v1.0.0

We are excited to announce that Flashback is officially here! It may seem like it came out of nowhere, but we’ve been quietly working on it for a good while, and today it’s finally available to the public.

Flashback is a companion mobile app that turns the Game Boy Camera into a viewfinder on your phone. Connect your Operator, insert the cartridge, and you’re shooting photos and video through the original sensor. Whether you’re at a meetup, on a road trip, or just pointing it at the cat, Flashback is the most fun way to shoot like it’s 1998.

Hardware Mode

The Game Boy Camera is one of the strangest, most charming cameras ever made, and the heart of Flashback is letting you shoot with the real thing. Plug your GB Operator into your phone over USB-C, insert a Game Boy Camera cartridge, and Flashback picks it up on its own. No pairing, no menus to dig through.

Nothing here is emulated. The live image comes straight off the camera’s original Mitsubishi M64282FP sensor at its native 128×112 resolution, four shades, dithered, the way it did in 1998. What you see is what the cartridge sees.

Software Mode

No Operator? No cartridge? You can still shoot. Software Mode is a faithful recreation of what the sensor does, running on your phone’s own camera: the same 128×112 grid, the same dithering, four greys and all. It needs no hardware and works fully offline, so you can shoot on a plane if the mood strikes.

Palettes and Dithers

Flashback ships with 32 palettes, from the classic DMG green to a heap of pastels and duotones, some more sensible than others. Pick one and the viewfinder follows.

In Software Mode, Color Mode goes one step further and builds a four-tone palette out of whatever is actually in front of the lens.

Manual Controls

Leave it on Automatic and just shoot. Or open up the controls and take over:

• Shutter. From 1/1000s down to 1/8s, in real shutter speeds.
• Gain. In actual decibels, the same values you’d find on the M64282FP datasheet.
• Exposure. A fine bias for nudging things lighter or darker.
• Sharpness. The sensor’s edge enhancement.
• Dither. Ten patterns, picked by hand.
• Grain. Dither contrast, for more or less of that texture.

These map to the sensor’s actual registers, not vague 1-to-10 sliders. And every shot is tagged with the settings you used, so a look you stumble into is a look you can get back to.

Photos and Video

Take stills or record video with audio. Everything saves straight to your phone’s photo library at full quality, where it’s yours to do whatever you want with.

Privacy

Flashback doesn’t ask you to sign up and doesn’t collect anything personal. The photos and videos you take stay on your device and are never sent to us.

Available on iOS, iPadOS and Android

You can grab Flashback from the App Store and Google Play. Hardware Mode works with the GB Operator and a Game Boy Camera cartridge; Software Mode needs nothing but your phone. If you run into anything odd, shoot us an email and we’ll take care of it.

Flashback is the third member of the family, after Playback and Retrace. The Game Boy Camera has always had a special place in our hearts (it already moonlights as a webcam in Playback), and giving it a whole app of its own felt overdue. We can’t wait to see what you shoot with it.