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Just a few days back, YouTuber ChromaLock treated his followers to a behind-the-scenes look at his latest tech wizardry on his channel. He introduced a fascinating twist on the much-loved Game Boy Color, enabling it to play videos using its original link cable. This magic happens thanks to the integration of a Raspberry Pi Pico and some tailor-made software designed specifically for this task.
Interestingly, the simpler the video content, the better the playback FPS you get – a noticeable improvement over using the classic Game Boy Camera. The images are impressively clear and smooth, especially when compared to those captured by a basic USB webcam. However, most videos play best in black and white since the Game Boy Color can only handle a palette of four colors, making it a challenge to display on its modest 160 x 144-pixel screen.
To pull off this innovative streaming, ChromaLock developed an app called CGBLinkVideo, which you can find on GitHub. This project is built on existing open-source software and uses sophisticated video compression to shrink videos down to 1 MB per second. With the Link Cable able to process only 64 KB per second, the videos undergo heavy compression, leading to occasional hiccups like dropped or split frames. Nonetheless, the overall experience runs quite remarkably.
ChromaLock’s full-length video not only showcases video playback on the Game Boy Color but also dives deep into the technical jazz that went into overcoming the system’s limitations. In grayscale or monochrome, the playback can soar to 60 FPS, though adding color reduces it significantly to approximately 12 FPS.
The channel went a step further, testing game streaming. However, streaming even older Game Boy games proved to be less than ideal compared to running those games natively. As for modern 3D games like Doom Eternal, forget it—the resolution is just too advanced for the Game Boy Color’s tiny screen to handle.
The driving force behind this project seems to be ChromaLock’s desire to achieve the seemingly impossible: playing the iconic Touhou Project music video “Bad Apple” smoothly on a Game Boy Color. Given its monochrome nature, it was actually quite feasible to get it running at 60 FPS, albeit with a noticeable dithering effect due to the streaming process.
