Gadgetory

dn8 selfies because if you do I can tell you exactly who's to blame for it Nintendo that's right Nintendo back in 1998 they released this little gem the Gameboy this is a peripheral slash game that came out in both Japan and the u.s. back in 98 Japan did get it a few months earlier and back when it came out you can get it in a couple different colors we have the blue one right here but they also released it in a red yellow and green in Japan specifically got an exclusive clear purple kind of in the style of the atomic purple gameboy color there was also a limited edition gold when they did that was Legend of Zelda now the idea here is pretty simple although it's actually a lot weirder once you start using it but you could use it to take photos and then they would show up on your gameboy screen and you could even actually buy another attachment that was the Gameboy printer which could print out those images using just basic heat paper so let's set this up and actually check out how it works and then maybe also do something a little unnecessarily cool with it so setting this up is really simple all you have to do is put it in the Gameboy and you're done let's turn this guy on okay so once you start it up you have three main options which are shoot view and play now shoot obviously is sort of the main goal with this guy because it's more we used to take photos let's check that out and it's this weird little screen it's almost like a command selection for Pokemon or something I can use magic okay first let's just go to shoot and oh that looks weird let's take a selfie like it's 1998 okay so this is gonna give you the ability to do other kind of special shots including things like panorama so after shoot we also have the option to view which is mainly just going over all the photos you've taken you can go to your album and take a look at the photos we've got like I don't think we took this photo what is this it looks like a close-up of an owl or something that's weird but here's my face and there's Rich's face rich it's you now those first two options are pretty straightforward but it's the third option play where things get weirder I'm it's already been a little weird so far but it gets weirder so there's four games but you start off by just playing one of them called space fever - which is a sequel to a Nintendo game it's basically space invaders now when it starts there's other ships that show up with letters on them and if you shoot those you play a different game but if you don't shoot those then you play space fever which is awkward and the other games you can play are not exactly games so the other games you can choose to play are DJ ball and question mark now DJ isn't so much a game as it is just picking different settings to make beats and sounds ball you just kind of move your arms around trying to juggle but it looks really bizarre and for some reason Solid Snake is the guy introducing you to the game and you just move your arms around trying to catch these balls that are very very slowly moving through the air with someone's face plastered on the body it's it's weird I think question mark kind of follows in the same thing it's a running game where it's just this face plaster I'm a stick figure body and you're constantly tapping a trying to run and jump over obstacles it's it's all really really weird and this is just all plays into what's really bizarre but the Game Boy camera because you buy it thinking it's just a camera you would expect that you just take photos and you know the private thing is cool and then you get it and then there's all these weird faces plastered in places mini games that don't really make sense you know you go to view and there's just a head eating a head or something and then there's like these error screens that just pop up with kind of disturbing faces like I think they were meant to be kind of fun or like you know just like doodles but with how it looks on the Game Boy camera it's honestly kind of disturbing so yeah this thing is weird so weird in fact that when it was being made there was actually a lot of internal resistance at Nintendo about even releasing it but I'm glad they did cuz it's gonna let us do some crazy stupid fun stuff today now there's actually a whole online community of Game Boy camera enthusiasts who have come up with all kinds of crazy things they can use it for whether it's using filters to create color images running images through neural networks to recreate like better versions of the photos and even attaching them to telescopes to get really crazy images but suddenly we're actually inspired by was someone who had post it on reddit the idea of actually adapting the Game Boy camera to be used with high quality camera lenses now in that case they were using a little 3d printed adapter they made we took the easier but more expensive route of actually finding a rigging we can use now if we're gonna do something like this a really important consideration is which Game Boy is gonna be best to use because since it works with the original Game Boy it works on basically every Game Boy all the way through the Game Boy Advance so there's a lot of choices here and there's actually a recent video from another channel Wolf Den which is a really awesome in-depth approach of taking a look at all different Game Boys and which works best with the camera I really recommend checking out it's an awesome video and after watching it we realized we don't actually have the right kind of Game Boy on hand right now so I ended up going to my local game store to pick up a backlit game boy we got a pocket and that didn't actually work out that well for us either so in the end I ended up borrowing a modded front-lit chibi color from a friend of mine so this is the actual rig setup we have going on right now with the original Game Boy and we're using here is actually an adapter that's designed for smartphones from B script the idea is that this will adjust to any size of phone you just plug it in and you can use it with professional lenses but in our case we're using it with the Game Boy camera and realize that with as impressive as this setup looks right here ultimately we're still taking photos that are only 128 by 112 pixels which is really tiny I mean this video is in 4k and that's how big that would be by comparison but you know for back in 1998 that's still pretty impressive in fact back in 99 this camera was actually listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest two digital camera now with the set up there are some problems we're gonna run into and have to kind of deal with to be honest guys I'm not really a camera expert I just talked to them so to explain these issues we're gonna bring on our local camera expert Richard hub hi I'm Richard so reason why we can't use any lens oh yeah I'm Richard so I'm gonna explain blind focus distance no I'm not because I totally forgot so what we have here is it okay okay hi I'm Richard the reason why we can't hold the lens up to the Game Boy camera is because of fund focus distance and that's the distance between the lens and the sensor and so what we need is an adapter that would allow us to kind of space it out and to be able to compress the image that's coming out of back of lens onto the Game Boy camera that's my assistant you may be wondering why the images are upside-down that is beautiful and flipping it you can solve this by using a Game Boy SP so with the set of all good and ready to go in the wild it's a little absurd looking and a bit awkward I mean to be honest it's a bit of Wiggly it's not very comfortable get a lot of shots with but with it we are able to get photos I mean look we're still using the Game Boy camera so it's not gonna make ultra pretty images out of nowhere but with this lens adapter we are able to get a photos that normally would not be possible with the camera by itself and that by itself is actually pretty cool I mean I've said many times before I'm always a huge fan of anytime we're able to mix old-school retro tech with modern technology and that is definitely something we've accomplished today