This Legend Figured Out How to Use a Game Boy Camera as a Webcam

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Webcams are hard to find right now, but you still have alternatives. Wyze, Sony, and others released firmware to turn your existing camera into a webcam. But what if you’d rather be ridiculous, awesome, and nail a retro feel all at once? In that case, check out how Bernard Capulong turned a Game Boy Camera into a webcam.

If you’re looking for a good reason to turn a Game Boy Camera into a webcam, you won’t find one. But for a plausible reason to do anything, you can always turn to Reddit. Over on the Game Boy subreddit, a user explained their dilemma.

They need to participate in a video call for a professional development test, and with it came a stringent set of rules for the exam. After some thought, the user decided a Game Boy camera would meet all the requirements and serve as a painful “thank you” for all the annoying rules.

Sounds like as good an excuse as any! But is it possible to turn your Game Boy Camera into a webcam? Enter Bernard Capulong, the man with a plan.

As he explains in a recorded Zoom call from his Game Boy webcam, he had to start by connecting the camera to a Super Game Boy 2. The Super Game Boy 2 serves as a cartridge adapter to convert Game Boy games to Super Nintendo, which lets you play the portable games on your TV.

Next, he inserted the cartridge into an Analogue Super NT, a third-party recreated “Super NES” that adds an HDMI out port. That connects to an external capture card, which sends the signal to his laptop via USB-C. You can check out a picture of his setup on imgur.

GB Cam -> SGB2 -> Super Nt -> Capture Card

The results speak for themselves. Capulong’s video is low resolution, missing plenty of frames, lacks color, and looks freaking amazing. Anyone who loved the Game Boy of old will appreciate it, and most likely everyone else will wonder why you’re filming from a potato cam.

It’s not a practical solution or even practical results. Between the Game Boy Camera, the cartridge adapter, the $190 Super NT, and the capture card, you’ll spend quite a bit of money if you don’t already have all the components. But this isn’t about practical. It’s about doing something just because we can. And for that, we salute Capulong and hope to see more people follow in his footsteps.

via Bernard Capulong