Real-Time Video Streaming on Game Boy Color with Raspberry Pi Pico

Just a few days back, ChromaLock, a popular YouTuber, dropped a fascinating new video on his channel showcasing his latest tinkering project. This time around, he’s managed to transform a Game Boy Color into a video playback device using its classic link cable. How did he do it? With the help of a Raspberry Pi Pico and some clever software tweaks tailored specifically for this task.

Now, when it comes to video playback on this nostalgic handheld, simpler clips tend to deliver smoother frame rates. Surprisingly, it manages to keep clarity and smoothness on par with a USB webcam, which is quite impressive compared to the old-school Game Boy Camera. However, most clips look best in black and white since the color output is restricted to just a palette of four. This limitation pushes the Game Boy Color’s 160 x 144-pixel display to its brink, making colorful videos tricky to handle.

The tool that ties all these components together is called CGBLinkVideo. It’s an application tweaked by ChromaLock and made available on GitHub. While it’s based on some open-source software, this app has its own unique flair. The videos are compressed to a mere 1 Megabyte per second, but here’s the catch—the Link Cable can only handle up to 64 Kilobytes per second. This means the final video output is highly crunched, with dropped or split frames being a regular occurrence. But surprisingly, it still manages to function.

ChromaLock’s video offers more than just a demo. It’s packed with insights into the development process, highlighting how he navigated the Game Boy Color’s hardware constraints. In an ideal scenario, video playback can hit up to 60 FPS in grayscale. However, once you throw colors into the mix, the frames drop to around 12 per second.

Gaming on this setup was also put to the test. Streaming even classic Game Boy titles proved cumbersome compared to native play. And when it came to modern, graphically demanding games like Doom Eternal, the Game Boy Color simply couldn’t keep up with its low-res display struggling to make sense of the visuals.

The real driving force behind this project? ChromaLock wanted to successfully play the famous “Bad Apple” music video from the Touhou Project series on a Game Boy Color. Given its original monochrome scheme, achieving 60 FPS on this device was within reach, although the streaming setup did introduce some noticeable dithering.

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