Given the nature of modern retro video game emulators, someone eventually porting a Game Boy emulator to the Apple Watch Series 2 was inevitable.
While not exactly practical given the Apple Watch’s miniature display, lack of buttons and the fact that the wearable has been designed to be navigated with only one hand, it’s still nice to know that if I wanted to, I could play Pokémon Red on my wrist.
The emulator is named after the Pokemon series’ gym leader Giovanni and was created by developer Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan. While it doesn’t play games at full speed, O’Flaherty-Chan’s emulator is functional and features on-screen buttons located below the game’s display for start, select and the B buttons. Also, swiping left, right, up or down, mimics the functionality of the the d-pad. The A button is mapped to the right side of the watch’s face.
As you may have guessed, getting this Game Boy emulator up and running on the Apple Watch is a somewhat complicated process given the locked-down nature of Apple’s devices.
O’Flaherty-Chan says that bringing the Apple watch Game Boy emulator — which is actually a fork of an existing project called Gamebatte — wasn’t an easy task because WatchOS uses very specific graphics standards and isn’t designed with complex games in mind.
If you’re interested in checking out the emulator, take a look at the projects GitHub link.
Source: GitHub
Via: Ars Technica
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