obscura

Salvage your beautiful photographs from a Game Boy Camera save file.

Photos snapped with a Game Boy Camera is stored on a battery backed RAM on the cartridge. There are lots of ways for you to backup that RAM, and thus your photos, to a save file on your computer.

Once you have that save file, pass it to obscura, and watch your snaps appear in PGM image format.

Extract photos from save file

Just pass a save file as a parameter to obscura like this:

$ obscura game-boy-camera.sav

You'll end up with all 30 photos in PGM format:

$ ls
game-boy-camera.sav  image-1.pgm
image-2.pgm          image-3.pgm
[...]

Convert to other formats

Of course, it is easy to convert to any format you want. Here's an example using ImageMagick:

mogrify -format png *.pgm

How to install

Install on macOS using homebrew by running brew install svendahlstrand/tap/obscura.

For other systems, you will have to build it yourself. obscura is written in C, free from dependencies, and should compile and run on most platforms. Just run make and find the executable in the bin directory.

Alternatives and resources

I developed obscura for my amusement and to better understand the guts of the Game Boy Camera. However, there's a handful of other ways to get your snaps off the cartridge.

• BitBoy - "Print" your images to an SD-card.
• GBcamera Image Saver "Print" your images to your computer.
• gbcamextract - Extract PNGs from save file, requires libpng.

I had great use of the following resources.

• PGM Format Specification - PGM is simple to implement.
• GB Camera Tech Info - Information about the Game Boy Camera's save format.