Digitizing photos from the 1998 Game Boy Camera

Published on 29 Mar 2026

One of my passions is retro game collecting, particularly things that I wanted to have as a kid but didn’t either because my parents couldn’t afford it or because those products weren’t available in Brazil.

Recently, I was able to get my hands on one of these wishes: The Game Boy Camera and its printer accessory. Released in 1998, this “game” turned your Game Boy into a kinda bad digital camera, but certainly amazing for the time. Today, even though the quality clearly sucks, I feel that there’s a certain charm to it that I can’t quite put into words.

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The way saving photos worked is that the game itself can only hold 30 photos, and if you wanted more than that, you needed to use the Game Boy Printer accessory to bring them to the real world. The problem with the printer however is that it uses the same thermal printing technology used for receipts, so not only were the photos comically small, but they also faded over time.

This is even worse today because on top of those issues, there’s now also the additional problem of how difficult it is to compatible find paper rolls nowadays. The Seiko S950 rolls are the only ones I’m aware of that work great, and not only they are not easy to find, but also quite expensive…

Emulating the Game Boy Printer

With that in mind, my primary goal after obtaining these products was finding out how to digitize the photos using modern approaches. I was ready to reverse engineer the printer signal to determine how to emulate it via software, but as it turns out, the community has already done all of that!

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