wrote under the X (Twitter) thread. Suffice to say, nobody will be able to tell who exactly is in the camera, right?
As The Verge noted, previous attempts at feeding the Game Boy Camera’s signal into the PC has been a complicated process involving other Nintendo devices, a signal converter, and a video capture card. Epilogue’s solution looks a lot simplified, for a relatively affordable price of $50 (~RM234).
Pokdepinion: It’s quite a miracle this even works in this day and age. Pretty cool stuff!
