Capture the Moment

Long before there was a Steam Deck or PlayStation Portable, gamers cut their mobile gaming teeth on one of the best portable gaming consoles of all time — the Nintendo Game Boy. It may not have been very powerful or had the best graphics on its tiny grayscale screen, but with highly addictive games like Tetris and Super Mario Land, it was a huge hit with consumers all the same.

Not everything in the Game Boy universe was a roaring success, however. This was still an experimental time in the world of mobile gaming, and Nintendo threw lots of things at the wall to see what would stick. Some of those ideas were just plain weird. You may be familiar with the Game Boy Camera, for instance, which allowed users to snap low-resolution pictures that could be displayed in all their pixelated glory on any Game Boy’s screen.

Perhaps that is only moderately weird when you consider that this was long before the era of smartphones, when even owning a standalone digital camera was something of a luxury. But another lesser-known accessory called the Game Boy Printer — which was meant to be used in conjunction with the camera — was much stranger still. This mini thermal printer was designed for those that urgently needed a junky physical copy of the junky picture their Game Boy Camera took.

As it turns out, that was not a lot of people. But with nostalgia having the power to make us see anything through rose-colored glasses, the Game Boy Printer still has a following of loyal fans to this day. That includes Raphael Boichot, who is so smitten with the printer that he created a modern-day emulator of the device called the TinyGB Printer. Being an emulator, it does not technically print anything, but rather takes a pixel-perfect screenshot of whatever is on the Game Boy's screen before displaying it on a small, external LCD. These screenshots are also stored on an SD card, making the TinyGB Printer a lot more useful than the real deal in many ways.

The TinyGB Printer leverages a Raspberry Pi Pico as its main processing unit. It incorporates a MicroSD shield for image storage, a 240x240 1.3-inch TFT display (optional) to view screenshots, and a 4-gate level shifter for voltage compatibility, as the Pico's pins are not (officially) 5V tolerant. A 5V DC-DC step-up converter powers the system, enabling it to run on two rechargeable AA or AAA NiMH batteries housed in a compact battery box with a switch. The device also includes an external link port for connection to Game Boy devices, a small push button for mode control, and an AMS1117 3.3V voltage regulator for stable operation. These parts are mounted on a custom PCB.

The installation process for the TinyGB Printer is straightforward and user-friendly. After soldering all components onto the custom PCB, one simply connects the Raspberry Pi Pico to a computer via USB while holding the BOOT button. Once connected, the provided UF2 firmware file must then be transferred to the "USB" folder that appears, and then the device will be ready to use. For those who wish to modify or recompile the code, the Arduino IDE with the RP2040 core is recommended.

Coming in at under $20 in parts, the TinyGB Printer is well worth the effort of assembling for any Game Boy fan. And with all of the details published under a permissive GNU General Public License, you can copy-and-paste your way over the finish line.