Photo credit: Sebastian Staacks
Sebastian Staacks, a physicist and maker of interesting tech, has turned a retro relic into a wedding photo booth. His Game Boy Camera photo booth is a lo-fi delight for his cousin’s wedding. He’s built five photo booths for family events, including his own. For this one, he tapped into his cousin’s love of vintage gaming and chose the 1998 Game Boy Camera as the star. This DIY favorite features a 0.014-megapixel monochrome sensor that produces 128×112-pixel images.
The setup is centered around a blue Game Boy Pocket, the sleeker version of Nintendo’s handheld, paired with Staacks’ childhood Game Boy Camera. It’s mounted on a tripod and captures stills and short video clips. A Sony a6400 mirrorless camera records higher-quality video from the same angle for the final wedding montage. A Game Boy Printer, a ‘90s classic, spits out tiny thermal-printed photo strips for guests to take home. A Raspberry Pi 4 runs a Python script that controls the cameras and printer like clockwork.
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Recording video with a Game Boy Camera is no easy feat, as it was designed for stills. Staacks solved this with his GB Interceptor, a microcontroller system he built in 2022 that redirects the camera’s output to function as a webcam for video capture. At the wedding, guests approach the booth and in a five-second window, the Game Boy Camera takes three photos and a short video. The photos go to the Game Boy Printer for pixelated keepsakes, while the Sony a6400 gets the final wedding video.
The Raspberry Pi 4 is the control center, running a Python script to trigger the Game Boy Camera for lo-fi photos and video and sync with the Sony a6400 for high-def footage. The Game Boy Printer spits out instant, physical mementos on thermal paper. Staacks even built a custom rig with a circuit board to display the Game Boy Camera’s pixelated feed in real time so guests can see themselves as 128×112-pixel avatars.
[Source]
