Remember the Game Boy camera? It was a device Nintendo made at the height of the Game Boy hype; it let you take a photo of something and save it as a pixellated mess. Well, if you saw those photos and thought "man, I wish this image were squashed down into even thicker pixels," then you're in luck: someone found a way to do just that with a recovered Atari 2600.

The Atari 2600 Digital Photo Frame lets you relive your memories one blocky pixel at a time

In a post on Hackster.io, tinkerer Nick Bild took on a broken Atari 2600 and got it all fixed up. Next was the question of what to do with it, and Nick came to the idea of displaying images on it. Nick states that "The 8-bit graphics of the Atari 2600 are so beautiful (in their own special way)," so he wanted a way to show off images using pixels the size of fully grown ants. And so he did.

Here's all the stuff Nick used to get the project up and running:

• 1 x Atari 2600
• 1 x Raspberry Pi Pico
• 1 x 74LVC245AN octal bus transciever
• 1 x 74AC04N hex inverter
• 3 x 0.1 uF capacitors
• 1 x Picotari 2600 Rom Emulator PCB (gerber files)

Getting an image onto the Atari takes a little work. First, Nick fed an image into Pixel It and touched up the result in Gimp. He then used this Python script to turn the image into a format that the Picotari liked, and converted the Atari ROM using this script. Once done, it was a simple case of plugging in what Nick calls the "Picotari," which is sort of like a homemade game cartridge powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico. Once it's all loaded up, Nick can power on the Atari and let the slideshow run.

If you want more retro Pi goodness, check out this picture frame that doubles as an emulator.