Game Boy Color Emulator Developed For Apple Watch

Emulators quickly flood any and all devices it can be attached to. From phones, tablets, to calculators, gamers will find a way to enjoy some past classic video game titles. Now it seems that one developer has managed to successfully place a Game Boy and Game Boy Color emulator on the Apple Watch Series 2.

The developer behind this project is Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan who is calling the emulator Giovanni, after his the infamous villain from the Pokemon series. Speaking about his development of Giovanni in a blog post, developer Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan notes that there were a few challenges that he had to overcome.

One of the biggest was finding an appropriate balance between the performance of Giovanni and the frame rate of video games.

“For the sake of prototyping, I committed to doing as little unnecessary work as possible, so extending an existing emulator was my first approach. However as platform limitations and ubiquities surfaced, I discovered it was way less effort to just start from scratch and only pull in what I needed from open source projects.”

As noted, instead of building the emulator completely from scratch, the developer opted to collect select components deemed necessary from other past emulators released online. Two of which that were used was Provenance and Gambatte.

While the result shows off a decent prototype of the game, there’s not much of a chance we’ll ever see this emulator make it onto the Apple marketplace.

Apple has been firm against emulators on their app store and because of this, Gabriel has tossed Giovanni online as a free source code for gamers interested in placing the app onto their Apple Watch themselves.