Using the DevTerm's built-in printer with mGBA to print Game Boy Camera photos

I’ve been using the DevTerm’s thermal printer as a Game Boy Printer, with mGBA running the GB Camera ROM and a cheap USB webcam as the camera sensor.

Getting the printer working took a bit of doing as I haven’t used the DevTerm in a while. My unit was still on the original Hirsute image, so I had to flash the v0.2h image first. After that the printer services came up fine, though the FPC ribbon cable was loose, which caused a “NO PAPER” error that took some strace debugging to track down.

I ended up forking mGBA to add thermal printer support directly to the Qt frontend. When a print job comes in from the emulated GB Printer, it fires straight to /tmp/DEVTERM_PRINTER_IN as an ESC/POS bitmap (no save dialog, no file written to disk, just prints). There’s a settings panel for density, contrast, dithering mode, and scale.

Full writeup: I turned my DevTerm into a Game Boy Camera and Printer — Max Glenister

Fork: GitHub - omgmog/mgba at devterm-thermal-printer · GitHub with a pre-built binary for the A04 (aarch64, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy).

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