While I had several Game Boy handhelds as a child—mostly acquired second-hand—my pocket money could never quite stretch to the magnificence that was the Game Boy Camera. Like an ever-staring eye of Sauron mounted to the top of the device, the 180° swivelling camera allowed users to capture selfies and print them out on thermal paper with an additional Game Boy Printer.
Now, thanks to an emulator dock, the Game Boy Camera has been reborn as a functional PC webcam, providing 16,000 pixels of glorious black and white resolution.
The Epilogue GB Operator dock allows users to play Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy advance cartridges on Windows, macOS and Linux devices using a built in emulator (via Tom's Hardware). The dock itself has been available since 2021, but the team behind it has spent the past three years tweaking the device to deliver a live-feed from the Game Boy Camera.
All that hard work appears to have paid off, as the team have posted a video showing some incredibly low-res footage of two of its members beaming with joy at their progress. Epilogue says that while the live-feed is finally working, it still needs to "fine-tune some things and allow for configuration options."
While the GB Operator dock is compatible with PCs, the test window shown in the video is running on macOS. So it's unclear if any more tweaking will be needed to get a Windows device to use it as a terrible, no-good, yet charming alternative to a regular webcam. Still, Epilogue says it can't wait to see everyone having fun with the device, suggesting a release may be coming soon.
Hello from the team in glorious 16 kilopixels ????????! Coming soon to a GB Operator near you. pic.twitter.com/nFjiQxn9DOJuly 2, 2024
YouTube channel Retro Game Couch has also previously managed to get a Game Boy Camera working as a webcam, although in this case it took a combination of a Super Nintendo, Super Game Boy adapter cartridge, an HDMI upscaler and an HDMI capture device.
The GB Operator dock is a much neater, smaller solution, so it looks a much more workable method to enable the world's worst camera to work with modern devices.
As to why you'd want to? Well, plenty of relatively modern laptops have pretty awful webcams. Who among us hasn't attended a meeting where a key speaker appears to be lost in a snow drift, or stutters like a malfunctioning animatronic? At least here, you'll have that sheen of retro cool to fall back on.
"You use a Logitech? How terribly boring. It's all about the Game Boy Camera for me."
4K resolution, forget about it. The real hip kids are going Game Boy, I reckon.
