Game Boy Camera Canon EF Lens Mount (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Game Boy Camera Canon EF Lens Mount (2018)

ekeler.com

603 pointsddtaylor62 comments

This is absurdly ridiculous, I love it.

Despite the low resolution, bit depth, lack of color, and dithering, I like how using a better lens can make the seagull picture somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

Of course the better lens in this case has really narrow depth of field, so you get a very smooth background in basically all situations. This helps a lot.

I can't help but wonder how these would look if the GameBoy Camera had a better dithering algorithm...

Not sure how narrow the depth of field would be with the 1.4x extender and the tiny little sensors though.

It's going to be super narrow still.

I tried punching this in on an online DoF calculator which has 1/4" sensors, but it only goes to 1200mm@F/45[gameboy], which is the equivalent of the 70mm@F/4[fullframe] end of this lens. Even then, focusing at something 40 ft away you have a 0.2 ft depth of field, so a background 10 ft behind your subject will be pure blur.

That doesn't seem right.

Out of focus blur is a function of focal length and aperture. The sensor size only dictates the crop.

In this case, the lens widest setting with a 1.4 extender is 98mm @ f/4. On a full frame sensor, something 10ft behind a in-focus 40ft away thing would still be very recognisable. Since a crop sensor is just a crop, I don't think it would have a different effect.

The 1200mm focal length equivalent only applies to the fov radius, not to the blurriness.

What's your definition of "pure blur" then?

This is exactly why I come to Hacker News.

So, the really cool part of this is the raw sensor used, I believe, supports up to 256 levels of brightness (I could be wrong on this, been a long time since I read some hacking articles), but the GB Camera itself limits it down to several because of display limitations!

This camera and sensor was so ahead of its time that it blows my mind!

I was looking at the photos and was thinking how it really kinda is it’s own type of photography art. They are so simple but pleasing to look at.

That is just cool! If the author releases an STL, I might actually buy a Gameboy camera just to try it out! Lost my original one but I've still got my Gameboy and other stuff.

The thing I loved about Nintendo back then was how they did little things that overloaded the original intent of their devices. The printer is probably the best example, but the camera is a great one too. There was just something magical about that. Same goes for initially owning a Nintendo 64 then getting the Rumble Pak, plugging it in, and suddenly adding a whole new dimension to the game.

Those days are long gone, for better and for worse. Nobody would want or even need such devices because they'd either be built right in or just be a part of the household, as would be the case of a printer. But even though everyone knew the Gameboy' screen was really crappy for the purpose, there was just something novel about turning it into a camera. It's an experience of its time that I'm not sure will be recreated any time soon.

You might be interested in the design philosophy of Yokoi Gunpei who was the original creator of the GameBoy as well as the Love Tester and other pre-Famicom Nintendo, "toys" from the 70's. He called the design philosophy he utilized, "lateral use of withered technologies" and, I can't agree with you enough about the, "magic" of the those peripherals from 90's and early 2000's; I think the design philosophy drives some of the magic. It's all very coherent and functional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi

Very interesting concept, really liked this bit:

> In the handheld market, Yokoi's refusal to adopt a color display for the Game Boy in favor of long battery life is cited as the main reason it prevailed against Sega's Game Gear and Atari's Lynx.

This reminds me...there used to be a sonar attachment for Game Boy color that tells you what type of fish are in the waters. Can't recall the name was released only in Japan to my knowledge.

Still have fond memories of Game Boy Camera. Really interesting to see the modding scene still strong, been thinking of upgrading my gameboy color with a new large screen IPS with Bung Enterprises flash.

Lots of interesting and neat stuff on the Game Boy Color, there's wifi mods, etc

Bandai Fish Finder Pocket Sonar: https://youtu.be/5mHSHmk_UU4

yes this is it! Still remember reading about it in Tips & Tricks magazine in the 90s and being amazed by it.

An emulator dev recreated the sonar's functionality somewhat recently:

https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art13.html

absolutely insane to me somebody knows this AND was able to dive this deep.

Found my new lock screen: https://imgur.com/a/ABecAFx

Aaand I’ve stolen that for my lock screen, thank you very much :)

This is now my lock screen as well. Thank you very much!

Someone asked on the 2018 HN post:

> Makes me wonder what a similar mod would do for video shot on a Fisher-Price PXL-2000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17220344

Looks like someone tried this on YouTube: https://youtu.be/aGJNUUtYAEc

The GameBoy camera and accompanying rom remind that in spite of outward appearance, the GameBoy is still just a computer.

And game consoles in the 80s (especially the early 80s) we’re straddling being a computer vs being an entertainment appliance. Nintendo very aggressively knew what it wanted it’s products to be by the time of its North America release.

damn, that æsthetic is pristine. those pics almost look like handmade pixel art

If this made color images, it would almost be useful for making game assets for pixel art based games. A camera that processes and spits out pixel art like images would be awesome.

You could approximate this by taking a picture as normal, then resizing and applying some dithering I think. There was a nice article submitted to HN recently on this: https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/

Few things give the pure joy that this kind of useless stuff does.

used to love this kind of stuff, but to be honest, youtube clickbait has kind of sucked the joy out of most intentionally ridiculous projects for me, by sheer oversaturation, or maybe just because a lot of it seems kind of insincere these days, whatever that even means. Still, this one I found to be pretty cool and it did put a smile on my face

Discussion in 2018, 30 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17217827

At one of the mini maker faire's at OMSI (a science museum in Portland) in past years, there was a guy with a penny sorting machine he had built.

The machine would sort pennies by shininess, and direct them into the appropriate column based on a target greyscale image. The idea was to have a machine that could sort pennies to make a mural based on picture. (If a penny doesn't match the desired color of one of the columns, it would be redirected into a reject bin.)

This game boy camera seems like an ideal input device for such a machine.

Some previous comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17217827

When making lens mounts for big lenses, keep in mind that the tripod mounting is usually via a ring attached to the lens, rather than to the screw hole in the underside of the camera body.

So, making your mount similarly strong enough to support whatever you're using as a camera body seems like good design.

Ok, making elaborate attachments for the game boy advance is becoming deliciously ridiculous. This is awesome. I can't wait to see similar modifications made to the steam deck.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17217827

i have a gameboy camera and would really like to use it for zoom meetings. An original mono connectix quick cam would be good, too.

a quick demo of gb camera and gb printer here: https://www.tiktok.com/@robotsdraw/video/7095836827122142510

I remember that connetix camera, just forget the context of it. What is it for?

You can. Plug the GB camera into a SNES using a Super Gameboy, which is then uses an HDMI adapter to plug it into an HDMI capture card. Some HDMI capture cards like the Elgato Camlink act like USB webcams, so you can use them in Zoom without any additional software.

Source: https://youtube.com/shorts/Ctz73FQ4Blo

This is impressive and I love it. Love this type of content where "old" or different hardware is augmented in a hacky way.

Is there any good smartphone app that emulates the Gameboy Camera? So far I found only some that promise but do not deliver...

I think it's very hard to achieve for the same reason why almost no black and white filter can reproduce a photo taken with an actual black and white film - you can get really close but something is always missing. It's not enough to apply a GB-like filter to a modern smartphone photo - you'd need to take into account the unique limitations of the GB camera and somehow reproduce them.

I don’t think it’s very hard, I just think not enough people care enough about getting an equivalent result. Basically 80/20, but no one will pay for that 20 (yet)

On the topic of emulating old hardware, this reminds me of the Nintendo 64 VRU accessory, which is a mic + voice recognition that was used in games such as Hey You Pikachu. Nobody has emulated the hardware which performed the actual voice recognition, instead opting for modern VR libraries. So while you can use it in an emulator, the performed VR won't match what you'd get with the limited hardware implementation.

  >This is an HLE implementation. I did not emulate the manner in which the VRU does voice recognition

https://github.com/mupen64plus/mupen64plus-core/pull/873

I suspect it is because of hardware limitation. The silver base one actually have multiple layers, not just one thin silicon light receptor layer. That depth and the randomness of the silver particles make the result very difficult to emulate. Perhaps if one can use those staggering focus???

Not exactly what you asked for, but this might interest you:

> Old School Gaming Filters: Takes a photo and converts it into what it may have looked like on an old school gaming console.

http://patorjk.com/old-school-gaming-filters/

The mGBA PC emulator supports running the Game Boy Camera ROM and passing video from a webcam or from a still image you select. I think some GB emulators on Android also support this, but I haven't tried them.

It's not a phone app, but I made a web app[1] that can get pretty close[2]. From looking at the images I think the reason why other other apps don't look the same is that they try to emulate it use an ordered dither, while it looks like the Gameboy camera is either adding some randomness or noise as well. I have a Bayer (R) algorithm that adds randomness and it seems to get closer to the Gameboy camera output.

[1]https://app.dithermark.com/ [2]https://imgur.com/a/AiQa14B

I have retroboy[1] installed. I got it from fdroid. I like it. It also has several other filters, for C64, Apple classic Mac, Amstrad CPC464 among others. Lots of settings to play with.

[1] https://github.com/mikljohansson/retroboy

Another reason to gain godly CAD skills

"I took my abomination out for a walk to the beach to shoot some nature and wildlife."

Sometimes the least useful ideas are the best.

Nice job.

Love this. Anyone know the shutter and iso settings on the gameboy camera?

I, and probably many others, would pay a lot of money for this...

This is amazing. I loved the Gameboy Camera back when it came out.

I’d love an EF lens mount for my iPhone!

They exist!

I would say to be totally correct those are more smartphone mounts for EF lens given the weight and rigidity difference.

Lenses being much larger than the camera body they mount to is nothing new.

Looking at them, it appears that the EF adapters go through optical gymnastics that don't really work the same way as in the Game Boy adaptation.

The EF-iPhone adapters project the lens' image onto ground glass and then use a macro lens to image that ground glass.

The Game Boy modification actually involves removing the optics from the Game Boy camera and projecting the EF-lens' image directly onto the sensor. There's no easy way to do this with an iPhone, but it is the way that would truly allow you to use the EF lens on the iPhone sensor.

Why?

Because.

I feel the same gut reaction when I see projects like a cyber deck, or people building old pentium computers but I also do the same thing, I seem to keep rehashing things (variation of a note taking app). Only thing I can think of is the joy of doing it.

Expanding further, it's easy nowadays to get a pi and attach some HDMI screen to it and battery source. Gets the job done, do I need to personally write a graphics driver for it to be impressive idk.

In the long run I am trying to learn harder things though so my skills are not commoditized.

This is the second post today I've seen here that is a complete and utter waste of time and effort, and I love them both. People make things for the joy of it. Constraints breed innovation and creativity - this is a perfect example of someone doing something stupid purely for the joy of doing it and it's wonderful.

I think it's funny that the most upvoted comment[0] and the lowest comment both acknowledge that this is a ridiculous project

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31596036

You know, I've been a photographer for probably 20 years now, and phrases like "creamy bokeh" still make my skin crawl.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com