Run a Game Boy Emulator in Your Terminal

For many, the days of the terminal are long over, much like the original Game Boy. Now one developer has brought the two together, allowing those with nothing but a terminal to hand to pass the time with some Game Boy classics. The entire emulator runs on PHP, requiring PHP 5.6 or 7 to be installed, but beyond that, it is just a single piece of software to install and then you can get started playing some of your old favourites.

There’s not a lot of reasons for such a program to exist, especially not in PHP, however, the developer himself stated that he simply did it to see what PHP could do and because he thought it was funny. He even implies that PHP could be able to emulate other systems with the performance increases brought in by PHP 7, so we could see more terminal emulations down the line from him or any other intrepid PHP developers looking to explore what PHP is truly capable of.

For those who are interested in trying out this emulator, you can head over to the project’s Github page where you will find all the instructions you need to get started, as well as all of the code it is built upon for those who are interested in just how it works. It’s great to see that the old classics are still capable of inspiring such unusual projects and makes you wonder just what fans will come up with next!