Time to capture all that Super Mario Land footage you’ve been dreaming of.
If you’re familiar with Nintendo’s handheld consoles,you know that there haven’t been a large number of options when it comes to recording off original hardware. You’re best bet for easily recording Game Boy games that way for a long time was something like the Super Game Boy or the Game Boy Player, both having their drawbacks. And while there were capture boards for the DS and 3DS, both required knowledge of the board and the ability to solder; both require users to open up their console, solder the additional board in place, and often modify the outer shell to accommodate the new output. So, the Game Boy, at least, was a bit easier, even if the hardware to do so was aging.
But now, thanks to one fan, there’s an easier way to get that footage of For the Frog the Bell Tolls. Sebastian Staacks, going by “there oughta be” over on YouTube and his own personal site, has developed a card that records footage directly from the cartridge slot on the Game Boy. It slots in much like the old Gameshark and Game Genie, and can stream the footage directly to a PC via a USB cable. Thus making it one of the easiest and possibly best ways to record footage directly from Nintendo’s little gray brick.
Dubbed the GB Interceptor, it passes footage to PC as if it were a webcam. Which, for those in the know, offers up a number of fun possibilities. What it doesn’t actually do, however, is take footage from the screen itself. Rather, it draws from the connection between the cart and the system itself, transferring commands from the system and replicating them through a custom emulator Staacks created.
He’s created a number of Game Boy projects in the past, which paved the way for the GB Interceptor today. Just to name a few, he created a WiFi cartridge for the Game Boy which can really just run Wikipedia, as well as streaming footage to the Game Boy which was demonstrated with Star Wars running on that tiny low-res screen. The latter led to streaming game footage to in the same way, which allowed him to play Grand Theft Auto V on the Game Boy’s tiny screen, all of this using that same WiFi cartridge.
This current cart was requested by a Tetris player, who needed a way to record footage from the console without modifications. The reason was due to this user’s plans to take part in a Tetris tournament; such things usually forbid emulators or other such modifications (in this case, they’re required to be playing on original hardware), as they can alter the intended gameplay, with the same being true for modern devices with video out like the Analogue Pocket. And thus the GB Interceptor was born.
There are some downside to the card, however. It only works on original Game Boy games, and will treat Game Boy Color games as if they were running on the original, non-color system, exporting video in black and white. It also doesn’t work with Game Boy Advance games (obviously), though it will work with Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance systems, just with the same non-color caveat. It also doesn’t intercept audio, so you’ll need a line-in jack on your PC and an auxiliary cable. Staacks also has no plans to produce more of the cards, though he has uploaded the files necessary to build your own on github, as well as a video going over the build (below).
Source: Gizmodo
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