Developer Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan has created a Game Boy emulator to play numerous Nintendo titles on the Apple Watch screen
GameBoy on the Apple Watch? From today it is possible thanks to Giovanni, an emulator made by a Canadian developer. The name has been borrowed from an unsavory character from the famous Pokémon saga – to be precise from Pokémon Yellow, his favorite Game Boy game.
The Game Boy emulator developed by Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan is currently still in the prototype phase, although its source code is already available for free download from the GitHub site, so as to allow other fellow programmers to “tinker” with it and help him in his cute project. Gabriel explains, in fact, that the biggest challenge he had to face, to make an emulator of this type, was definitely find the right combination to make the most of the various types of input present on the Apple Watch that, to tell the truth, are not many.
The Game Boy comes back to life
The Toronto-based programmer has taken advantage of the Apple smartwatch’s digital crown for the “Up” and “Down” buttons, swipe left and right to move in the appropriate directions, while the “A”, “B”, “Select” and “Start” buttons will have their own space on the Cupertino device’s display. The Giovanni emulator, as mentioned, is still in an embryonic phase, but Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan hopes to improve it and release a stable version, especially with the participation of other Game Boy fans, on watchOS 4 expected for next fall.