Admittedly this is a pretty niche solution to exporting your Game Boy Camera pictures from the camera cart and onto your computer.
There is actually a whole bunch of ways to export pics from the cart. Pictures are basically stored as save game files and if you can find a way to dump the saves, you can export pictures. You can also export pictures by creating a device which connects to the Game Boy using the same port and cable as the Game Boy Printer. You connect the device, select print on the Game Boy Camera and the device takes that output and saves it for you. This page has a really great summary of many different ways of exporting pictures.
I found one more method which is not mentioned on this page. It requires a very specific setup which I just happened to have. If you do not have all these parts, this amounts to a pretty expensive (and kinda flaky) solution, so I wouldn’t recommend if you need to buy a bunch of this gear. Maybe you have an N64 and Everdrive and then its 20 bucks for a Transfer Pak from Japan and you are good to go.
Using this technique you can dump the ROM and save game data for any Game Boy or Game Boy Colour game. In theory you can also write save files back to the cart, although I did not test that functionality. What we will do is dump the save from a Game Boy Camera and then convert it into a usable image format.
What You Need
- Nintendo 64
- Standard Nintendo 64 controller with the plug on the underside for a Transfer Pak (like most controllers have)
- An Everdrive flash cart
- A Transfer Pak, which was a Game Boy cart reader for N64 which allowed you to use your GB saves in various N64 games.
How to Do It
- Download this special N64 ROM which do the dumping
- Make sure the folder “GB64” is in the root of your SD card. Inside the GB64 directory you will find the ROM “GB64.z64” and a directory “data”.
- Connect your Transfer Pak to the controller and plug in your cart
- Fire up your N64 and load the “GB64.z64” ROM
- If everything goes well, when the cart loads you will get a screen saying you can dump the ROM (the game) or dump the RAM (the save).
- Press button to dump the RAM. This will create a *.srm file on your Everdrive SD card in the GB64 folder.
What Can Go Wrong Here?
I had such a hard time getting the Transfer Pak to dump correctly. Everytime I would load the ROM on my N64 it would tell me that it can not connect. I ended up opening up my Transfer Pak and inserting the ribbon cable manually into the controller to ensure the connection was good. That worked.. sometimes.. other times not.
At first I wasn’t even sure this whole scheme would work and I wanted to verify the Transfer Pak worked at all. I happened to have a copy of Perfect Dark on the Game Boy Colour and when it is connected to the N64 game, a few extra cheats are available. I tried this to verify that at least the Transfer Pak works…. and at first it didn’t work at all. I honestly fiddled with this for hours.
Somehow, I don’t know really why, I managed to get it to work. If I just tried to load the GB64.z64 ROM then the connection would not work. However, if I loaded Perfect Dark on the N64 with Perfect Dark GBC in the Transfer Pak and verified it worked, THEN reset the console and loaded GB64.z64, it would work. I don’t know why or if I am confusing something. I had time after time of GB64.z64 not connecting to the Transfer Pak and then once I loaded Perfect Dark, hit reset and loaded GB64.z64 another time… it did work.
When you get GB64.z64 to work definitly leave the controller still as much as possible. I would leave it on the table, just press the button to start the dump and not touch it again.
I may have a rather flaky Transfer Pak but as I have read online, even under the best circumstances it doesn’t work very consistently.
Assume It Does Work and We Get a RAM Dump, What Now?
Now we need to take that SRM save file and extract the Game Boy Camera images. First we need to convert the format of the save file from SRM to SAV.
- Use this online tool, upload your SRM and it will give you a SAV file back
- Go to this excellent online Game Boy camera image management tool Game Boy Camera Gallery
- Go to the “Import” screen and select your SAV file for upload.
The Game Boy Camera Gallery will then analyze your uploaded save file and allow you to extract each image. It really is a great tool and you can manipulate each image or just download it to your computer in a more modern format.
I could not have figured this out without the help of this great write up at http://micro-64.com/features/gbromdumping.shtml