Ben Heck Reverse Engineers Game Boy Printer

[@zaprodk]

I think you got the "optocoupler" part wrong. The printhead is "dumb" and all the pins are connected directly to the heating resistors. The two "opto couplers" are darlington arrays. A quick look with the scope will show this. Also, there is only a single motor. The advancement of the paper is done with gears.

[@mystman1210]

Gameboy Camera is definitely one of the best Game Boy games ever made.

[@JamesMichaelDoyle]

"i don't know if I can start flashing though" unintentional innuendo is the best.

[@noapparentfunction]

glad im not the only one who caught this

[@Geeksmithing]

They sell this type of paper on Amazon... The paper goes bad over time.,,which explains why it's so faded

[@yiffytimes]

and Taxi receipt paper is an excellent subsitute

[@AndrevusWhitetail]

"See how it has really wide threading there?" I would if someone would zoom the damn camera in! I can barely see the details!

[@danxepha4535]

If that was the original paper supplied with the printer then the heat reactive part of it may have expired by now. You should be able to find till receipt/credit card machine paper the right size that will give a much better image.

[@theannoyinggeek156]

I'd love to see Ben put the code onto a modded cartridge and make a sort of word processor.

[@greenaum]

There was at least one Gameboy personal organiser cart, came with a teeny keyboard. Still the Gameboy has an onboard font, somebody could write a word processor if they wanted to, burn it to a flash cart, and use the GB Printer. The method for driving the printer is known among Gameboy hackers. You wouldn't need to tear anything open.

[@lucasn0tch]

Can you try building a time machine?

[@element14presents]

A watch?

[@buggsyspam]

:D Seriously, honestly, laughed out loud. Not just a normal laugh, but the kind of laugh that starts with a *Pwwffffbbtt* then you laugh.

[@toaster4634]

hehe, How about the ultimate Sega? Combine the Master System, Genesis, 32x, Sega CD, Saturn, and Dreamcast.

[@boot-nr7jn]

Toaster well, the device would be too big to be portable if it wont be an emulator, and he will need to program a whole new OS from scratch to power the device... but a good idea though..! :D

[@lucasn0tch]

The Ben Heck Show I meant something like a Delorean from Back to the Future.

[@kanpaifighto]

Hey Ben! Not sure if you knew this, but if you hold down the big pink button on the printer for a few seconds, it triggers a test print image. Not particularly helpful to you at this point, but cool to know, I guess, for anyone else trying to reverse engineer this thing on their own.

[@swissmrkc]

Why they used expired thermal paper is beyond me? i owned one of these when they were new and they printed very dark. You can buy fresh paper now not nintendo brand.

[@greenaum]

Because it came with the printer? And it gave good enough results, so Ben couldn't be bothered chopping the end off a roll of fax paper.

[@TheTurnipKing]

Probably because they had it, and it was good enough for testing purposes.

[@Corrodias]

Not good enough, apparently, because Ben ends the video convinced that it prints in only 1-bit color, when in fact it does print 2-bit color, white and 3 shades of darkness.

[@JeniousJustin]

Yeah you can buy rolls of thermal paper at Office max for things like credit card machines

[@sparticus214]

+Corrodias That's enough to film a moon landing

[@HorstKirkPageKian]

Silly me, expecting to see a PS4 Pro Teardown this week. Instead we got the GameBoy Printer, which is a gazillion times more interesting! Awesome!

[@JoshuaPritt]

Yes! More reverse engineering videos please!

[@hingeslevers]

Fun fact, the cover of Neil Young's album "Silver & Gold" was shot with a Gameboy camera.

[@JawharJohnson]

I wonder if Pokemon Silver and Gold was a nod to him...

[@kironoschannel]

What about connecting it to the giant GameBoy?

[@jussapitka6041]

Kirono Hasama Yes!

[@Davedarko]

now I want to see a Giant Game Boy Printer :)

[@LetsPlayKeldeo]

We need a Second Part :3 With more stuff to do with the Printer :D

[@element14presents]

What would you do with the printer?

[@raafmaat]

make it print in shades by hitting the same pixel multiple times ;) and maybe tweak the code to make it faster

[@tec5x5]

Id Print out 8bit Nintendo sprites and stick them all over the place..could you make the printing darker?

[@LetsPlayKeldeo]

The Ben Heck Show Maybe try out the Limits of this little Printer and try to use if for Jobs it wasnt made to do and maybe just try to print stuff from the Gameboy Camera directly to a New Printer :3

[@greenaum]

Don't think that'd work. It's not faded because the printer didn't put enough heat onto the paper, it's faded because the paper is old. That's as dark as it will get. As far as Nintendo sprites, early Pokemon games let you print your 'mon out using the GB Printer if you had one.

[@MostlyHairless]

19:17 You can use the PROGMEM macro to store large arrays in AVR flash storage rather than RAM and access them with the pgm_read_* macros if you're running low on space

[@NigelMelanisticSmith]

He...He....He just threw a gameboy camera.....

[@OlivierCR]

It's ok, they used to build them with Nokia 1100 quality standards back then

[@chloejackson-reynolds418]

you mean 3310

[@oliviaiacovou]

Most of the phones were well built, not just the 3310.

[@chloejackson-reynolds418]

Retro Aspie but the 3310 is the one that was in the meme

[@OlivierCR]

But the 1100 is the one I owned :V

[@3DSage]

That's crazy, I was just thinking you should tear down a gameboy printer. You read my mind. It is still impressive how they made such a small printer back in the 90's. Great video!

[@greenaum]

Nah, teeny thermal receipt printers go back a way before then. In the early 80s Epson made a primitive laptop (8-bit CPU, 8-line LCD screen) with a tiny thermal printer built in. Thing also had a tape drive for Dictaphone tapes. That's impressive! Nintendo did a good job on the price though. It's likely that they didn't build the printer themselves, or at least not the mechanical parts. Possibly one of the big receipt printer companies did a special job for them.

[@maxlovesamber]

one of the coolest videos so far! love how comprehensive the coverage was in this video versus some of the others. keep it up guys!

[@KennethScharf]

what if the printer does gray scale by double striking?

[@raafmaat]

oooh, that would fck up his whole theory xD

[@greenaum]

There isn't any striking. It's a thermal head. The paper is impregnated with a chemical (often a bisphenol, dangerous cancer-causing DNA-ripping, but anyway...). When you heat the chemical, it turns from transparent to dark. Most receipt printers do this. Next time you get a receipt from a shop, or a bus ticket, try writing on it with something hot, a soldering iron or a heated pin. You'll see. So the print head has 16 tiny little heating elements in it. They can heat and cool in tiny fractions of a second. While you could, possibly, vary the current and thereby temperature of the print head's pixels, it wouldn't be reliable, the paper isn't intended to do grey scales, it's just black or white. The problem would be different batches of paper would give different, bad looking results. So Nintendo and everyone else who does thermal printing, just uses 1 shade, dark or light.

[@raafmaat]

greenaum in this context the striking means heating the paper to create a pixel, ffs, wasnt that obvious?

[@greenaum]

No. In what sense does "striking" mean "heating"? Impact printers, like dot matrix and daisywheel, strike the paper (well, a ribbon). It's logical to assume perhaps our guy got confused between the two types.

[@raafmaat]

greenaum ok maybe he confused them, but still, hitting and striking etc are not always literal, when its warm you can say damn that heat hit me hard! or whatever, would you go complain that they are using the term "hitting" wrongly ? :P

[@PlasmaHH]

You might want to invest in some zoom lens, it is nice that you explain things and point at them, but when the whole DUT (device under teardown) is only like 2% of the pixels of the screen, the thing you point to is barely visible.

[@greenaum]

It's actually an LED and a phototransistor in an opto-isolator. Though phototransistors are often housed in LED-looking packages. While an LED will work as a light sensor, a phototransistor gives much more reliable, clean switching. And yup, they're used to pass data while electrically isolating 2 circuits from each other. Not sure if that's something to do with surges from the tiny heating coils, surely a capacitor would smooth those out? Also seems to have lots of pins, so maybe each one contains 8 sets of optos. Or maybe they're used to isolate the different voltages of the Gameboy and the printer. To transmit data without bothering worrying about converting voltages in both directions. Also it's not unlikely that there's only one motor in there, moving the head and feeding the paper with a bit of mechanical cleverness. Other tiny printers have done that, famously the ZX Printer. Perhaps the extra 2 lines are some sort of jam detection or something.

[@BrunoPasquini]

Maybe reverse engineer the camera so I can connect the gameboy to arduino-pc and store the pictures in the pc

[@Redline-99]

More Reverse Engineering Episodes please!

[@raafmaat]

I love this kind of detailed reverse engineering but explained in a way i can actually understand it :) luckily i know a bit about how binary works and computers in general, so this video was just a dream to watch ! Please make many of more of this kind of videos! xD

[@donguyguy]

This video made me subscribe. I thought to myself, "who in the world and why would you ever reverse engineer a gameboy printer" pause... "Why wouldn't you reverse engineer a Gameboy printer"? Love your shows Ben!!!

[@ericbazinga]

You know, Mad Catz has a USB cable that lets you connect the Game Boy Printer to a computer and use a special program to print stuff out. But where's the fun in that?

[@novafawks]

Or if you have a flash cart you can transfer the images, dump the save, and use some utilities for it too :)

[@marleywright8429]

>usb if only

[@GauBan2501]

ericbazinga also in the last year the BitBoy was released which replaces the printer and allows you to save printouts to an SD card.

[@colonelbarker]

I would love to see the camera done like this, just to see what kind of data is coming out of it.

[@tOSdude]

I think I'll try adding to an existing reverse engineer of a force feedback racing wheel I have. See if I can get that working without a gameport, or write a windows 7 driver for it.

[@Whitefox789]

19:14 I just had flashbacks when I was helping one of my buddies with his senior design project. He essentially made this very long array of 32 bit integers and was telling me he was getting the low RAM error when he compiled the code and the usage of the index of the array was inexplicit however when he explicitly defined a static index for the array the code compiled no errors. I explained compilers are very smart with memory, if you had the usage of the array's index set to a variable i.e. 'i' and have that value increment it will load all the static values you defined in this array to memory however if you compiled your code and have it set to the first index of the array it will only load that first static value because the compiler knows it will never go past the first index of the array. Though like Ben said though if you want to guarantee those values are in memory set the array as constant.

[@zephryus]

when I got this when I was like 9 or 10 years old, this was literally the coolest thing anyone ever had. You gained in popularity just for owning one of these things

[@michaelhodge9902]

do a tear down video about the ridgid hyper drive cordless brush less mailer and see what can you do with the brush less motor

[@slango20]

AVR constants don't have to be loaded into RAM if they are defined as PROGMEM in the source. I forget exactly how to do it, but it would save a LOT of RAM with that giant array.

[@SmokyFrosty]

I had, and still have both of these!! Never used... But totally necessary with a game boy...

[@elizle]

A shipping company that I have to support from time to time still uses a dot matrix printer to print their bill of ladings. I had to replace their print ribbon a year ago and I was shocked that their still using that technology. I wonder if the printhead needs cleaned or if it is just really old thermal paper. I know that thermal paper seems to degrade over time. I wonder if it would be possible to source some new paper that is the right size for that printer.

[@Laziter73]

Not so elaborate as this video, but I did pull a controller chip out of a Logitech Wingman Precision gamepad. This was mounted in my all-time favorite joystick for the C64 and Amiga; The Arcade. I did it to be able to use that same joystick on a modern PC through USB with emulators such as WinVICE and WinUAE. Cheap and dirty way to get a classic joystick to work on todays computers.

[@colinstu]

Can you make the gameboy send its raw camera data to another source so we can see all four shades of grey it can capture?

[@zawzero]

Done years ago.

[@nrdesign1991]

Just a thought, can you use your existing knowledge to back up the images from a Game Boy Camera?

[@o0julek0o]

I mean, here he figured out how the data is stored. You could use an arduino to just record that data coming in, maybe output it to a CSV File and then recreate the image?

[@Firefoxfifty]

You should do a teardown of the Sinclair ZX Printer. It was a spark printer. Interesting bit of old tech.

[@Corristo89]

I think one kid at our school had one and the novelty wore off really quickly. It was fun for a few minutes until we all realized that the quality of the prints was so bad that we might as well sketch them ourselves and probably be faster and better too. But printing pictures on the go via Polaroids was a thing in the 90's, so I guess this thing did appeal to some consumers.

[@BrainSlugs83]

Just for reference, the Z80 (CPU in the gameboy) at 4 MHz can deliver .58 MIPS, and your Arduino at 16 MHz can deliver about ~16 MIPS... so yeah, assembly optimizations on the non-pipelined Z80 aside, it can't even touch the Arduino in terms of computational power...

[@retrogamelord3763]

You should have bought reproduction paper; I got some for mine and it wasn't faded at all.

[@Ghozer]

It does do dithering / shading, so it must be sending all 4 to the printer, did you actually take a photo of something with the camera, then print it? - lots of images have dithering...

[@neophytealpha]

Wonder how hard it would be to create a modern version as well as a color version.

[@robertk3635]

I would be great to know how to make a printer that prints larger images

[@richfiles]

I bought a Gameboy Printer with the hope i could mod it to work with the Elektor GBDSO oscilloscope cartridge I made for the Gameboy... I never got around to it. It has the option to output data over the serial port.

[@Wren6991]

What you said about constants getting put into RAM is not necessarily true. Google "AVR PROGMEM". The reason they're put into RAM by default is just to make your code run faster.

[@brianwalker7771]

How about a part 2? Connecting a modern Thermal Printer to the gameboy camera and Gameboy color. For me it would impossible however i get the feeling The Ben heck show could figure something out with relative ease.

Nice vidoe except one thing. You should have used fresh fax paper!

[@ChrisKewl]

I'd love to learn how you did this and see some code so I can hook this up to a PC and print from there. I have the original MadCatz Printer product if you're interested (I used to work at MadCatz).

[@marleywright8429]

You have the printer link cable for the camera? The one where you 'print' to PC? They're hard to come by these days :/

[@FlameSoulis]

Hmm... so if the printer is only doing on/off, I wonder how many games that used the printer were attempting to send full 4-bit gray scale images to the printer in the event Nintendo made a 4-bit printer...

[@greenaum]

That's a good point (except you meant 2-bit, but never mind). It's not unlikely that the printer and the camera / cartridge were developed separately. So to keep things versatile, they had the GB send the extra bits, just in case they decided to go with a greyscale printer. Or for some future hardware to be compatible. There's no point in throwing away the extra bits, when the whole image is only about 6K anyway. The data format you need to send to the printer is fixed and defined. So that means all games would send data the same way. Those few that used the printer at least.

[@cristoferxcruz]

The gameboy printer actually prints grayscale tones. The print head has variable heat output.

[@JL0ndon]

You could have used regular thermal print paper in the printer lol it would have been much better. That's what I use and it's a superior image to the old thermal sticker paper.

[@RetroCabeza]

It would be really cool to have some kind of memory stick attached to the Game Boy that allows the GameBoy Camera to record some video footage. I know you can do the same thing with the Super Game Boy and a video capture device, but it would be nice to do it with the Game Boy itself. Thanks for your videos! I don't understand half the thing, but I always find very creative and entertaining!

[@TheChestnutBowl]

This was very cool. I've never reversed engineered anything, but I wish I had the knowledge and skills to do so.

[@UltimatePerfection]

Ben, it seems your gb printer paper went bad since prints are virtually invisible. Unless you care about sticker capabilities, get some cash register/printing calculator paper of similar/same width, works just fine with gb printer and your prints will be sharp and nicely black.

[@tec5x5]

Love the GB camera, love Buffy...love this vid

[@liams.g.452]

What if you made a casing for an iPhone that made it into a GameBoy?

[@poptrunkonu]

Liam's Films Productions it's been done already look up a company named hyperkin they have invented one already

[@ricarleite]

I don't get it, did he solve the checksum issue? I understood from his comment it only printed half of the lines with the valid checksum, but then he said it was OK in the Arduino code. Was that code his? Did I miss something?

[@raafmaat]

i think there is a part of video missing, one moment he is discussing the checksum problem, the next moment he suddenly has all the code and the checksum is working

[@ricarleite]

raafmaat It *might* have been an editing blunder? Or maybe he thought we didn't care how it was solved?

[@raafmaat]

ricarleite im guessing that they already had found the working code for this online, but decided to try to reverse engineer it live for show

[@bbggakkba]

I reckon they found a working code, Ben makes a comment that he found a thing to do continuous printing

[@Jademalo]

The prints are faint because the paper has expired. If you get new thermal paper for reciept machines then it prints super well.

[@brandonlewis2599]

You can put your string constants into flash by decorating them with PROGMEM.

[@aaroNiGHTS]

Woah, rig one of those up to be a mini PORTABLE FAX! Fax machines are awesome, you'd have so much anticipation waiting for important messages to come out from that.

[@Bamuel]

Ben you should of replace the receipt roll so it prints out more visable.

[@sobolanul96]

Would this be possible to do with an old daisy wheel typevritter that is missing its parallel port print interface?

[@JaredReabow]

20:06, hahaha no comment about flashing.

[@nrdesign1991]

It can print on regular checkout paper, which should work better than 20 year old sticker paper

[@AJB2K3]

@Ben Heck, If you had done some googleing, you would have discover Jeff frohwein Had a ton of information on the printer and the cables. Supermario DX made use of the printer and used to print banners.

[@logan_cadfgs]

The GB Printer is in fact able to properly reproduce the GameBoy's four shades of grey, actually. In that case, maybe it isn't throwing out that data after all?

[@tsrenis]

hm. this makes me wonder if its possible to make a normal thermal printer print images from the Gameboy.

[@rthoulouze]

I got back into GB printers and tinkering with them led me to this video. I just tried printing a 4-tone flat bands picture and it does print 4 flat bands in 4 shades of faded, so there definitely is more to it. :)

[@CousinHubertRetrogaming]

have you seen that gbprinter prints gameboy images but squished a bit with a wrong aspect ratio?

[@nerdexe3880]

Could you try making a shop computer out of a raspberry pi? I think it would be a simple yet productive build to many builders.

[@ph0sgene967]

I have one of these. I've been wanting to hax it to use it on my computer. I don't have any paper anymore but I'm sure I could find some. Where is the source for all the code written in this video...?

[@phonotical]

Why didn't you print out a large image, using the paper as one line of the image

[@DoRC]

Can you forward engineer something next episode?

[@technicon541]

Could i build an Arduino nano inside of the printer and use ist as an usb-printer?

[@TheyCallMeFizzy]

I think it would be really neat to make a camcorder with the Gameboy Camera! Would you be able to get the data from the camera and send it directly to something like an Arduino and record video?

[@zawzero]

Already been done. avr-gameboy-cam

[@zzco]

There's a typo in the disclaimer at the end. >> ("element14)" -- uhh, shouldn't the ending quotation mark be _inside_ the ending parenth?

[@zawzero]

Are you austistic?

[@zzco]

What does that have to do with a typo being in the disclaimer page? And if I am, does it make a difference somehow? Prople do read that wall of text at the end sometimes.

[@zawzero]

***** Thanks for confirming.

[@zzco]

Huh? I'm confused here, what just happened?

[@2xsaiko]

Don't mind the trolls Robert

[@playereric7538]

I'm so lucky I found a bundle for the camera and printer for 20 bucks back in the early 2000s

[@edwardlui531]

Nice! I tried reverse engineer a IBM model F but kinda failed, ended up just taking code from online and slap a teensy to it

[@frozenintears]

Does the ink ever end? is the ink cartridge replaceable?

[@MrDalek2150]

What if they made a giant version of this that printed in banner size?

[@SNMG7664]

Please, for the love of all that is holy, tell me that that Gameboy Camera didn't work when you threw it?

[@subtledemisefox]

I always wanted one of these to go with the gameboy camera i inexplicably spent hundreds of hours on with my brother, but my mom never got it for us :(

[@Porygonal64]

If it's a thermal printer, why not just use weaker or stronger temperatures for gray scale?

[@cristoferxcruz]

The gameboy printer actually prints grayscale tones as you say using variable temp

[@UltimatePerfection]

Also could you write some software that would allow us to hook up gb printer to a pc via link cable to usb connector and print our own images or text?

[@kduhtdkzrt]

So, this thing is finally completely reverse engineered? USB interface and driver on the way?

[@zawzero]

finally? What do you mean? What was wrong with the hacks from nearly a decade ago?

[@kduhtdkzrt]

zawzero Oh my gosh, I had no idea. That makes this whole video anything from pointless to staged.

[@zawzero]

kduhtdkzrt The video is very informative and entertaining/educational. Just the outcome is nothing new.

[@something-y6e]

You should try combine an old typewriter with a modern printer, so it's still easy to write on the PC and then get the old style writing on paper :D

[@RAMChYLD]

Christian Skjerning that would be what we in the line call a "daisy wheel" printer. It's been around longer than dot matrix printers are.

[@lostname605]

Christian Skjerning I am actually working on such a project right now, my plan is to hook up an arduino to the keyboard matrix of my typewriter. I still have to figure out the pin out though...

[@Colt45hatchback]

You mean like an electric typewriter? Or like, have solenoids press the actual keys on an old typewriter, and read a word document or something and convert it to solenoid actuation/keystrokes?

[@whydoihavetodothisannoying]

So it's basically a old receipt printer taken from a defunct POS system with proprietary crap added on top ?

[@1Mehdi05]

Hey Ben, I'd like to see an old old webcam turned into a time lapse camera that saves the images to a micro sd card.

[@zawzero]

You mean like what a 12 year old would slap together with a raspberry pi in an afternoon?

[@1Mehdi05]

zawzero yes but without a raspberry pi. Back to basics kind of thing

[@Nezarn]

You should reverse engineer how a Gameboy Advance screen works, and make it moddable (since its hard to find AGS-101 screens in realistic price.. :( would be nice to be able to hook up a small screen to it)

[@briansegarra9312]

just commenting because that idea is really great

[@amirpourghoureiyan1637]

Nezarno I actually thought he was going to make a combo unit out of the camera and printer like a Polaroid

[@sarowie]

Reverse engineering LCDs is not that hard. It is also not that hard to grab an image from such a link. There are "generic" "frame graber cards" that simply need to be connected to the connections. The art is not in the reverse engineering, but to make reasonable priced product out of it. What Ben could build would be too expensive. It would only make sense when going into volume production (at which point you could have gone to a chinese LCD manufacturer straigth - do not underestimate what they can) or when adding niche features like a USB/HDMI connection for frame grabbing.

[@amirpourghoureiyan1637]

Yeah it would take a lot of time and effort to run a production like that and would probably force Ben away from making vids on the channel

[@Zestypanda]

Lol, AGS101 are cheap.

[@BIGGIEDEVIL]

Great show always look forward to the next episode

[@lambpato7100]

Try to remake the gameboy with modern technology and by changing the display to a 1080p screen.

[@andychrzanowski1520]

Is there anyway to get the code you uploaded to the arduino?

[@southjerseysound7340]

I dont know about his work but I looked a while ago and there was some stuff on github that should get you going ;)

[@andychrzanowski1520]

Do you have a link by chance?

[@element14presents]

github.com/thebenheckshow

[@southjerseysound7340]

Andy Chrzanowski No but they do lol

[@SammysHP]

Cannot find the code for this project on GitHub.

[@douro20]

Is that a Seiko printer mechanism?

[@coondogtheman]

Ben I have one of these little printers, Bought it off amazon. I was wondering if there was a way to print from my PC without hacking it all up. I use thermal receipt paper to print on as it works better. I like the arduino idea. maybe make some type of adapter that goes between the PC and print. I have an extra Gameboy cable I wouldn't mind cutting up for the project.

[@zawzero]

You can already do that for years.

[@coondogtheman]

zawzero Well how do you do it?

[@zawzero]

coondogtheman1234 Search for avr-gameboy-cam and github.com/davedarko/GBPrinter

[@kaostheory2940]

can you do a nes mini hand held

[@pivoteer007]

You know, I had a game ON the Gameboy that could pretty much make shapes and text, I once printed out a whole collage of images and made it say stuff like "Mario is Awesome", because it came from a Mario game. (Super Mario Deluxe is the name of the game) it had puzzles you could collect from beating levels and then print them. Fun game. (I still have my Gameboy Printer too)

[@CimandeTube]

Ben, please do the NES Mini teardown and whether it can be hacked in any way. thanks

[@SalimOfShadow]

Your videos are AMAZING!Big up from Venice

[@nensondubois]

Since you've reverse-engineered the Game Boy Printer, why not step it up a bit and reverse engineer the Super Game Boy and write some simple SNES-side 65816 code sent via a Game Boy game? utilising commands 49 (SOU_TRN, 81 91 DATA_TRN, JUMP and 79 DATA_SND C1 OBJ_TRN (7900F0601 since OBJ_TRN command C1 is defunct) to do some cool things? I have reverse-engineered the SGB BIOS and did a few quick tech demos and found unused programming.