[Jyaif]

I doubt the CMOS is only 2 bits, otherwise we wouldn't have such nice dithering pattern. Somewhere in RAM there's probably at one point a representation of the image with at least 3 bits per pixel.

[Luc]

The camera outputs analog values. I don't know for sure but I bet the dithering is applied right after the analog pixel is converted to digital...

[objclxt]

Yep, here's the technical data sheet for the chip:

https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/FinalPro...

[joshumax]

Looks like the maximum supported exposure time is ~1 second... That mixed with the fact that the fact that it has a fairly shallow well depth probably means that the CMOS would be best suited for LUCKY imaging. Also adding a cooler to the back of the Gameboy camera may help reduce amp glow. Anyone have the specs on the ADC chip?

[userbinator]

There is some reverse-engineered documentation here:

https://github.com/AntonioND/gbcam-rev-engineer/tree/master/...

The ADC appears to be part of the ASIC which contains most of the circuitry to interface the sensor to the GB.

[trevyn]

"Artificial Retina LSI"... beautiful. :D

[averagewall]

It's an analog output. You can very easily add an ADC to get higher bits per pixel and bypass the whole digital Gameboy interface. I did this once when the game boy camera was about the cheapest digital camera available. I even converted it to color by taking successive photos with colored filters and combining them in software.

Curiously, the camera has hardware edge detection which might have helped with very early machine vision.

[pepijndevos]

It is the Game Boy screen that has only two bits.