West McGowan

Brian Khuu (mofosyne) created an Arduino powered Game Boy Printer emulator; after picking up a couple of Game Boy Camera’s and finding a bunch of images on them he attempted to dump the images, and succeeded! Being a massive fan of both the Game boy and photography this project was for me. A while back I picked up a handful of super cheap (good quality but inexpensive with the CH340G chip) Arduino’s. It was hard trying to find projects that I really really wanted to do.

Luckily while browsing Hackaday I seen this article about the project. I quickly went to the good ol’ eBay to pick up a GBC Link Cable (from hellfire_trading) and had a rummage through my Arduino box. Decided on the Micro, it seemed perfect for the job. I had a Raspberry Pi GPIO breakout board which fit the Arduino Micro quite well.

Gameboy Original/Color Link Cable Pinout
 __________
|  6  4  2 |
 \_5__3__1_/ (at cable)
 
Arduino Pin      Gameboy Link Pin
unused           Pin 1 : 5.0V
D4               Pin 2 : Serial OUTPUT
D3               Pin 3 : Serial INPUT
unused           Pin 4 : Serial Data
D2               Pin 5 : Serial Clock (Interrupt)
GND              Pin 6 : GND (Attach to GND Pin)

Once you’ve got it all soldered you can upload your code to your Arduino. Plug it into your Game Boy, open up your Arduino’s IDE Serial Monitor (Ctr+Shift+M) and set the baud rate to 115200. Go to your image on your GB Camera and press Print. You’ll see a bunch of code coming through the monitor. Copy all of the code and open the gameboy_printer_js_decoder.html and paste in the code and press Click to Update Gameboy Tile.

Here’s an instructional video of the process.

A post shared by West McGowan (@imwestm) on Dec 6, 2017 at 4:58am PST

If you’re getting any errors feel free to contact either myself or Brian. We’d both love to see your pictures too!

Extra

EUR Game Boy Camera Frames

Pictures Taken By Me