This $20 Adapter Lets You Connect the GameBoy Camera to a Cheap Receipt Printer

The GameBoy Camera is a cult classic, but finding paper for the GameBoy Printer that it uses is a pain. Fortunately, industrious creator Vaclav Mach engineered a solution that’ll let you attach the GameBoy camera to any cheap thermal/receipt printer you can find.

Mach calls his creation the “GameBoy Printer XL,” but it’s basically an adapter that allows you to connect your GameBoy with Camera to any modern receipt printer. And he’s selling the whole thing as a DIY Electronics kit on Tindie for just $20.

As Gizmodo points out, this saves you the trouble of needing to find (or cut your own) thermal paper for GameBoy’s printer by converting the proprietary connection into an RS232 serial interface that will work with a wide range of ESC/POS receipt printers. These printers can be found for less than $50 online, and the thermal paper refills are dirt cheap as well.

If you want to take a stab at building your own from scratch, all of the necessary instructions and code are available on GitHub. But if you’re not a DIY enthusiast, you can pick up the kit with all necessary pieces on Tindie… although there’s still some assembly required.

Check out the video up top to see how this creation works, and if you want to see all of the ways you could put your GameBoy Camera and new “XL Printer” to use, you’ll find plenty of low-res inspiration in the PetaPixel archives.

(via Gizmodo)