Forgotten Pixels

If you’ve ever wandered through your local jumble sale you might have come across people selling faded photos of unknown people out of rusty old tins. These lost, personal curios preserve their subjects until the chemicals holding the photos together degrade only to fade away completely. Well, I give you the modern equivalent: forgotten Game Boy Camera photos.

The Game Boy Camera, or Pocket Camera in Japan, came out back in 1998 alongside the Game Boy Printer. Unfortunately, the Game Boy Printer uses thermal paper, so, much like a receipt, the chances of it fading away are quite high. My focus, though, is on the Camera cartridges themselves.

At the time of release, Guinness World Records regarded the Game Boy Camera as the world’s smallest digital camera. These weren’t much more than the price of a regular Game Boy cartridge, and when inserted into a Game Boy Pocket, they were perfect for budding digital photographers to take with them wherever they went.

Each of these cartridges housed up to 30 photos and four game faces to be used for the Space fever II, DJ, Ball and Run! Run! Run! minigames. What’s worrying is that the Game Boy Camera uses SRAM (and a pretty mammoth amount of it too). What does this mean? Well, in short, it means that once the battery inside the cartridge dies, all the photos will be lost. This gives them even less shelf life than the average photograph.

However, in my experience of buying 30 or so Game Boy Cameras in the past year, they were all still functioning. This means you may still have time to either backup your own Game Boy Camera photos, or ones people have unwittingly left behind in their cartridge’s SRAM.

There are a couple of ways to retrieve the photos from the cartridge.

One way is by tracking down the Mad Catz GB to PC Camera Link Cable. It’s still floating around on Amazon and eBay. This makes the Game Boy Camera think your computer is a Game Boy Printer and prints it as a bitmap (.bmp) file. The problem with this is that the quality is not exactly the same as the data stored on the cartridge, plus you have to go through and print each photo manually.

Instead, I recommend the GB Transferer II. It’s a Chinese product that is used for extracting the save files and ROM images from Game Boy and Game Boy Advance cartridges. After using the software that comes with it to extract the save file, you can take all the photos off the camera using freeware called GBCameraDump. The extracted photos will be the same quality as they are on the cartridge. The bonus is that you can also extract the ROM image so that you can play that save file long after the cartridges battery dies on an emulator if you so desire. It can even be later restored to the Game Boy Camera if you know a tech wiz who knows how to replace the battery. Another plus is that even if you or someone else deleted all the photos from the Game Boy Camera, the photos are still stored in the SRAM, so unless they have been overwritten you can still extract them.

Both these ways require parallel ports, meaning you’ll need an oldish computer or possibly a parallel to USB cable. I’ve only tried the former myself.

You can pick these up pretty cheap these days. On eBay the prices for them start at 99p, but if you look hard enough I’m sure you’ll find them in charity shop bargain bins for even less. If you build up a big collection of Game Boy Cameras you could always take a bunch of them out with you and use them for your own photo or video art projects too.

In the future it’s unlikely DSi or 3DS units will be sold second-hand without the photos on their SD cards being wiped first, as anyone who’s bought a second-hand 360 only to find their copy of Hexic HD missing will know. Regardless, Game Boy Camera photos have a certain style to them that’s not easily emulated elsewhere.

I’m not sure of the legality issues involving the photos you recover from Game Boy Cameras. The best I can work out is that as long as you have bought them second-hand and you don’t sell the photos on the camera, you’re in good standing.

Join me!