The GB Interceptor is a DIY video capture card for the Game Boy

Have you ever wished you could stream your Game Boy exploits on Twitch or just save a video of your gameplay… without using an emulator, third-party console, or hacked Game Boy? Probably not. But it’s still pretty cool to know that now it’s possible.

Developer Sebastian Staacks has designed a Game Boy capture card called the GB Interceptor. It’s an adapter that you can plug into an unmodified Game Boy to capture a video of your gameplay and stream it to a computer via USB.

The key here is that the GB Interceptor works with unchanged Game Boy devices. People have been hacking Game Boys to add HDMI output or using third-party Game Boy clones or emulators to stream games like Tetris for years. But the GB Interceptor allows you to capture and stream games without making any changes to the Game Boy you may already own.

Here’s how it works: you plug the GB Interceptor into the cartridge port of a Game Boy, then plug the cartridge for the game you want to record into the Interceptor itself. This means the cartridge won’t fit into the handheld game console shell, but it also means you can play the original game on the original hardware, while running a USB cable from the GB Interceptor to a computer for video recording and/or streaming.

Staacks describes the hardware and software solution in a blog post and shows how it works in a YouTube video. But in a nutshell, the GB Interceptor consists of a custom circuit board with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller as the brain and a Game Boy compatible connector. In terms of software, the Interceptor must emulate the Game Boy’s CPU and graphics unit to replicate the video RAM for capture and streaming.

When you connect the GB Interceptor to a computer via a USB cable, it should appear as a webcam, allowing you to save the video or stream it. So far it only seems to work reliably with Linux, but it’s possible that limitations can be worked out with future software development.

There are far more details in Staack’s recipe, but if you’re wondering if you can buy one, the answer is…sort of. The PCB, firmware, and case are all open source, and you can find downloads, design files, and documentation on GitHub. There is also a video showing how to build your own. But you have to order parts yourself.

via Hacker News