[Brian Khuu] bought a few Gameboy cameras on the Internet and found that they still had pictures on them from a previous owner. The memory in the camera has a backup battery and if that battery dies, the pictures are history. [Brian] bravely decided to extract the pictures to a PC. He knew the protocol for how the Gameboy talked to the companion pocket printer was available, so he used an Arduino and a Web browser to extract the photos. The resulting code is on GitHub if you want to save your pictures.
Although Brian didn’t have to crack the protocol, he does offer a good explanation of it. There’s even some sniffed displays. The Arduino does all the communications and fools the game into thinking it is the companion printer. However, it simply streams the data out and a Javascript decoder handles the actual decoding. In fact, in the blog post, you can enter data, click a button, and see the resulting Gameboy picture.
It works, but [Brian] did run into a few problems. For one thing, the devices don’t see to use any flow control so he had no choice but to keep up with the Gameboy. Also, there is a CRC he could not correctly decode. However, the pictures look good — well, as good as Gameboy pictures look, at least. So he did get results.
We’ve seen this done with a PC before. If you are more interested in the reverse, by the way, you can use a real Gameboy printer to print from an Arduino.
Filed under: Android Hacks, Nintendo Game Boy Hacks
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