Gaming Hacks

Take and Print Photos with Your Game Boy

Fun things you can do with Nintendo’s playful printer and camera peripherals.

Nintendo comes up with some cool geek toys. Many of them are in wide circulation right now, particularly the Game Boy Advance and the GameCube. Some of their older gems are still well worth buying to hack, exploit, and otherwise fiddle with; the Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer are foremost among these. Let’s check out what you can do with them.

Introducing the Game Boy Camera and Printer

Many people have fallen in love with Nintendo’s rudimentary Game Boy Camera, which shoots up to 30 pictures in four shades of grey at 128 112 pixel resolution, and stores everything in 128 KB of battery-saved SRAM. Originally released in 1998 in Japan and then in the West in the days of the black-and-white Game Boy, the camera still works with subsequent Game Boy models, including the Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Advance SP.

Due to its low-resolution, black-and-white look, the GB Camera feels even older than its actual vintage. While snapping, the camera lens itself either swivels to point toward the Game Boy user or faces outward to take pictures of your surroundings. It’s surprisingly versatile, though. Not only can you take pictures and create simple stop-motion animations, the camera provides a large variety of stencils and silly add-ons (including fake noses, hats, and other accoutrements) that you can paste onto your picture. It even includes mini-games, as well as a musical ...