Game Boy Color Receives Live Video Stream from Raspberry Pi Pico

Just a few days back, YouTuber ChromaLock unveiled his latest tech adventure in an engrossing build log video. This time, he merged nostalgia with innovation by turning a Game Boy Color into a video playback device using its original link cable, all powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico and some custom-tailored software.

In essence, the less complex the video, the smoother and clearer the playback. It’s a surprising feat when compared to the original Game Boy Camera, especially when connected to a USB webcam. However, the Game Boy Color, with its limited 160 x 144-pixel display and four-color palette, plays most smoothly in monochrome, making color videos a bit more of a challenge.

To make this all tick, ChromaLock developed an application, CGBLinkVideo, available on GitHub. It leverages open-source foundations to work with the Raspberry Pi Pico and funnel video through the link cable. The catch? Video compression. It’s a hefty cut to 1 Megabyte per second, but the cable can only process 64 Kilobytes per second, squeezing the frames down even further. This leads to quirks like frame dropping and splitting, but nonetheless, it does actually run.

If you dive into ChromaLock’s full video, you’ll find more than just video results. The tutorial delves into the nuts and bolts of how he overcame the Game Boy Color’s limitations. High frame rates like 60 FPS are possible with grayscale, but add color and you’re down to around 12 FPS.

He even ventured into streaming games. While original Game Boy games streamed okay, they paled against the native experience, and high-res modern games like Doom Eternal became lost in the low resolution of the old display.

ChromaLock’s main goal? To showcase the iconic “Bad Apple” music video on a Game Boy Color. Since that video’s naturally monochrome, he managed to run it smoothly at 60 FPS, despite some dithering from the data streaming process.

This project serves as a fascinating intersection of retro gaming love and modern tech capabilities, breathing new life into a classic console while exploring the boundaries of its vintage technology.