Ever wish you could stream your Game Boy exploits on Twitch or just save a video of your gameplay… without using an emulator, third-party console, or hacked Game Boy? Probably not. But it’s still pretty cool to know that now it’s possible.
Developer Sebastian Staacks has designed a Game Boy capture card called the GB Interceptor. It’s an adaptor that you can plug into an unmodified Game Boy to capture a video of your game play and stream it to a computer via USB.
The key here is that GB Interceptor works with unmodified Game Boy devices. Folks have been hacking Game Boys to add HDMI output or using third-party Game Boy clones or emulators to stream games like Tetris for years. But the GB Interceptor lets you capture and stream games without making any changes to the Game Boy you may already own.
Here’s how it works: you plug the GB Interceptor into the cartridge port on a Game Boy, then plug the cartridge for the game you want to play into the Interceptor itself. This means the cartridge won’t fit inside the handheld game console’s shell, but it also means you can play the original game on the original hardware, while running a USB cable from the GB Interceptor to a computer for video capture and/or streaming.
Staacks describes the hardware and software solution in a blog post and shows how it works in a YouTube video. But in a nutshell, the GB Interceptor consists of a custom printed circuit board with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller as its brains and a Game Boy-compatible connector. In terms of software, the Interceptor has to emulate the Game Boy’s CPU and graphics unit in order to recreate the video RAM for capture and streaming.
When you connect the GB Interceptor to a computer via a USB cable, it should show up as a webcam, allowing you to save the video or stream it. So far it only seems to work reliably with Linux, but it’s possible that limitation could be addressed with future software development.
There are far more details in Staack’s write-up, but if you’re wondering whether you can buy one, the answer is… kind of. The PCB, firmware, and case are all open source and you can find downloads, design files, and documentation at GitHub. There’s also a video showing how to build your own. But you’ll need to order your own parts.
via Hacker News