Developer Gabriel O'Flaherty-Chan recently shared a project where he managed to get a Game Boy emulator he dubbed "Giovanni" running on the second-generation Apple Watch, allowing it to play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.
According to O'Flaherty-Chan, it was a challenge finding the right balance "between framerate and performance," but he says the end result is a "surprisingly usable emulator." In GIFs shared in a blog post, the Apple Watch is displayed running Pokémon Yellow.
The Giovanni emulator, named after the villain in Pokémon Yellow, was built using open source code from Gambatte, an existing iOS emulator. It uses the Digital Crown and gestures for control purposes.
As Ars Technica points out, Giovanni is not something you should expect to see in the App Store -- it's more of a proof of concept than anything else. Apple does not allow emulators on the App Store, and O'Flaherty-Chan himself says it is afflicted with bugs due to the "constraints of watchOS," including the lack of support for OpenGL and Metal.
The Giovanni source code is, however, available on Github for anyone to download, and the blog post behind the creation of Giovanni is worth reading for anyone interested in the development process.
Article Link: Developer Hacks Apple Watch to Run Game Boy Emulator
