The NeoGB Printer is a SD card-based standalone Game Boy Printer emulator. It is easy to build with parts readily available on the market. It does require little to no soldering skill and is fast to install from Arduino IDE (few dependancies). Using it is straigthforward and intuitive. Mounting the device with all parts on a table requires about an afternoon from opening the component bags to printing.
This project is very similar to a popular ready-to-use solution available on the market, but the NeoGB Printer is open-source, cheap and tested with success with all officially released games (110 in total) that support the original Gameboy Printer. The total cost for all the parts bougth new is below $15. All parts can be easily exchanged with other projects, reused or harvested from dead electronics as they are all very common.
You just need to upload the code using the Arduino IDE, connect the components like described here, plug your SD card and print any image directly from a Gameboy compatible game. Serial protocol is directly recorded under binary form on SD card. Once your printing session is finished, hold the button for a few seconds and all the recorded data will be quickly converted to BMP and/or PNG images, ready to use with social media. Reboot the device once and you will access to an intuitive webserver mode.
List of Games/Homebrew projects compatible with the NeoGB Printer
All the instructions can be found in our Wiki Page
Make sure to follow every step. If you still have questions, ask us here or in the Game Boy Camera Club Discord
- Rafael Zenaro: main code, hardware setting, new ideas, concept art, technical innovations and group facilitation.
- Brian Khuu: architect of the Matrix, Game Boy Printer emulator core, BMP image decoder core.
- Raphaël Boichot: serial protocol and code debugging, BMP and PNG upscalers, RGB led support, hardcore gaming with Japanese kusoge.
- Cristofer Cruz: 3D model for the GB Printer shell.
- Herr_Zatacke: support for the Game Boy Printer Web compatibility.
Want to discuss with the authors or share your art and projects with people fond of the Game Boy Camera and Pocket Printer ? Join the Game Boy Camera Club Discord
- Mofosyne - Arduino Gameboy Printer Emulator
- HerrZatacke - WiFi Game Boy Printer Emulator
- Raphaël BOICHOT - Gameboy Printer Paper Simulation
- A better/responsive Web interface. Since the actual is pretty simple.
- RTC (Real Time Clock) can be implemented but is not planned with this device. RTC obliges the device to be constantly powered even if it can be placed easily in deep sleep mode. Consequence is that the image files generated on SD card do not own time attributes. Copying the files into your favorite storage folder fixes this "issue".
- The file conversion to PNG uses BMP image as source material. It would be perfectly possible to embed a faster PNG converter that would directly use the binary stream of data. It is not planned for today as png support is yet fast.
- The BMP upscaling is quite slow due to the lack of onboard memory and because it makes two things. First, all images are processed by reading/writing to the SD card on the fly, using a very limited buffer (one line of pixels per image at most). Second, it compresses the native 24-bits BMP format output by the C decoder library to 4-bits indexed BMP in order to save storage space.
- The ESP is forced to run at 80 MHz instead of its native 240 MHz during serial protocol. At full speed we experienced protocol unstability with few games. We did not investigate what was the reason (faulty boards sold on Aliexpress ? Need for a magic cap on serial line ?). Anyway, image conversion is made at full speed, so experience for the user is not altered by this programming design choice.
- The choice of implementing a short press button function for dealing with some games is due to the fact that automatic splitting of images can be tricky as Game Boy Printer protocol specifications appeared to be rather unstrict. On the 110 games, most of them sends an after margin after printing one image to feed the paper and allow proper cutting. But sometimes, games send an after margin within image for aesthetic reason or no margin at all between images (but white packets instead). This render the automatic splitting of images all but obvious. Reverse engineering the protocol on 110 games was a very huge effort and we have debated a lot on how dealing with particular games that are perhaps totally unknown or forgotten. We hope that the solution provided here is the most convenient for users. It is at least the most conservative from a video game history point of view.