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I used a Game Boy camera for Facetime video calls in iPadOS 17
- waltbosz 3y agoAbout 20 years ago, I had a similar idea for a Game Boy camera webcam, but I never finished it. My plan was to put my Game Boy camera into my Super Game Boy, and then hook my SNES to my PC's video capture card. Nice to see someone actually did it with modern tech.
- giantrobot 3y agoYou'll be pleased to know your plan is workable[0]. [0] https://hackaday.com/2021/07/25/dominate-video-calls-with-game-boy-camera-webcam/ https://hackaday.com/2021/07/25/dominate-video-calls-with-ga...
- hsishish 3y ago[flagged]
- mr_o47 3y agoAmazing Article Really enjoyed reading the post.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Almondsetat 3y agoApple implemented a standard so most stuff that follows the standard now works. Nice but.... uninspiring?
- MrLeap 3y agoInteresting take. If somebody chiseled a tree stump into a recognizable likeness of your face, would you dismiss it as derivative? Your face has been done before, stumps are EVERYWHERE. Chisels and hammers are _LEGACY TECH_. Sometimes things are interesting because they're creative, not because they're on the bleeding edge of technical complexity.
- echelon 3y agoGame Boy Camera has been used as a webcam before. There's an entire enthusiast community around it, and it was especially popular during the pandemic. I think OP was groaning at the Apple blog self-congratulating the platform. Most of the points were about the iPad, and Apple products were mentioned 71 times (in almost every sentence).
- smrq 3y agoHonestly, if this sold me on any product, it's the Analogue Pocket. None of the iOS stuff seemed particularly inspiring or inspired, but that's one piece of hardware I didn't know I needed in my life.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoI mean… Viticci is a long-time Apple blogger, so it makes total sense for him to blog about new iPad features. I’d hardly expect him to get excited about Android; there are other blogs for that.
- Almondsetat 3y agoWhat's creative about using UVC like you've done for decades on Linux or *BSDs already?
- dmonitor 3y agoIt's even more fascinating that a 25 year old peripheral for a 30yr old handheld game console can be used in the current year with normal systems without any hacking.
- smoldesu 3y agoThank God Nintendo didn't imagine anything so heinous as adding DRM to a serial bus.
- wtallis 3y ago"Without any hacking" becomes less impressive (and less believable) as the chain of adapters gets longer and more expensive. HDMI capture dongles are cheap commodity items these days, but the Analogue Pocket and its dock are quite specialized and not exactly cheap. It's only possible to use the Game Boy camera with normal systems of today by outsourcing the hacking to the creators of some quite abnormal hardware.
- crazygringo 3y agoThat's hilarious. And now it irrationally makes me desperate for a software video filter to reproduce the effect with my regular webcam -- green tones and 4-level grayscale and Bayer matrix dithering and everything...
- qup 3y agoSomething tells me there's a linux one-liner for this
- tharg0 3y agoPerhaps something like: sudo modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 video_nr=99 ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -i color-palette.png -filter_complex "[0:v] scale=-1:112 [scaled];[scaled]crop=144:112:(in_w-144)/2:0 [cropped];[cropped]eq=brightness=0.3:contrast=2[eqed];[eqed][1:v] paletteuse=dither=bayer:bayer_scale=1[gbc];[gbc]scale=-1:480:flags=neighbor[done];[done]format=yuv420p[v]" -map "[v]" -f v4l2 /dev/video99 With 4 color palette. Here is a base64 encoded png with the color palette I used. iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAIAAACQkWg2AAABhGlDQ1BJQ0MgcHJvZmlsZQAAKJF9 kT1Iw0AcxV9TpVpaFOwg4pChOlkQFXHUKhShQqgVWnUwufQLmjQkKS6OgmvBwY/FqoOLs64OroIg +AHi6uKk6CIl/i8ptIj14Lgf7+497t4BQr3MNKtrHNB020wl4mImuyoGXtGLIMIIoV9mljEnSUl0 HF/38PH1LsazOp/7c4TVnMUAn0g8ywzTJt4gnt60Dc77xBFWlFXic+Ixky5I/Mh1xeM3zgWXBZ4Z MdOpeeIIsVhoY6WNWdHUiKeIo6qmU76Q8VjlvMVZK1dZ8578haGcvrLMdZrDSGARS5AgQkEVJZRh I0arToqFFO3HO/iHXL9ELoVcJTByLKACDbLrB/+D391a+ckJLykUB7pfHOdjBAjsAo2a43wfO07j BPA/A1d6y1+pAzOfpNdaWvQI6NsGLq5bmrIHXO4Ag0+GbMqu5Kcp5PPA+xl9UxYYuAWCa15vzX2c PgBp6ip5AxwcAqMFyl7v8O6e9t7+PdPs7wcH0HJ8UAGrtwAAAAlwSFlzAAALEwAACxMBAJqcGAAA AAd0SU1FB+cJCg0ZMBA5CWgAAAAqSURBVCjPYzS2VLZ20AgPidTRtGYgAjB+/HafgRTAxEAiGNUw qmHANAAAjvYFq/QT7j8AAAAASUVORK5CYII= Inspiration: https://gameboymaniac.com/how-to-make-a-fake-game-boy-camera-photo/ https://gameboymaniac.com/how-to-make-a-fake-game-boy-camera... https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-make-a-gif-from-a-video-using-ffmpeg/ https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-make-a-gif-from-a-vid... https://gameboymaniac.com/how-to-make-a-fake-game-boy-camera-photo/ https://gameboymaniac.com/how-to-make-a-fake-game-boy-camera... https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-make-a-gif-from-a-video-using-ffmpeg/ https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-make-a-gif-from-a-vid... https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html https://github.com/Lana-chan/webgbcam https://github.com/Lana-chan/webgbcam
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoOk, so now there's got to be a way to get the Game Boy printer working too.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoOk so this worked because the ipad 17 allows you to plug in USB video devices. So ok how would the printer work?
- worthless-trash 3y agocloud print or something similar i imagine.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoThe gameboy printer is going to print from an ipad with cloud print?
- worthless-trash 3y agoWith a little bit of love, sure why not ?
- CyberDildonics 3y agoThis was about hooking it up directly, what are you talking about? Did you follow this thread at all?
- worthless-trash 3y agoDo you understand that the "cloud print" adapter would need to be hooked up directly to the GBA printer ? Are you having a bad day, did my comment warrant that attitude ?
- 3y ago
- joshu 3y agoi set this up a while ago. it was less disruptive at the partner meeting than i was hoping. https://x.com/joshu/status/1601032221703294976?s=46&t=KQjkyIFdphgQbY5QYwoqeQ https://x.com/joshu/status/1601032221703294976?s=46&t=KQjkyI...
- cocacola1 3y agoAn aside: the "I" in question isn't me, but the author, Federico Viticci @ MacStories (https://www.macstories.net/ https://www.macstories.net/).
- jscottmiller 3y agoI do this as well but with a slightly cheaper solution. You can find a used SNES, Super Gameboy, and Gameboy Camera for a reasonable price on Ebay if you look around and are willing to do some minor cleanup and repairs. If you're fine with a bit of analog noise, you can capture it with a cheap composite -> USB ADC you can find on Amazon for under $10. As an aside, I also do photography with the Gameboy Camera. A company called Epilogue makes the Operator, a USB device for dumping Gameboy carts. It has native Gameboy Camera support, allowing you to dump pixel-perfect pngs of your on-cart shots. The 2-bit dithering is lovely.
- Edman274 3y agoWiring the stuff to do it yourself isn't the worst in the world. When the pandemic started and I was cloistered inside and cabin-feverish, I found a blog post that had a link to the following: https://github.com/Dhole/gb-link-stm32f411 https://github.com/Dhole/gb-link-stm32f411 and I bought a board to run that code on. I wasn't able to figure out how to actually write out the raw data as a png so I wrote a script to take the data and convert them to pngs myself. Now that the operator exists (I don't think it did in 2020) that'd be the solution I'd use, but failing that, there's always the microcontroller route.
- edandersen 3y agoI'm hoping USB-C on iPhone 15 unlocks UVC camera support on iOS 17 too - this will make iPhones decent portable camera monitors/basic recorders for proper digital cameras. Sony's Xperia line has been able to do this for years, starting with an actual HDMI input port on the Xperia Pro and moving to supporting UVC over USB-C a bit later on.
- chrisco255 3y agoI don't know how to describe the magic that game boy camera was when it came out in the late 90s. It was probably many people's first digital camera, despite being limited to black and white. I made so many still capture animations with it because the software made it very easy to do, so many of my videos were still frame animations of LEGOs duking it out or various action figure scenes. And then with game boy printer the ability to print stickers of your stills was fantastic. Terrible resolution, low frame rate camera but absolutely magical.
- sublinear 3y ago> That’s when I truly lost it. There I was, performing gestures in front of a Game Boy Camera in 2023... If this ridiculous thing can work, perhaps the iPad is going to be okay after all. This is when I lost it as the reader and rolled my eyes. I'm not a fan of this silly writing style or weird tribalism. I have no problem nerding out about some underlying concept or implementation detail, but not about brands. This isn't nerding out. This is just an ad.
- akerr 3y agoNo, the writer rightly criticised the iPad’s accessory support and found some encouraging signs in a surprising place. Lighten up.
- smoldesu 3y ago> and found some encouraging signs in a surprising place. Remember that we are talking about the company that invented "MFi", a DRM scheme for serial cables. I'm all for encouraging Apple to do the right thing, but it should not take a multi-trillion dollar company 17 iterations of iOS to support class-compliant USB devices. That's not encouraging at all.
- heywhatupboys 3y agothis whole article is basically "man plugs webcam into device" but "hardware that records is very old!"
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoCounterpoint: Let people be enthusiastic about things. There's so much cynicism and snark in this comment section it's depressing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bdavbdav 3y agoAm I the only one disappointed that this is just using an off the shelf device and a capture card as opposed to an actual protocol conversion
- akerr 3y agoWell, the Analogue people did the protocol conversion and made an off the shelf product that is impressive (and previously praised by the author). The additionally impressive step comes with the improved accessory support with iPadOS 17. Hurrah for dongles!
- bdavbdav 3y agoI think my point is that it’s a somewhat roundabout way of saying “UVC now works on iPad”
- firesteelrain 3y agoWhether it be UVC or something else, there would have been a conversion somewhere. UVC just made the integration a lot easier.
- yonatan8070 3y agoYeah there's nothing particularly remarkable about this. Apple added support for USB video devices, he plugged a USB video device into an iPad, and it worked as intended, he could have done the same with a PC and been surprised it works with Discord or whatever
- bmacho 3y ago> It all worked out of the box and I, incredibly, was able to do a FaceTime video call using the Game Boy Camera, a modern Game Boy, and some HDMI adapters with my iPad Pro. Yeah, I don't get this. Apple starts supporting standard video formats, now everyone should lose their mind? Or is it weird in 2023 that two devices using the same protocol can communicate? Or.. what? Maybe because I don't own Apple or Game Boy cam, but I seriously don't see something the author sees.
- SanderNL 3y agoThe impressive thing here is the Analogue Pocket (“modern gameboy”) that actually does the heavy lifting. Sold out unfortunately.
- Kipters 3y agoI had done the same at the beginning of the year, except using a Windows desktop and an Elgato HD60S+ (still using an Analogue Pocket, its dock and a Gameboy Camera) At some point I replaced the Pocket+Dock with a Super Famicom, RetroTink 5X and Super Gameboy 2 for extra lulz
- ClassyJacket 3y agoAmazing. Best thing I've read all week. I'm as amazed as the writer that that gesture recognition worked. Side note: now I want that white Analogue Pocket.
- dfex 3y agoOn behalf of retro geeks everywhere, thank you for your service! Love your work! "None of this makes sense, and no regular person will ever need to use this" Fortunately, this is not a site for Regular People™ Someone should make a fil... oh wait: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bufolab.camboy https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bufolab.ca...
- joshspankit 3y ago*Average People™
- wlesieutre 3y agoFor the iOS folks, Iconfactory's BitCam https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bitcam/id1114990619 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bitcam/id1114990619 Not gameboy exactly, but in a similar spirit
- notRobot 3y agoAn online tool with such filters exists here: http://patorjk.com/old-school-gaming-filters/ http://patorjk.com/old-school-gaming-filters/ Includes Gameboy camera, as well as a few other retro filters.
- waltbosz 3y agoOh man, patorjk.com has been around forever. He once published some code that I submitted. He actually lived in the same town in Maryland as my brother. I still use his ASCII art text generator tool on occasion.
- notRobot 3y agoI do too! :D I discovered his site back in my teens, when I was really into ASCII art.
- ClassyJacket 3y ago:/ Not compatible with S23 Ultra... weird.