You’ll Soon Be Able to Turn Your iPhone into a Game Boy Camera
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It’s been a long and winding road for one of the most infamously popular game emulator apps on the iPhone. However, now that Apple’s relaxed rules have allowed Riley Testut’s Delta emulator to finally grace the pages of the App Store, the developer is moving on to another whimsical project for Game Boy fans.
For those who are sadly unaware, Testut has been working on a Game Boy emulator for iPhones since 2013. His first project, GBA4iOS, was shut down by Apple’s App Store rules and Nintendo, which took umbrage at the notion of allowing its intellectual property to be played on anything other than its own hardware.
Testut shelved GBA4iOS and began working on Delta in 2016, but with Apple’s refusal to allow emulators of any kind, he was forced to distribute it through a grassroots App Store until Apple finally opened the doors to “retro game console emulator apps” a year ago.
With Delta now firmly established on both the App Store and Testut’s European AltStore PAL, he’s just announced his next project, a sort of companion app in the Delta family that will turn your iPhone into a Game Boy Camera.
Introducing our new app — Delta Camera ?A stand-alone app dedicated to taking Game Boy Camera photos with features you'd expect from a modern camera app? Manual exposure/zoom? Camera Control supportComing later this year, but available NOW in beta for all Patrons patreon.com/posts/introd…— AltStore (@altstore.io) 2025-06-26T14:22:59.652Z
Delta Camera is a stand-alone camera app that’s made specifically for emulating Game Boy Camera. We’ve been wanting to make this app for a little while as we’ve noticed a lot more people taking photos using their favorite retro hardware, like DSi, PSP, Nokia Phones, etc. However, one of our favorites things we’ve seen from this trend are the new Game Boy Camera carts with built in lenses — a great way to play around with both modern and retro hardware. So we wanted to play off that concept and really utilize the iPhone’s camera capabilities in combination with the playful, retro feel of using Game Boy Camera.
Delta Camera combines the retro feel of a Game Boy Camera accessory with the features of a modern camera app. The quality is in line with the 1998 Game Boy Camera cartridge, which featured a 128 x 128 sensor, but includes the ability to adjust settings such as brightness, contrast, and manual exposure options.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen something like this. In December, we shared news about an app called My Classic-Retro Console that provides a Game Boy skin for playing music and podcasts, and also includes a Game Boy camera feature. It can also be switched over to an iPod classic interface, and despite that, it’s surprisingly still available on the App Store and has received recent updates that added a fifth-generation iPod nano-style video recording feature.
Nevertheless, the features we’ve seen in other apps remain extremely basic. Testut is going for something that’s not only more full-featured and whimsical, but also true to its origins. As with the standard Delta emulator, you’ll need to grab the Game Boy Camera ROM from elsewhere, as Delta Camera is quite literally using Nintendo’s original code here.
I’ve put the beta through its paces, and it’s pretty fun. You can flip between the front and back cameras and even shoot with the Camera Control button on an iPhone 16. As with the original Game Boy Camera, you can only capture 30 photos. They remain there until you export them to your main iPhone Photos app, after which you can clear them out from Delta Camera and start fresh.
Delta Camera is currently available in beta for early access subscribers to Testut’s Patreon, which costs $3 per month. Supporters in the European Union will be able to access the beta via AltStore PAL, while those outside the European Union can use a TestFlight link. The beta will also need to be linked to an active Patreon account, and as I mentioned earlier, you’ll need to grab the appropriate ROM from another source to make it work. The team says it hopes to release a public 1.0 version later this year.
