About Link to heading
Swap It Like It’s Hot (Silihcam for short) is a small payload for the Game Boy Camera that is loaded by cartswapping from a flash or EEPROM cart. It requires no modification to the Camera cart or console. It has several features not present in the original software:
- Manual control of almost all camera registers.
- An upside-down version for consoles such as the Game Boy Advance SP.
- Remote control over the Link Cable port for highly stabilized shots.
- Burst shot and AEB (Automatic Exposure Bracketing) modes.
Feature Showcase: Link to heading
Manual Exposure Link to heading
The brightness and contrast slider from the original software is user-friendly, but it doesn’t expose the many parameters that the image sensor has, and there’s no way to set them to remain constant. This is particularly annoying in scenes with high dynamic range or with rapidly-changing lighting conditions. Swap It Like It’s Hot allows you to control all of the camera registers to get the exact exposure time necessary.
Rotation Link to heading
If the cartridge slot and the LCD are rotated relative to their normal orientation, rotating the device so that the camera cart is standing right-side up flips the screen from the user’s perspective. While the stock ROM can rotate the screen horizontally or vertically, it can’t flip both at the same time, which means the viewfinder will be mirrored either horizontally or vertically. Swap It Like It’s Hot supports horizontal and vertical rotation at the same time.
Remote control Link to heading
Pictures that are taken with the camera in a fixed position tend to turn out much better, but the stock ROM can only take stabilized pictures by utilizing a timer.
Swap It Like It’s Hot can be controlled with another Game Boy over the Link Cable port. For extra convenience, this remote control is located on the same cart that is used to launch Swap It Like It’s Hot.
Automatic Exposure Bracketing Link to heading
The camera’s sensor has a very narrow dynamic range - within one shot, if you can make out details in the darker areas of the scene, you can’t make out details in the brighter sections and vice-versa. This can be solved by taking multiple shots with different exposure times and combining them such that you can see detail in both brighter and darker areas. The stock ROM is able to take multiple shots with one button press, but is unable to automatically under- and over-expose the image.
Swap It Like It’s Hot can automatically take multiple photos with different exposures differing by a user-defined value. Here’s an example of a collection of photos taken using AEB and the resulting composite:
Exisiting Solutions: Custom ROMs and Flash Carts Link to heading
Some brilliant folks have put a lot of work into reversing, modifying, and improving both the software and hardware of the original Pocket Camera. Through a combination of custom flash carts and software, such as Photo! and 2bit PXLR Studio, all kind of awesome new features are available: fully control every parameter of the image sensor! Save more than 30 images by saving to flash, and never have to worry about the cart’s battery running out! Faster printing! Trigger using the link cable or the Game Boy Color’s IR sensor for stabilized shots! The possibilities truly are endless.
Making these flash carts is inconvenient. It requires ordering a custom PCB, buying obscure components, moving surface-mount chips from a Pocket Camera cartridge, and risking failure for the inexperienced. I have neither the equipment nor experience for surface-mount PCB assembly, but there are people who offer to assemble these, if given the parts.
Project page Link to heading
The sane thing to do would be to accept that my 1998 joke camera isn’t going to give me the premium photography experience, or to spend a little over $100 to make the flash cart. Instead I’m developing Swap It Like It’s Hot (Silihcam for short), a custom Game Boy Camera ROM that works with original Pocket Camera hardware by cartswapping.