I used a Game Boy camera for Facetime video calls in iPadOS 17 | Hacker News Reader

I used a Game Boy camera for Facetime video calls in iPadOS 17

macstories.net

407 pointscocacola161 comments

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On 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.ca...

:/ Not compatible with S23 Ultra... weird.

Sounds like Android. Anything interesting has weird compatibility quirks.

Especially Samsung-Android.

Hardware that runs AOSP and closer variants are much more interesting, way less undocumented kernel hackery.

While I love a good Samsung/TouchWiz (showing how long it has been since I've used Samsung Galaxy) bashing, I don't think this one is on Samsung.

One a OnePlus Nord N30,

> This app isn't available for your device because it was made for an older version of Android.

Your best bet is you want long term distribution is probably to try to get included in fdroid default repositories. Yes, this takes open source your app but it is probably good if you don't want to jump through Google's hoops.

Android is better than ever and as of Android 12, neostore (fdroid frontend) can finally update apps on its own.

For the iOS folks, Iconfactory's BitCam

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bitcam/id1114990619

Not gameboy exactly, but in a similar spirit

An online tool with such filters exists here: http://patorjk.com/old-school-gaming-filters/

Includes Gameboy camera, as well as a few other retro filters.

Oh 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.

I do too! :D

I discovered his site back in my teens, when I was really into ASCII art.

*Average People™

I 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.

Wiring 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 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.

Am 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

Well, 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!

I think my point is that it’s a somewhat roundabout way of saying “UVC now works on iPad”

Whether it be UVC or something else, there would have been a conversion somewhere. UVC just made the integration a lot easier.

Yeah 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

Yeah but... as far as I'm aware, nobody's tried that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37450792

Other people probably have, but didn't write and post about something trivial.

They missed out on generating "content".

> 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.

No, the writer rightly criticised the iPad’s accessory support and found some encouraging signs in a surprising place. Lighten up.

> 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.

this whole article is basically "man plugs webcam into device" but "hardware that records is very old!"

Counterpoint: Let people be enthusiastic about things. There's so much cynicism and snark in this comment section it's depressing.

An aside: the "I" in question isn't me, but the author, Federico Viticci @ MacStories (https://www.macstories.net/).

About 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.

You'll be pleased to know your plan is workable[0].

[0] https://hackaday.com/2021/07/25/dominate-video-calls-with-ga...

I'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.

I 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.

> 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.

That'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...

Something tells me there's a linux one-liner for this

Perhaps 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... https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-make-a-gif-from-a-vid... https://gameboymaniac.com/how-to-make-a-fake-game-boy-camera... https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-make-a-gif-from-a-vid... https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html https://github.com/Lana-chan/webgbcam

Respect

That's what I was thinking. An OBS plugin...

i 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=KQjkyI...

I 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

Apple implemented a standard so most stuff that follows the standard now works. Nice but.... uninspiring?

Interesting 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.

Game 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).

Honestly, 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.

I 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.

What's creative about using UVC like you've done for decades on Linux or *BSDs already?

It'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.

Thank God Nintendo didn't imagine anything so heinous as adding DRM to a serial bus.

"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.

Amazing. 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.

The impressive thing here is the Analogue Pocket (“modern gameboy”) that actually does the heavy lifting. Sold out unfortunately.

Ok, so now there's got to be a way to get the Game Boy printer working too.

Ok so this worked because the ipad 17 allows you to plug in USB video devices. So ok how would the printer work?

cloud print or something similar i imagine.

The gameboy printer is going to print from an ipad with cloud print?

With a little bit of love, sure why not ?

This was about hooking it up directly, what are you talking about? Did you follow this thread at all?

Do 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 ?

"cloud print" adapter

What you are saying makes zero sense. Cloud print is wireless and over the internet.

The gameboy camera worked because it is a standard video device that could be hooked up through a cable.

The printer uses its own protocol. You can't hook it up through a cable adapter and expect it to immediately work and cloud print makes no sense at all since that prints over the internet.

did my comment warrant that attitude

There is no 'attitude' here, you just aren't saying anything that fits in reality. It seems like a mishmash of unrelated ideas with no thought put into them. Your comments read like you just wanted to reply with something vaguely related, what did you expect as a response?

Yes, you'd hook up something like a rasberry pi to the control pins of the gameboy printer. The pi could convert cloud print protocol into the protocol the printer uses, its not rocket science, and I think you're just being a dick.

Conversation is over.

This was about a web cam hooked directly up with a cable.

Show me how you are getting ipad cloud print to the "rasperry pi". Link something technical.

I think you are just throwing things at the wall hoping they stick now, this barely seems like a coherent conversation.

And with this reply, the conversation is over.

Amazing Article

Really enjoyed reading the post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com