1bit Fotografie

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In grand Retro Challenge fashion I experienced some technical difficulties with Fireshow. The main 5.25 floppy I was using decided to go rogue. When attempting to transfer the data to another floppy the disk returned an error. I then moved every file one by one and wouldn't you know it? The only corrupt file was the main Fireshow program file. I frantically scoured the disks laying around my desk without any luck. Then I remembered that I ran it on Sweet16 for screenshots. Crisis averted! An older version was residing in my trash bin. So I transferred it to the IIGS and made some small changes from memory. Oh well... at least I have something.


Fireshow 1.0 is now available for download. - ProDOS Disk Image or as a Text File.

I've got a feeling that I will come back to this project and improve it at some later date. I would have liked the software to boot automatically, add some background elements and expand on the animation sequences. Perhaps in Retro Challenge 2010?

Overall I had a blast playing with my Game Boy Camera over the past month. I will occaisionally pick it up and upload more in the future. The Fireshow Applesoft project just kind of popped up into my head in the middle of things. Of all the projects that were done this month there are a few that I really like. DogCow needs to release his NetSnake game as soon as possible because I have two Apple //e with serial cards ready to go. I want to try out Jamtronix gopher client, but need one of those neat Uthernet cards. Mac-TV was kind enough to make a boot screen for Fireshow, but I didn't have time to impliment it. He did tell me what to use if I want to create something similar so I have to thank him for that. Equant takes the cake for his System 6 Twitter client called Grackle68k. Bravo.

It has been a good Retro Challenge. Over and out from Whitewater, WI.

Retro Challenge is winding down and overall I think this month was a success. One of the things that got me going a little over a month ago was an app for the iPhone called GB Camera. The $0.99 app tries to duplicate the effect of the Game Boy Camera.



The image from the GB Camera app on the left has been scaled down to 25%. The image on the right is brought to you in stunning raw Game Boy Camera 160x144 High Definition (NTSC).

In my opinion it leaves something to be desired next to the authentic Game Boy Camera snapshot. Although the technology of the iPhone is leaps and bounds over the monochrome Game Boy, it still doesn't capture the magic. If you are so inclined, the author has even written a $0.99 C64 Camera app too. Although GB Camera recreates some of the functionality of the Game Boy Camera, it will never have the whimsical "funtography" aspects of the original.

Over the past couple of days people have come through the apartment and seen my Macintosh collection neatly stacked in the back room. The first word out of their mouths is "why" with a subtle hint of incomprehension. I explain very briefly that "some software and hardware has no modern equivalent." If they are interested I explain further, but most are merely too overwhelmed. I cannot speak for the rest of the Retro Challenge 2009 entrants, but I gather that they too occaisionally encounter similiar situations when legitimizing their projects to people. In many cases the hardware and software has no modern counterpart, or if it does, it fundamentally lacks what made it so aesthetically appealing in the first place.

It is mundane nowadays to whip out the iPhone and connect to the internet. Do that with a computer that is 20+ years old and you've got something special. Pushing retro hardware and software to a limit beyond their initial capacities, or even approaching it in a new and novel way, is what makes retro technology so interesting.

Yesterday I met up with a friend in Milwaukee who knows practically all of the city's secrets. Every time I go there he's got something new to show me. For lunch we walked into an unnassuming grocery store called Koppa's. Back by the deli they've got a sweet setup for you to pass the time while they make you a sammich. Pull up a chair and play some Atari 2600!



Yes, free as in beer.



Best. Grocery. Ever.

Gave Firewshow a run on a IIc and totally forgot that it is a slower machine than the IIgs. I might have to change some of the animation times. The color issue that I have been having? It's not a bug, it's now a feature. Fireshow was meant for monochrome.







I'll have a disk image uploaded some time in the near future. I should just program an infinite loop and this can be used as a "screensaver."

Congrats to equant for his imperfect but oh-so-cool Grackle68k program. I got it working on my Macintosh SE running System 7.1, 4mb RAM, and Asante EN/SC Ethernet adapter. The fact that he got it running on a system with System 6 and only 2mb RAM is pretty intense. Check out the beta at his page.

The new paper for the Game Boy Printer did not solve the spotty printing issue. Oh well...

I went home to a family reunion and my aunt donated two computers. On the drive back home I stopped to talk to a friend. He donated a SCSI Zip 250 drive, USB Zip 250 drive, SCSI Syquest 270 Turbo S drive, and some unopened Macintosh modems. Then I stopped at a thrift store and found an Apple IIc external 5.25" drive for $2.50. When I finally got home my fiance brought me a package that someone had sent. Therein lie three Apple SCSI hard drives. Its enough drives to drive (sorry) one crazy.

At the thrift store they also had... brand new Game Boy Camera paper! I can test the printer with a new roll of paper now.



At the moment I'm really excited about equant's Retro Challenge 2009 project. For what equant lacks in site content he more than makes up for with can only be described as "68K OF EPIC WIN." A twitter client for System 6?! I'm tempted to whip out the Macintosh Plus just to try it out. The beta should come out today.

The Applesoft madness continues unabaited.


This small program loads the fireworks shape table used in Fireshow. Unfotunately Sweet16 is not accurately reproducing the color error I am seeing on my real IIgs screen. The first top row displays the four fireworks with XDRAW and SCALE set to 1. As you can see the colors are not uniform. The second row displays the fireworks using DRAW and HCOLOR set to 5 (orange). On my IIGS any pixel you see in blue is not not displayed. The third row again uses DRAW, but SCALE is now set to 2. Anything you see in blue is again not actually displayed on the IIGS. I'm still trying to figure this one out.

I've gotten sidetracked. Here's some Game Boy Camera photos!

The Game Boy Camera automatically dithers images by default. It is possible to turn it off by pressing select and changing dither to off. There is a noticible impact on the quality of the image. Dither on the left, no dither on the right.






Personally, I prefer the dithering option. With such a small resoltion every bit of detail counts. The undithered images lack the same level of depth and definition.

Now for some random photos.

It seems I have a bit more to learn about shape tables and vectors. A screenshot can best demonstrate the issue.

I just used Sweet16 to grab a screenshot! I swear this is being coded on a genuine IIgs. No need to hurl stones! Anyway the program is called Fireshow. The program displays a fireworks show in the beautiful night sky. Number of fireworks, speed of the show and sound are set by the user before the show begins.

As it stands right now there are four types of fireworks in my shape table. After the launch animation one of the four fireworks is selected at random from the table. SCALE animates the "explosion" in a FOR/NEXT loop as the firework expands in the sky.  Here is where I am running into trouble. The HCOLOR value is currently statically set to 5 (orange) for the time being.  The DRAW command is ignoring the HCOLOR command an animating the frames with white, green, and purple instead of just the solid orange.

This is where I realized that using HGR2 boxed in the potential of this program. This graphics mode limits the program to eight colors. Of these eight black and white are repeated, so in reality there are six colors. Fireworks come in all sorts of colors though. The HGR2 color options are limited to:

• black
• green
• violet
• white
• orange
• blue

The sixteen colors offered by GR would have been nice, but I can't use a shape table to animate the fireworks. I would have to write a routine to animate every single pixel, clear it, and continue. All those calculations are much too slow and the end result would have been too boxy. GR and HGR also leave room for four lines of text on the bottom of the screen, which I feel ruins the aesthetic quality. Animating from an HGR2 shape table is super fast compared to PLOT, HLIN, VLIN, HPLOT and HPLOT x1,y1 TO x2,y2.

For its faults the program runs nicely. I still have to cleanup the intro screens, write some error traps, add better sound effects and fix the animation. I also need to randomize the detonation points in the sky. An INT statement chooses one of five X coordinates in the sky at random. All the fireworks detonate on a static Y coordinate. Then I would like to see trails from the firework embers as they fall. So many good ideas, but so little time.

Thanks are in order for fellow Retro Challenger artfink for coming through with a solution for my Applesoft dilemma. The error on line 30 is caused by a missing PRINT statement. Lines 40 and 50's errors are resolved by removing the question mark. Once the changes were made I was able to write a short test program to display, rotate and scale my test shape table. Did I mention that artfink's solutions were thorough and well written? Bravo, good sir.

Thanks to the imbibing Retro Challenge twitter monkey intern for putting out the word that I needed help too.

I haven't forgotten my original goal entirely. Here are a few Game Boy Camera pics to quench your pixel lust.

Last night I sat down with  The Applesoft Tutorial (#A2L0018) and my IIgs for some retro coding. About four and a half hours later I realized that the sun disappeared, I missed Keith Olbermann, and my fiance was fast asleep. I was in the zone and making great progress.

I'm writing a simple program using the full-page graphics mode HGR2. So far I've been able to draw my landscape features using HPLOT since they are pretty simplistic. I've got the minor animation stuff pretty much down pat. HPLOT is okay for the elements that don't have to be drawn quickly. I need something a little quicker.

Using image tables to draw an animated sequence on screen seems to be the solution.  Unfortunately, working examples online are few and far between. The only example I could find came with the Beagle Brothers software package "Apple Mechanic," which has a suite for creative vector shape tables.

The documentation reads as follows.


Every time this code is implemented the error message "?SYNTAX ERROR IN 30"  is returned from my IIgs. I actually tried naming the shape table made in Apple Mechanic SHAPES, but still no dice.

Lines 40 and 50 also change when viewing them with LIST. They change to:


INT? changes to a PRINT statement. 

Getting frustrated I headed to my local library. Low and behold they had two books on Applesoft programming.  In Christopher Lampton's "Graphic and Animation on the Apple" the last chapter is devoted to shape tables. He actually recommends getting a vector program (like Apple Mechanic") instead of charting the image vectors, converting to binary, blah blah blah... Roger Haigh and Loren Radford's "BASIC for Microcomputers" has a simple code example in it.


This code snippit results in a black screen. Playing with the DRAW command was no help either. I put [ 130 DRAW 1 AT 50,50 ] and a circle was drawn on the screen. That means that there is an shape table loaded, but not the one I want to draw from.

I guess my unanswered questions are...

1. ...does anyone have an example of an Applesoft program that loads and displays an shape table?
2. ...in [ 30 D$;"BLOAD SHAPES,A";SH ] the 'A' stands for address. How do I find the address of my shape table?
3. ...how do I store my shape table into the Apple II memory using PEEK/POKE?
4. ...is there anything glaring that I am missing?

If you have any of these answers I would love to hear from you ASAP. 

The Game Boy Printer

Q: What purpose does art serve if the Game Boy Camera photographer is unable to share his or her creation with the world?

A: Art is a liberal waste of time and money. All Game Boy Camera photos should be labeled as "entartete Kunst" and burned. Go get a job you filthy hippy. The Game Boy Printer enables the artist to share his or her black & white vision with the world.

The hardware counterpart to the Game Boy Camera is the Game Boy Printer. It is modeled in the original color scheme of the Game Boy. Unit dimensions are almost as large as the Game Boy itself. Do you have ten AA batteries handy? Four of those are for the Game Boy and six are for the printer. And you thought the Wii controllers were terrible battery vampires. After purchasing the Energizer "Eff-the-Environment-Mega-Power-Pack" I sat down with the printer.

Errrmmm...



If I had to guess what is going on with this Game Boy Printer, I would say that years of storage haven't been to kind to it. Unfortunately I don't have a triwing screwdriver handy to pry this thing apart.

The Game Boy Printer uses a proprietary thermal printer. Thermal paper is the type that your local Taco Bell uses to print your receipt so you can prove to them that they screwed up your order. It makes sense that Nintendo would choose this option to keep costs down. One of the major problems with this type of paper is that it is extremely environmentally sensitive. Exposure to hot or cold temperatures can easily damage the paper and printer components. Don't expect these pictures to last very long either. They have a tendency to fade quickly.

While writing the above paragraph I tore off the misprinted photos and popped them in the microwave for three minutes. The test confirmed that the roll of paper I have in my printer is bad. The spotting is uniform outside of the print area.



Oh, well. Owning the Game Boy Printer was a moot point for me as a kid. The Mad Catz Camera Link enabled me to print my creations on a standard inkjet printer. I came into it years later as part of an eBay bundle I bid on. It came with the original box and an unopened package of refill theremal paper. I decided to hold onto them for nostalgia's sake. Oddly enough that same bundle came with an empty yellow Game Boy Camera box. I kept that too.

There are also number of Game Boy games that are Game Boy Printer compatible. Game Freak developed the Camera software, so it comes as no suprise that Pokemon games are on that list. You know what? It was probably a good thing I didn't have a Game Boy Printer because my younger brother was a Pokemon FREAK. This included watching the cartoon, memorizing the CD lyrics, playing the games obsessively, playing the card game, and buying every single figurine... up THROUGH high-school. According to this video you can print off pictures from the Pokedex. The little kleptomaniac would have wasted any paper I had. He still owes me for years of lost accessories, broken figures, and other damaged goods.

A few years back an enterprising individual wrote a Game Boy Printer emulator with software enhancements. I remember using the software on my old Compaq to edit my images. Unfortunately I cannot get the software to work properly now. There are very primitive schematics included in the documentation on how to build your own transfer cable. 

Spent a good chunk of the day converting vinyl to MP3 for a friend. Using an Ion iTTUSB05 turntable and the iMac G4 to do the encoding. Wrote a nice Applescript to handle the .aiff to MP3 conversion and add ID3 tags. For some albums you just need that snap, crackle and pop to enjoy it properly.

One of my hobbies is collecting and restoring retro Apple computers. The first retro machine was the Macintosh Classic won off an eBay auction in 2003. The collection snowballed from there. Here are a few shots of the machines in my office.

If you have any of these Apple items in any condition please contact me. Especially if you live in the southern Wisconsin region!

Repair Parts:

• Macintosh Classic II - logic board
• Macintosh Classic II - screen
• Macintosh Classic - screen
• Macintosh Plus - logic board
• PowerBook 170 - logic board
• Apple IIc internal 5.25" floppy drive
• Apple branded monitors - any model
• Apple floppy drives - any model
• SCSI drives - any model

Wish List:

• 3rd Gen. iPod
• 4th Gen. iPod
• Macintosh Color Classic
• Macintosh II
• Newton 100
• Newton eMate
• Performa XXXX
• Quadra / Centris XXX
• Apple CD 100 / 150
• Quicktake 100
• Connectix Quickcam
• Apple Quicktime Video Conferencing Camera
• Boxes, documentation, software, advertising, ephemera, etc.

My other big project this month, besides partaking in the omni-awesome Retro Challenge, is trying to find a job. Last month I graduated from UW-Oshkosh with a degree in German and Speech Communications Education. I'll be licensed with the Wisconsin Department of Instruction once my application goes through this month. With the economy being what it is, jobs in my subject area are either already filled or cut completely. I am looking at options outside of education. Partaking in Retro Challenge has so far been a nice distraction from the stress.

The Mad Catz Camera Link

This is the Nintendo Seal of Quality. Nintendo has an almost unparalleled level of quality standards in the videogame market. Any product bearing this symbol guarantees that blowing on it will fix all your problems.

The Mad Catz Camera Link does not have a Nintendo Seal of Quality because blowing on it will not solve anything. The accessory really should not have been released. The construction is cheap, the software buggy as hell, and it only works sporadically. At its best this product is an unfinished beta. When the cable works properly it enables people with too much time on their hands to enter Retro Challenge 2009.

Other options for extracting images from the Game Boy Camera exist, although they are a bit unwieldy.

• Take a screenshot on a PC with a Super Game Boy hooked up. 
• Place the Game Boy screen flat on a scanner.
• Print the pictures with the Game Boy Printer and then scan them.

In every one of these scenerios the quality of the image decreases. The Camera Link insures that every raw pixel is preserved when transferred to a computer. When the cable and software works properly it produces the best output. There are Linux options out there, but I don't have the patience to sort out any incompatibilities that may arise. The Camera Link, even with all of its imperfections, is the most efficient route to take.

There are two different connectors on the cable. One end connects to a parallel port on the computer. This end has a transparent housing covering a controller chip. The housing is held together by two small philips screws. The housing has fallen off of both Mad Catz Camera Link cables that I have owned. The Game Boy business end of the cable connects to the extension port. If you plug this end of the cable before turning on the Game Boy it sometimes stops the handheld from booting up entirely. I was able to replicate the issue on my Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. Even after turning the Game Boy Advance off the power LED stayed on. My guess is that there is a current running through the cable that sometimes interferes with the Game Boy boot sequence. 

Where to begin with the software?

Here is the only window to the software interface. Let’s go down the list of options.


Open – This option will only open Game Boy Camera sized bitmap images. Anything else will return an cause a scrambled image to appear. There should have been an error trap implemented here.

Save – Save your imported Game Boy Camera images. 

Email – Opens your e-mail client to send Grandma your pictures and any other Windows virus along for the ride.

Print – Create physical evidence of your Game Boy Camera shenanigans.

Big View – Embiggens the imported image to the size of the black window. A perfectly cromulent thing to do is have an option to set this as a default.

Modify – Opens MS Paint so you can draw questionable content that Nintendo never intended.

Mad Cat(z) – This genetically-modified upright-walking green-eyed hyphen-cat has MC tattoed across his chest just to show you how extreme  this software is. 

Exit / Help – Frustrated? Need help? Too bad. Pressing the help button opened nothing for me. Why not just quit and press exit?


OK – Okay. It isn’t a button on the interface per se, but you will be pressing it a lot. This error message will pop up frequently. Even when you are not uploading anything. I’m not joking.

If everything is running smoothly the Game Boy Camera user merely has to select the print option to send a picture. The screen on the Game Boy will be exactly the same as if the picture was being sent to the Game Boy Printer. The circle under the view screen on the Camera Link software turn from green to red when there is data incoming. You can get a sense if the data did not successfully transfer if the "Downloading Data!!  Please Wait!" message continues to flash after the Game Boy Camera is already finished sending. (PS: I should point out the extra exclamation point in the dialogue window. Sloppy Mad Catz... sloppy.)

There is just one more little thing about the Camera Link software that gets on my nerves. The software plants itself in the center of the screen and cannot be moved around to free up some desktop space. It is time to move on.

As a spritely youth I was blissfully ignorant of how important product quality was. I spent hours downloading Game Boy Camera images to my Compaq 233 Mhz Pentium Pro. Half of that time was spent swearing at the malfunctions. The other half was spent editing images in Microsoft Gif Animator 1.0.  On the weekends my friends and I would get together and make animated shorts one frame at a time.

Sharing our creations added a whole dimension to the Game Boy Camera experience. In 1999 I began uploading the .gif files to my website hosted on AOL. You have to remember that this was a time before everyone and their mom had a Facebook/Myspace/Twitter account. The internet was still a wild place where a teenager with a little HTML knowledge could garner some serious attention. Internet video was still in its infancy and YouTube non-existent. A funny animated .gif file displayed on a projector to a whole high school class was a big technical accomplishment.

I have thusly downloaded Microsoft Gif Animator 1.0. No good can come of this.

If you are interested in further reading on some of the logistics of importing images from the Game Boy Camera I recommend heading on to Judith Hoffman's excellent webpage.

Images:

Yesterday I mentioned that my original Game Boy had died. There is a wide verticle column of pixels that will not illuminate on the screen. When I plug in the Tetris cartridge I get nothing but a scrambled Nintendo logo at the boot. The adjust contrast slide will not set and the screen will dim and darken at random short intervals.

Nintendo has always built quality products. This Game Boy survived 20 years of rough and tumble. It went through the wash, was stolen numerous times by mischevious siblings, was almost sold by my mother at a garage sale, and had long forgotten what a battery cover was. I feel like I lost a friend.

But Retro Challenge 2009 must go on...

Today we take a look at one of the photo settings available to the Game Boy Camera. To change the palette go to shoot > shoot > press select > palette.

An Introduction to the Game Boy Camera

Just last month Kodak announced that it would be discontinuing Kodachrome film. That’s right Paul Simon, Mama is gonna take your Kodachrome away. Film as a medium for capturing images will no doubt continue to have its niche. After all, film has a certain artistic aesthetic that can’t even be simulated by 100 Photoshop lens flares.

In the past decade digital photography has become more accessible to the Average Joe. The falling cost of solid-state media, the development of cheaper video convergence hardware, and the proliferation of internet capable devices has all but secured the fate of film cameras. It is now entirely possible to capture, view, edit, and publish an image all on a singular handheld device.

Hop into the Delorean and come with me to a time when Conan O’Brien’s “In the Year 2000” comedy bit still had the possibility of coming true. We’re going back… All the way to the year 1998!

The Nintendo64 is playing second fiddle to Sony’s PlayStation in the next generation home console wars. In the handheld market, however, Nintendo is the only major player. The up-and-coming Game Boy Color is poised to render the monochrome Game Boy obsolete. It is just before this leap in hardware evolution that Nintendo releases the Game Boy Camera.


The Game Boy Camera is a standard slot cartridge with a large protrusion that extends over and behind the Game Boy unit when plugged in. The lens of the camera is located in the bulb and can be rotated 180-degrees to face either the user or the camera subject. Nintendo offers the cartridge in a variety of colors.


The software allows the user to take up to 30 still frames in all the colors between black and white. (White being about as sickly pea-green as your Game Boy screen.) It all seems overly simplistic at first… just point the camera and press A to shoot. But the beauty of this simple camera lies in its complex options. Pressing the select button presents the user with a dithering option, the ability to flip the screen horizontally or vertically, change the shutter sounds, or even manipulate the palette in six ways.

Other menu options encourage users to personalize their work. Pressing select while viewing the photos taken brings up an even wider array of manipulators. Users can select a frame to surround the picture, add a comment, alter the image with the paint option, or even add preformatted stamps. The last two options are perhaps the most important. The delete option allows the user to clear up memory on the camera. What parent is going to buy their child an über-expensive 8mb flash card for their Game Boy in 1998? The last option is print. When hooked up to a Game Boy Printer users could create a physical copy of their masterpieces.

The Game Boy Camera also offers even more complex camera options for the experienced user. The self-timer, time-lapse, trick lenses, montage, and panorama items push the user to expand their creative horizons. The time-lapse is perhaps the most brilliant option when used with the built-in animation editor. Yes, that is right.  An editor allows budding directors to create their own custom animations on the enormous 2-inch un-backlit monochrome screen.

The rest of the user interface is an eclectic mix of odd images and at times counter-intuitive menu options. I just recently sat down with the manual and discovered a previously unseen menu. Pressing start at the main menu allows the user to change personal info, review camera statistics, game high-scores, and view the credits. The credits was a looping montage of a man flailing his arms. Very strange indeed. At least I learned that my Game Boy Camera has taken 1425 pictures and made 455 prints. 

Remember that Nintendo is a game company first and foremost. There are three simple built-in games on the cartridge. The first is Space Fever II, which is a simple shooter in the style of Galaga. Ball is a rehash of Nintendo’s eponymous Game & Watch title, but it features your face. That’s right. You take four headshots of yourself with the camera and they are mapped into the game. The same goes for the last game called DJ. As if the kitchen sink image editor wasn’t enough, Nintendo throws in a simple music editor. 

In retrospect the Game Boy Camera came out at the very last gasp of the monochrome Game Boy’s lifespan. As a concept it would not have worked as a Color cartridge. The hardware limitations combined with the complexity of editing color images would not have translated well into a fun user experience. The Game Boy Camera experience is thusly enhanced by its monochromatic limitation.

On a personal note the Game Boy Camera was my first foray into the world of digital photography. It got me interested in pushing hardware to the limit and discovering what could be accomplished within technical limitations. It got me up and moving around, interacting with my friends, and made me solve complex problems. It was a nice distraction when my friends and I weren’t playing Goldeneye. That game came out in 1998 too. Don’t you feel old?

In the next in-depth article we'll take a look at the Mad Catz Camera Link. Until then appreciate the random photos.

Gateway G6 350 - Manufactured 01/06/1999

I bought this computer for $5 at a thrift store because I needed a Windows machine. It is the lone Windows computer in my collection. Sometimes Mac and Linux just doesn't cut it for what you need to do. I tried explaining this concept to my fiance when I brought it home, but she never quite understood the concept. Hopefully you will...

PS: When it isn't running Windows I keep it networked to run Folding@Home off a Xubuntu flash drive.

Nintendo Game Boy Pocket - Clear

Purchased in the mid 90's for $15 because my fat Game Boy had seen better days. Also, I was getting sick of my siblings stealing that damn thing.

Nintendo Game Boy Camera - Yellow

Purchased at the same time as the Game Boy Pocket for $7. Why do I remember this? Because as a young geeksprout I replaced real-life friendships with fun hardware. The Game Boy Camera provided hours of entertainment in an age when digital cameras were priced well beyond any young teenager's purchasing power. The camera can hold up to 30 images, has a built in editor, and has many other neat features.

Mad Catz - Camera Link

Ahhh... I bought this cable new at Best Buy on clearance for $6 in the late 90's. The Camera Link enables transfers from a GameBoy Camera to a Win95/98 machine. It seemed to have a mind of its own as it would only work when it felt like it. The controller chip on the end of the cable is buggy and the software... well doesn't work more than 75% of the time. I need the Gateway G6 to interface with the cable and GameBoy hardware. (I thusly legitimize ownership to my fiance.)

When I grew up and went to college I decided to clear out some of my old gaming gear. Unfortunately I decided to chuck this cable out. That was a mistake. Years later when I discovered there was a Flickr group dedicated to the GameBoy Camera I longed to have this cable once more. After months of eBay scouring I was able to find a complete cable set once more.

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Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude.