The Game Boy Camera may have been a terrible camera, but thanks to one intrepid modder, it’s now a terrible camcorder.
Cobbled together by an 8bitcollective member using the nom de Internet “kraettz,” the rather unwieldy hack couples the optics and image capture abilities of Nintendo’s add-on with the video output abilities of a Game Boy Advance TV converter. The real-time footage is then piped through a portable video player, while simultaneously being recorded to an on-board 40GB hard drive.
Admittedly, the footage this thing takes isn’t exactly on par with James Cameron’s Avatar rig, but given the quality of images captured by the Game Boy Camera originally, it’s rather impressive. Especially considering that it can snag nearly an hour of 320×240 video on the power provided by a single 9-volt battery.
To wit, a recent snowboarding trip captured by kraettz’s camera:
There are a lot of DIY modding projects that add functionality to a device. This is not one of those.
This hack is of the “I did it because I could” variety, so even if the video captured by this makeshift camcorder isn’t in glorious 1080p high definition, the lo-fi aesthetics and sense of “this is a machine that should not be” give the whole project an aura of geek cool.
Source: 8bitcollective, via GameSetWatch
