I wanted to take some screenshots from the Japanese Pocket Camera (Game Boy Camera elsewhere), got the ROM (Ver. 1.1 if I remember correctly) off the web and tried to run it. The results: no$gmb crashes right away and visualboyadvance reports an "unknown cartridge type fc" and also refuses to run it. I don't have the means to make a dump by myself and don't know if the ROM floating around is a good dump. Is there any way to check? Does it have to be hacked in order to run in an emulator? Are there any hacks available? Does it run with another emulator? Any help is appreciated!
In the ROM header for CGB games, the "cartridge type" determines which Memory Bank Controller the game uses, whether or not it uses the clock and has SRAM, etc. With a few exceptions, the cartridge type can range from 00h to 1Eh. One of these exceptions is indeed the Pocket Camera, which uses FCh (notice how it's mentioned in the VBA error). You can see a list of cartridge types here, under header 0147 It's very likely based on that error that the camera doesn't run at all in VBA, clean dump or not. Remember that it has the physical camera attached to the cartridge, which would be nigh impossible to emulate. (Another example of special hardware that's currently unemulated is the Super Game Boy, which has no emulator, though some GB emus can show the border and palettes that are SGB features.)
Thanks a lot for shedding some light on this. I have found a couple of screenshots on the web but, of course, no one says they were taken with an emulator.
Come to think of it, I remember reading about some sort of cable that could be used to connect a GB camera to a PC and transfer images; this was some time ago however and it may have only been a concept. In any case, you may be able to transfer pics using save files, or bar that taking a screen capture through the Super Game Boy or other such "run through TV" system.
Yes, the cable was released by MadCatz and I do have one. It's a pain in the a** to get the old software and cable to work under WinXP but in the end it does it's job nicely. I have no problem dumping photos but screenshots of the software is different problem. Side note: some of the photos I recently took can be found here.
Its interesting that you can actually take color photos with the Gameboy Camera too, with the help of that cable. Using Red/Blue/Green colour filters and then merging them as colour channels in photoshop. Here is a few examples that I made:
Those are neat! I had read about color photography with the game boy camera on the web. So, you also had to use a infrared filter, right? It's interesting that the camera is sensitive to infrared light. I took this picture by pointing the TV remote at the camera: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1403/858759496_3707d005e8.jpg
actually, I didn't use a hot filter at all. I simply took the photos in my basement under fluorescent lights Works just the same, and in my case saved me some cash.
According to Jeff Frohwein's site, That explains the initial problem, at least. The only way to get past it would be to either rewrite some of the ROM (ie make a patch) or create an emulator that can specifically play the Camera.
