Finally, a Digital Photo Frame for Your Game Boy Camera Images
Dr. Raphaël Boichot’s Pico Slide Show device to display the grainy little photos captured with your Game Boy Camera.
You know those digital photo frames that litter the shelves of thrift stores? The kinds that were sold at Sharper Image 20 years ago and are now peddled through podcast ads like they’re something new? They’re actually pretty neat if you can get past the stigma. Your photos are all digital anyway, so they make sense. But they aren’t ideal for the tiny, low-res images that come from the legendary Game Boy Camera. That’s why Dr. Raphaël Boichot created Pico Slide Show specifically to display Game Boy Camera pictures as they’re meant to be shown.
Dr. Boichot is an actual doctor (in the PhD sense) and has published all kinds of very technical papers. We can’t understand them, but they have many citations and so we assume they’re good. But even more important than Dr. Boichot’s contributions to science are his contributions to the Game Boy community. The Game Boy Camera is iconic in the gaming and tech worlds, but it has always been difficult to get regular people to understand that. What are you gonna do, whip out your DMG-01 to show everyone? They’ll think you’re a child!
The correct way to showcase those grainy little pictures is with Pico Slide Show. This is a small device with a little screen to display Game Boy Camera images at their native resolution. The display is a 0.85” TFT with a resolution of 128x128. The Game Boy Camera’s CMOS sensor has a resolution of 128x128 — though it actually stores images at 128x112. But a few black rows at the top and bottom aren’t going to hurt anyone.
The other hardware on the Pico Slide Show’s custom PCB includes a Waveshare RP2040 Zero development board, a DD05CVSA battery charging module, and a 500mAh lithium battery. There are also push buttons and switches for interaction.
The device is programmable through the Arduino IDE, but it can’t work with Game Boy Camera images directly. So, Dr. Boichot provides a utility to convert images into a C-friendly format (essentially just arrays of bytes). Getting the images from a real Game Boy and Game Boy Camera to a modern PC isn’t easy, but there are workarounds. Dr. Boichot recommends Photo! (untoxa’s “gb-photo” on GitHub) for a solution that won’t make you want to throw your beloved Game Boy into a river.
And that’s it! Now you can display your Game Boy Camera photos in all their glory. We suggest using double-sided tape to stick a bunch of Pico Slide Show devices onto your wall, possibly connected by strands of red yarn, for the ideal presentation.