This project simulates the Game Boy Camera, an old product from 1998, by capturing a photo from your webcam and turning it into a 128x112 4-color monochrome image, with optional Bayer dithering - the same as the real thing uses. Most of the instructions are in the project. Enjoy! Also, yes, the image in the thumbnail is an actual photo, of my own Game Boy and Camera, taken with this project. Talk about meta, eh?
Now mobile friendly! This is something I've wanted to make for awhile, and it took a bit of experimenting to get it working. The main problem was how to get it to take a still photo - Scratch doesn't natively support "taking photos" with the webcam, it can only overlay the live feed on the background. I've seen some projects that can capture a still photo, but most of them took a really long time to capture a single image - sometimes in terms of minutes - and the end result was at tiny resolutions that make the Game Boy Camera look HD by comparison. The reason for this is Scratch has no way of detecting the specific color of a certain pixel on the screen, it can only tell if it's touching that color or not - so if you want to find a single pixel's color, you basically have to test it against all 16.7 million possible colors, and do that thousands of times for each pixel on the screen. Ouch! But since the Game Boy Camera only captures in black and white, testing it against EVERY color is unnecessary - all I had to do was figure out how to get a pixel's brightness. After some trial and error, I discovered that I could do it with the [set video transparency to (_)] block. All I had to do was put the video over a white background, then to get each pixel I'd slowly fade out the video feed, and the project would detect how long it takes before the sensor detects pure white (#FFFFFF). Darker pixels take a bit longer to fade out than lighter pixels. By doing this you'd get a brightness value with decent accuracy, a LOT faster than if you were trying to capture a full color image! Unfortunately this method isn't perfect, it takes a few seconds to scan all 14336 pixels, so you have to stay still while a photo is being captured, otherwise you'll get some pretty weird results. If Scratch gets better webcam support, like being able to just take a still photo and display it, I'll update this project to get rid of the wait time.
