
Game Boy Camera Canon EF Lens Mount - rainbowmverse
http://ekeler.com/game-boy-camera-canon-ef-mount/
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cateye
Great example that photography is not about buying the newest or most
expensive gear.

Maybe an idea to sell some photos as posters. They give a very authentic and
retro digital feeling.

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dzmien
That lens is not exactly inexpensive. I think it says more about the
importance of a good lens.

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roemerb
Haha true, but since the resolution is 128x128, you probably won't see a
quality difference with a cheaper lens.

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danburbridge
Yeah, no real need to worry about things like chromatic aberration etc, a
cheap old manual focus telephoto would give similar results at much less cost.
Something like an old Vivitar perhaps

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xtiansimon
@Synaesthesia, True. You could recreate the effects using Photoshop. And yet,
you could create many more images in the same amount of time using the rig.
With the rig you're working at the time of image capture to discover what's an
interesting image in low-resolution without preconception. Magic! Conversely,
using Photoshop you're working to draw, paint, this low-resolution style onto
an existing photo.

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rainbowmverse
This is why people use those same Game Boys to make chiptunes instead of using
a good softsynth. It might be possible to make a perfect replica of a Game Boy
sound chip in software, but it's still not the real thing.

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jchw
Thanks to careful and dedicated developers like blargg and kode54, there are
in fact fantastic, potentially perfect software replicas for many video game
console audio chipsets. Game_Music_Emu comes to mind, with at least the SPC700
core featuring cycle-accurate emulation of the DSP and certainly near perfect
audio output.

Even then, though... maybe 'perfect' is a misnomer. What one may have looked
at as flaws initially, such as the phosphorus glow and curvature of a CRT,
composite artifacts, low sample rate audio, and even the behavior of analog
chips that could change depending on just about everything including room
temperature are not really viewed as flaws or imperfections anymore; rather,
they've become part of the personality of a machine. Software nowadays can
emulate almost all of these aspects to some degree, but even so, the "feel" of
a physical device is hard to replicate 100% in software.

When it comes to _listening_ to audio, it makes no difference to me if the
audio was produced by a highly accurate emulator or the original hardware;
however, maybe for production, the feeling is different in some way. After
all, humans are producing the music, not robots. The atmosphere of holding a
Game Boy connected to a bunch of audio equipment is certainly a lot different
than sitting in a DAW with an emulator (assuming software exists to marry
those two kinds of things... maybe via MIDI or something?) - nobody doubts you
can produce the exact same thing, or at least something that is nearly
impossible to tell apart. But maybe the question is, would you? It's possible
the environmental influence leads to different outcomes.

Right now I'm unsure. I know plenty of music I've listened to in the chiptune
realm was written and produced in Famitracker, possibly using a combination of
overclocking and special chips that would either be very difficult or
impossible to rig up in the physical world. So I guess maybe the answer is
that it depends on the artist, the song, and probably a host of other factors.
But it's fun to think about, anyway.

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rainbowmverse
>> _The atmosphere of holding a Game Boy connected to a bunch of audio
equipment is certainly a lot different than sitting in a DAW with an emulator
(assuming software exists to marry those two kinds of things... maybe via MIDI
or something?)_

Most chiptune-inspired synths come in VST format. They run inside the DAW. I
usually just put something together in Serum when I want a chiptune-esque
sound, but I used various chip synth VSTs before I had Serum.

None quite match the feel of composing in Mario Paint on a friend's SNES
decades ago.

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djsumdog
The 8-bit guy did a video on the GameBoy camera a while back. It's pretty
interesting.

What's amazing about this post is just the quality of the images. They're
really good for the medium.

They look like some of the drawing demos the old Commodore artists (and
current demo scene people) do; amazing images with really simple color sets
and low resolutions.

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amlib
Now all we need is a professional gimbal for the gameboy... RED better watch
out!

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

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pxl-2000](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pxl-2000)

~~~
munificent
> Fisher-Price PXL-2000

Now _that 's_ a name I haven't heard in a long time.

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chris_wot
What dithering technique did the Game Boy use?

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eboyjr
The Game Boy Camera has an analog output (a technical data sheet for the chip
is available[1]), so the dithering is done in software. Although I am
speculating, at first glance it appears to be ordered dithering[2].

EDIT: I did find a document detailing the dithering algorithms and registers
used for this purpose reverse-engineered here[3].

[1]:
[https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/FinalPro...](https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/FinalProjects/f2012/qs44_twc55/qs44_twc55/datasheets/MITSUB_image_sensor.pdf)

[2]:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130512190753/http://white.stan...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130512190753/http://white.stanford.edu:80/~brian/psy221/reader/Bayer.1973.pdf)

[3]: [https://github.com/AntonioND/gbcam-rev-
engineer/blob/master/...](https://github.com/AntonioND/gbcam-rev-
engineer/blob/master/doc/gb_camera_doc_v1_1_1.pdf)

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ashleyn
That absolutely is ordered dithering. Not only does it have the characteristic
cross-hatch pattern but ordered dithering is relatively efficient even on very
limited resources. I can't picture the Game Boy's Z80 or even a toy-market
ASIC of the era having the horsepower to do Floyd-Steinberg or anything more
modern.

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pjc50
Floyd-Steinberg dates from 1976 and is fairly simple to implement, but it does
require storage of a source image; ordered dithering is however easier to do
statelessly from a scanning analogue input.

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michrassena
This is wildly impractical, but I suppose the creator has no illusions about
that. There's a link on the page to a more practical version using a cell
phone accessory lens. I'd like to see an adapter for CS mount CCTV lenses.
These lenses are inexpensive, small and lightweight, actually intended for
something like the GameBoy's 1/4" sensor format, and available in a wide
variety of focal lengths, including wide angle lenses.

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zodPod
This is ridiculous and I love it.

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lathiat
That is amazing. I love it.

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throwaway77384
Love this. Best thing I've seen in photography in a while!

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TeddyBones
Really cool project.

