Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr_TgTXuOqQ
Check Out The Weird Photos I Found On This eBay Game Boy Camera
Introduction
A few years back I bought somebody’s old Game Boy Camera on eBay - and it had some weird pictures on it! So before I wipe them to embark on a new project, let’s take a look at them and try to work out what on earth was going on.
Script
Now, I have quite an amusing story for you for this video, and this concerns this Game Boy Camera that I bought a couple of years ago, and indeed the photos that I found on this Game Boy Camera, which I have to share with you - and I’ve been holding off on making this video for so long, but I was here at the studio today working on some other stuff, and I thought - I actually found all this in a box a couple of days ago - and I thought:
“Right, it’s finally time to do this, because I’ve got to share this with people!”
I want to get this wiped and start again, because I’m going to do another slightly different video project all about the Game Boy Camera and the cult following that it has in these modern times - people modifying them, putting better lenses on them, using them for video and all sorts - the really cool kind of community around the Game Boy Camera.
So I’m going to be using my Game Boy Color, and this I’ve had for quite a few years now - in fact, this predates my YouTube channel, because I’ve modded the screen on this - it’s got one of the early BennVenn LCD screens, if you remember those, if you’re into Game Boys.
Once upon a time it was the only option for a screen upgrade in a Game Boy Color. Of course nowadays there are IPS options and stuff like that - and on that note, I actually have a brand new Game Boy Color kit making its way to me. You’ve probably seen on a few other channels that there’s a brand new FPGA-based Game Boy Color, a complete recreation, no original Nintendo parts in there - and the longer-term plan is that it will be able to run different cores, and support different types of Game Boy, and I think it just runs Color and original Game Boy games at the moment - and it’s actually relatively inexpensive, and I’m very much looking forward to covering that.
So I think I’ll keep this one original with the old BennVenn screen and build a nice new one with a nice big IPS screen and an internal lithium ion battery and all that. That’ll be a cool project for the channel. So keep an eye out for that on this channel and of course on my main channel ctrl-alt-rees.
A bit of backstory behind the Game Boy Color: of course it was the follow up to the original Game Boy, this was released in 1998. The Game Boy Camera was also released in 1998 and the Game Boy Printer which goes with this, which is a little thermal printer thing and I am planning on getting hold of one of those for when I do eventually do the video - that was also released in 1998.
But you don’t actually need the Game Boy Color for the Camera - this works with the original Game Boy. It’s only a black and white, very, very low resolution thing if you’ve not come across these.
…and the final piece of the puzzle is this - and no, this isn’t a sponsored video or anything like that - in fact I’ve literally just discovered that they don’t make these anymore, which is a bit sad really. It’s made by a company called Submodule, and it’s a Game Boy cart reader for PC and Mac, and what it allows you to do is to dump your original ROMs from your original cartridges, if you want to play them on emulators and also copy your saved games across, and any other data that’s kind of contained on those original Game Boy cartridges.
Indeed, if you have the Game Boy Camera, it can copy the images from that, and it can also convert them into a more useful format that you can actually use for sharing and whatnot. So what I’ll do is I’ll show you how this works and then I’ll also show you the process of copying the pictures across, and we’ll have a look at those weird pictures that I found and maybe see what we can make of them.
So I hope you find it interesting.
So here it is - that beautiful, resplendent Nintendo Game Boy Color, in that beautiful shade of yellow, of course, with the matching Game Boy Camera. Very pleased that they made them in matching colours for these. Very forward thinking of Nintendo, of course - and one thing to bear in mind about these, particularly these unmodded ones with the screen upgrades - the earlier screen upgrades - is that they’re very hungry on power, and, actually, standard rechargeable AA batteries are only 1.2V, and I had to actually track down something slightly different to power this, and usually, in this day and age, you’d put an internal lithium ion battery and stick a USB port in it somewhere and power it from that, but these are actually AA 1.5V lithium ion rechargeable batteries - and as you can see, they’ve got these Micro USB ports on them, and you actually charge them by plugging Micro USB cables into these - and I’d completely forgotten about these.
I found this earlier today, and the batteries were completely dead, so these have actually been on charge for the past couple of hours, so hopefully they’re sufficiently charged to be able to demo this. But yeah, just an interesting quirk of the Game Boy Color, and this kind of thing wasn’t something I’d come across until I’d tried to power this particular Game Boy.
But yeah, they’re quite interesting.
Useful to bear in mind if you’ve got some older device that doesn’t like modern rechargeables - it’ll save you spending an absolute fortune on batteries. Of course, we’re not here to talk about batteries, we’re here to talk about the Game Boy Camera. There we go. So that’s up and running, which is fantastic.
Obviously I haven’t demoed the actual camera part yet - you can do these animations. It’s one of the fun things you can do in the software - and then there’s a mode where you can put stickers and things on the on the pictures - and as you can see the interface for this does have some basic colour to it, but the actual camera itself is completely black and white.
In fact - no - I won’t take a selfie just yet. I’ll show you these pictures that I found!
So… Oh, play.
Oh, it’s got a game-
Yeah, sorry, I completely forgot about this, it’s got a game built in as well. That’s not the option we want - we want view!
So here we go.
Go to the album and we’ve got pictures of…
…these guys!?
Yeah, I don’t know, are they clear enough to be identifiable? I don’t think so. I think there’s er… this guy lying on the bed.
There’s a child.
I’ll probably blur these out in the edit, I think - but there are some that aren’t people, which I will get to.
There’s a picture of these rather scary looking dolls.
…and yeah, there’s this - which seems to be a picture of some kind of drawing?
Nice plant there and I think, is that a carrot there? Perhaps they’re a keen gardener, you know, taking pictures of their plants and their vegetables perhaps.
Yeah, I know what it is!
That’s more graffiti by the looks of it.
More graffiti by the looks of it - and the pictures kind of follow along with this theme.
There’s a another picture of a child there. Quite interesting.
A man in a hood with a little one of those little soul patch type beards that were quite big in the early 2000s - maybe that dates this?
There’s this dude - he looks a bit like me actually. Yeah, kind of hard to tell. Or a bit like-
Who’s the guy from American Pie? I can’t remember his name, it looks a bit like him
…and then there’s this: “HM Prisons Only”
I’m not quite sure what that is? Perhaps when we download the pictures we’ll get a better idea.
Yeah, “HM Prisons Only”. Is that an edited version of the previous picture? I don’t think you can scroll, but that’s, yeah, you have to load each picture individually rather than scrolling through them.
Yeah, any ideas!?
And then there’s this. This looks like a photo of a photo of a couple of old army guys in uniform?
…and then there’s this one, which is - err, somebody’s attic maybe with the pointy roof? Perhaps that’s related to some of the other paraphernalia that we’ve seen?
I have no idea - and then that’s it. So, yeah. Some quite interesting photos on this camera, and you can probably see why I wanted to get these off and preserve them and share them with you before I went ahead and cleared it so that I could make the video that I wanted to wanted to make.
So let’s get these pictures downloaded now, have a bit of a closer look at them.
So the GB01 just plugs in via a USB port - this laptop’s quite old so it doesn’t have USB-C, so I’ve just got a USB-A to C adapter just to connect that up. Windows is just installing the drivers for that, and there are some updated drivers and updated software that you can download from the website, which I’ve just started downloading.
But as you can see from the website here
- in fact it’s literally just finished downloading, there we go -
as you can see from the website here, unfortunately this device is no longer being sold and support is limited, it says. Although there’s not really much to support, it just kind of works and does its job.
And you can go to the manual page and we’ll just have a quick look through the website first as well.
It says, you can relive your favourite Game Boy games, so you can actually dump the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games - I didn’t mention that - actually dump the ROMs and play them in your emulator of choice, which is quite cool really, isn’t it?
It’s got its own purpose built software, and I’ve just noticed that’s actually available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux as well, which is really cool of them. Of course you can transfer your saves over, legally play your own original ROMs, and indeed get your Game Boy Camera pictures, which is what we’re interested in here.
But yeah, real shame that they don’t make these anymore. Like I say, €45 was actually a bit of a bargain for what it is and I’m very pleased that I managed to get my hands on one.
But if we just go to the manual page, which is also where you go to download the software - or so it says on here.
There you go - so we’ve got support for Windows, MacOS, Linux x64, and of course ArmV7, so I guess that runs on the Raspberry Pi as well, which is fantastic to see. I have had a play with the Mac version in the past, but it’s been a few years and it looks like they’ve updated this.
Right, so finally, after fighting with this laptop for a couple of minutes - I’ve absolutely no idea what’s going on - I’ve got the application installed and it’s just telling me that there’s been some updates. I imagine the version I looked at this was probably the first version, years and years ago so it’ll be interesting to see what they’ve added - and it’s advertising that if you have a Game Boy camera, you can now add filters to your pictures.
“This makes it really fun to export your photos and upload them straight to Instagram or your platform of choice”.
So that’s cool.
Ah, there we go, so it’s detected the device and it’s telling me that there’s a new firmware update for it, which is great - so let’s update the firmware, why not?
“Please wait, this may take a while”.
Everything’s taking a while tonight…
…ah, there we go, that didn’t take long at all, wonderful! So, looks like we’re ready to rock and roll!
“Looking for cartridge”
“Please select platform”
So we’re going to select “Game Boy”, and now it’s looking for the cartridge, so what I will do is I will remove the Game Boy Camera, because obviously the Game Boy Camera is indeed the actual cartridge itself, and plug that into this - and hopefully it should pick that up straight away.
That has detected that as a Game Boy Camera, so let’s go through and download those pictures.
“Destination Folder”
“Game Boy Camera”
We’ll save those on the desktop, shall we? Like a boomer.
A few minutes later…
So there we go, that’s the pictures downloaded and automatically converted to PNG format - now obviously there’s a few here that I can’t show you because they’re pictures of actual people and now we’ve got them up on the computer screen they’re actually a little bit more visible and a little bit more legible so I guess I should probably protect their identities, particularly as there’s children in here as well.
Here are those creepy dolls that we saw when I was going through on the actual Game Boy Color itself - I’ll just zoom in a bit in the edit so we can have a bit of a closer look at some of these.
That wonderful, that wonderful gardening-related artwork there, I think that’s a tomato leaf and a carrot maybe?
Like I say, probably owned by an avid gardener.
Some interesting-looking, I guess it’s graffiti like I said before? I have no idea.
Some people again, obviously I can’t show those - and this “HM Prisons Only” thing and again, I still can’t quite work out what that is - I thought the picture would be a bit clearer after I downloaded it but yeah, any ideas?
Maybe like a lighter or something? I guess I guess it’s not from an actual prison - it’s probably like a novelty thing.
Or this Game Boy Camera has been smuggled into a prison at some point!?
I dread to think, I hope it’s been thoroughly disinfected in the meantime…
But that’s the photos on there. That’s that wartime one of the the gentleman in their uniforms - I guess I can show that ‘cause you can’t see anything at all in that one - and the the people..
Oh, there’s also, there’s also a lady, there’s also a lot of photos of a lady.
A blonde lady shining a torch or something, or a lamp or something at the camera - I didn’t see those when I was going through on the camera itself. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Maybe they’ve been deleted and the software somehow managed to recover them.
So, yeah, interesting stuff.
So quite an interesting story there, evidently.
Any ideas whatsoever? Anyone out there? Maybe they’re your photos!?
Is that you in the photos? Let me know.
I’d love to know what’s going on there - but evidently this was owned by some quite interesting characters or a quite interesting character in a former life. Unfortunately, I bought it a very very long time ago and even then it took me quite a while to actually get around to looking at the photos on it and I don’t think I’ve got any kind of record of who I bought it from.
Not that I’d necessarily want to get involved with any of that anyway.
So interesting, interesting stuff!
I hope you enjoyed the story anyway and I hope you enjoyed the video and of course checking out the process of exploring the Game Boy Camera and copying the files across and stuff - of course there are other ways, there’s DIY Arduino-based things that plug into the expansion port on the Game Boy and all that kind of stuff and that’s certainly something that I’d like to look at in a future video at some point, but that’s all I have for this one I hope you enjoyed it.
Don’t forget to smash that like button and subscribe to my second channel here and all of that lovely stuff!
So thank you ever so much for watching and I’ll hopefully see you next time.
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