GBCam Studio

A native Mac App for decoding and saving GameBoy Camera photos.

I've always been enamoured with the GamBoy Camera's impressionistic view of the world, and uncomfortable with how difficult it is to extract photos from the device. After discovering Brian Khuu's GameBoy Printer emulator project I set about writing a companion Mac app for natively decoding GameBoy Camera photos and saving them to disk. If you're into the GameBoy Camera, see below for a download link and instructions for how to use GBCam Studio yourself. Let me know how it goes!

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Free Download

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This is beta software, so please let me know if you run into any bugs.

Download link coming soon.

Features

  • Decode multiple GameBoy camera photos in one go
  • Automatically split batch imports into individual images
  • Browse imported photos in a modern Mac app
  • Batch save all photos as individual files
  • Choose your colour palette (original GameBoy, GameBoy pocket)
  • More to come

Donate

GBCam Studio is free to download. If you enjoy it, consider making a small donation. I accept donations through Paypal, anything I receive helps me to continue experimenting and making cool things like this.

Donations:

Instructions

What You'll Need:

  1. A GameBoy Camera
  2. A GameBoy of some sort
  3. A GameBoy Printer emulator. I designed the app to work with this project by Brian Khuu specifically. It's super easy and fast to get up and running. All you'll need is an Arduino and a GameBoy ext link cable. I'm interested in looking into how I can make the app compatible with more transfer methods in the future, please get in touch if you know of any other devices that I could support.
  4. The GBCam Studio App which you can download below.
  5. A Mac With macOS 10.11 or newer
     

Step by Step

  1. Connect your GameBoy Printer emulator to your Mac and open up your Serial Monitor of choice, this could be the one in the Arduino app if you'd like. (I'm planning on adding serial support in the app - but it's not done yet).
  2. Print your GameBoy Camera photos to your GameBoy Printer emulator.
  3. Tip: You can print your images one at a time but it's much more efficient to print multiple images in one batch. To do so press select on the GameBoy Camera's main menu, press up and choose the 'Link' option. Select 'Print' then 'Option'. Push 'A' on all of the images you would like to print, then select 'Print'.
  4. Once your gameboy has finished printing copy all of the output of the printer emulator to your clipboard.
  5. Open GBCam Studio and press the '+' button in the toolbar.
  6. Paste the data that you copied into the import window.
  7. Select a colour palette if you'd like then press the 'Import' button
  8. Done!
  9. To save your images use the 'Share' button in the toolbar or use File > Export...

 

Support, Feature Requests and Bug Reports

If you have any questions, have an idea for a new feature, or run into any bugs, please get in touch.