Game Play

For the last few months, I’ve been working on a side-project to bring Game Boy emulation to the iPhone: Game Play is now in public beta and I encourage people to give it a go.

App Store restrictions have encouraged iOS emulators into Cydia, leaving those of us who prefer not to jailbreak our devices and enjoy the odd bit of retro gaming out in the cold. No longer! Fortunately, Mobile Safari performance on the iPhone 5 is good enough to run a pure JavaScript Game Boy emulator as a web app.

Game Play integrates the JSGB core¹ by Pedro Ladaria with a rich JavaScript web application with Google Drive support for adding ROMs. Suitably named .jpg files are, as you might expect, automatically used as artwork.

The whole project is released under the GNU General Public License, Version 2, and can be found on GitHub.

1. I have also experimented with the GameBoy-Online core as this provides audio support, but it will require some significant optimisation to make it usable on an iPhone.