Hi, it's Matt.
If you're a long time viewer of the channel,
you might know that this, the Gameboy camera, is my favourite digital camera.
And after decades of trying, I have finally found the ultimate way
of getting photos off it.
This is now the third video I've made on my channel about it.
But here's the Gameboy camera.
It's a cartridge that goes into the Game Boy.
I've got a game boy pocket here, but it works with all of them.
You shove it in like a game, and it can take selfies,
it can take someone-else-ies.
And the photos you get out of it are really low resolution.
They are about 100 pixels square.
And for the time, that was actually really good
because digital cameras were prohibitively expensive.
Almost everyone was using film.
And the amazing thing about this was you take a photo
and you can immediately see the photo you took without having to wait a week
for the photo to be developed and then posted back to you.
I have had this since then.
I've had it the full 25 years, and I still love it, obviously,
because it's steeped in nostalgia, but also because even
with its low resolution, it takes surprisingly intelligible photos.
Being from the nineties,
it was never designed for getting the photos off it onto your computer
because not everyone had one back then, but I've always wanted to do it.
So I have tried three different ways over the years.
The first one was very fiddly.
but it got the job done, but not very portable.
The second was something I cobbled together myself out of a Raspberry Pi,
a cartridge reader, and a 3D printed case,
which I called the Gameboy photo WiFi transfer or something.
I can't remember.
I'm not very good at naming things.
The way that works is Sometimes.
it didn't always work, couldn't work out
why, so I'm going to file that under Fiddly as well.
my goal here, by the way, is while I'm out and about taking photos,
I want to be able to fill the memory of all 30 photos,
dump all of them off onto my phone, and then clear the memory and take some more.
That way I can immediately share them with people on my phone.
And also I don't have to wait.
I've got all the space needed I found the solution though, and it seems to work.
It's the BennBenn Joey Jr.
It's a Gameboy cartridge reader.
There's loads of those about because there's a whole Gameboy homebrew
programming scene.
People make their own games, music, software and stuff,
but this one has the killer feature.
You can plug in your Gameboy camera connect it via the USB-C
port on the bottom into your device, and it shows up as a hard drive
with all the photos on it and all you need to do is copy them off.
Done.
I'm very excited.
I'll take a photo now to show you.
There's one of the tripod and my messy room.
Let's take one of me Right.
I've taken a few photos.
I'm going to take the cartridge out, plug it into the Joey
Jr using this cable, which I'll talk about a bit more later.
I'll plug it into my phone,
open up the files up.
Wait a second.
The BENNVENN drive’s appeared,
and these are the photos.
The previews take a while to load, but if I click on the first one.
Tadaa!
and I can now select as many as I want
and copy them across.
that's it.
It's done.
The photos are now off the camera on my phone so I can unplug it.
That's it.
It works just the same whether you plug it into a phone,
a tablet, a computer, it mounts as a drive.
You drag the photos off and you've got them.
It's great when you're out and about because you can take photos
and then share them with people straight away.
I was actually at a rooftop bar
and tried taking some landscape photos with it, which is not its forté,
but the staff there saw it and really wanted to have a go
and rather having to wait until I got home and fiddling like I would before
I could give them the photos right there.
and then There's a slight problem if you're an iPhone user like me,
if you've got anything else that has a usb-c port, it works straight away.
But with the lightning port on an iPhone, you need an adapter.
It's called a lightning camera adapter or sometimes known as a lightning OTG cable.
And what it does is it gives you a USB port
and I can't
find anywhere that gives you a Usb-c cable version of it.
It's always a USB A port.
So on top of that, I've also got a Diddy USB A to C adapter.
You could also use a cable. I just wanted to keep it small.
And then from that I finally plug it into the Joey Jr.
and it all fits in the pocket
nice and small.
I don't have to carry round a
whole laptop with me like I did originally to be able to deal with the photos.
Yeah!
Now I can take the photos off the camera,
there are two things I want to do to improve the photo taking experience,
and both of these come from the Gameboy enthusiast community and here they are.
Number one is improve the screen.
As you can probably see here, it's quite reflective and it's not backlit either.
So you kind of have to look at it from a weird angle.
But I've bought a kit with a circuit board and a backlit screen
that I'm going to put into here to make it easier to use.
and number two, someone by the name of HDR has made a custom circuit board,
which with a bit of soldiering, you can replace with the one that's inside
the Gameboy camera and you can use that to upload custom software to it.
So instead of using what Nintendo wrote to control
the camera, you can use someone else's program.
And in theory that can give you great control, let you do new things.
But to me it just sounds like a bit of fun.
to do this.
I'll need to order a PCB, a printed circuit board,
which neatly brings us to our advertising segment.
Over to you, Geoff thank you, Matt.
This is Geoffrey Trout coming to you
from the advertising cupboard.
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Thank you PCBWay for paying for this advert.
I’m done with this video.
It's too hot.
I’m sweaty.