A community built Game Boy emulator for Playdate.
The emulator backend is provided by the equaly teeny PeanutGB.
- Reboot your Playdate into Data Disk mode (Settings > System > Reboot to Data Disk).
- Connect your Playdate to your computer.
- Copy your .gb files into the
app.gamekid.data/gamesfolder. - Unmount the Playdate.
- That's it. Run Gamekid. Enjoy!
Once installed and games stashed safely on your Playdate, using Gamekid is fairly straightforward. Simply open Gamekid. Your games should load on the following screen. Select a game to run. Not all games run flawlessly and some have serious FPS issues to the point of unplayability, but I'm convinced we can fix these in time.
Start/Select: Move the crank to activate start/select buttons.
Open the Playdate menu for scaling and interlacing options.
- Grab a copy of Playdate dev tools.
- Run
makewithin the Gamekid folder. OR! grab yourself a copy of Nova from Panic (makers of the Playdate).
Gamekid is pretty good, but it isn't perfect. But we can get it there with your help!
Connect with me on Twitter @dmierau—I'm pretty active there (for better or worse).
Simply make pull requests and I'll look over changes and merge.
Though I had originally built Gamekid with my own emulator, it felt unnecessary for the world to maintain yet another Game Boy emulator. So, I selected PeanutGB for it being written in C already and its portable implementation. That said, I would like any improvements made to that library to be contributed back.
- Sound support
- Visual affordance for crank start/select
- FPS optimizations