Show HN: I built a multiplayer Gameboy

by tholm • 3 years ago

157 32 3 years ago

Still very much a work in progress, but really wanted to share this even in it's early state. Had heaps of fun building it to learn more about WebRTC.

trh0awayman• 3 years ago

You should add "democratic mode" - every button push counts as a vote for that control. An election is held every X frames.

tholm11• 3 years ago

Good idea! Adding that to my to-do list.

sharkjacobs• 3 years ago

Twitch Plays Pokemon (2014)

tholm11• 3 years ago

That's exactly what inspired me to make this, I wanted to learn about WebRTC and used that idea as a base but also wanted the potential to play more real-time titles as well.

gberger• 3 years ago

I can't believe it has been almost 10 years since Twitch Plays Pokémon.

wesapien• 3 years ago

Best mode is where decision makers are given power without any accountability. We just finished "The Legend of Gain of Function" and we were all surprised to not finish the game.

sen2• 3 years ago

Also “anarchy mode” where it switches to a new random player after every button press.

Would be pretty fun once there’s more than a couple people connected.

oneandonley1• 3 years ago

Very cool what games work with it? Have you tired Pokémon battles

tholm11• 3 years ago

I haven't exhaustively tested the emulator, but haven't found anything that doesn't work so far. Pokemon battles work well, was testing it with some friends today, with shuffled controls it was pretty fun.

pjerem• 3 years ago

That’s cool :)

noduerme• 3 years ago

So... this doesn't have head to head (i.e. where you'd connect two gameboys with a cable and play Tetris)?

tholm11• 3 years ago

Not at the moment, but that's possible to implement by extending the emulator and this webapp. This implementation was more inspired by something like twitch plays pokemon (multiple users competing for control), but on a smaller scale and also playable with more realtime titles.

indeyets• 3 years ago

So, there's no actual device, right? It's not a gameboy, but a custom web-ui for emulator

tholm11• 3 years ago

Correct, just a webapp with peer to peer multiplayer (where players compete or cooperate using shared control of a single Gameboy)

jader201• 3 years ago

Yeah, I was expecting a hardware article, not a GitHub repo.

Should probably add “emulator” the the title.

hauxir• 3 years ago

very cool. uses similar ideas to https://snes.party and https://nes.party

tholm11• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing this, wasn't even aware these existed, it's actually something I was thinking to working on next.

bejd• 3 years ago

Great work! It would be nice if the demo page had a game ROM ready to go. You could probably find something free and/or open source on itch.io.

tholm11• 3 years ago

Great idea! Will look into adding that in.

mattl• 3 years ago

Or put up something yourself made with GB Studio.

dandigangi2• 3 years ago

Shocked the Lambdas are good enough for perf needs.

tholm11• 3 years ago

The lambdas themselves do very little, most of the work is actually done by the game host. The bulk of the work for the lambdas is to process websocket events for signalling to establish peer connections.

dandigangi2• 3 years ago

Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

birdyrooster• 3 years ago

Its just RPC

vapidness_is• 3 years ago

This is super cool! What emulator did you use? Would be cool to add this to https://afterplay.io

tholm11• 3 years ago

I used https://github.com/roblouie/gameboy-emulator which I forked and made a very minor tweak to allow streaming audio over WebRTC. Code was super well organized and easy to understand. Was also very easy to integrate into the webapp.

seabass-labrax2• 3 years ago

I get a 'oops not ready' message when trying to load a ROM file on Firefox (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0). Here's where I got the ROM from: https://radicorn.do.timdeve.com/

tholm11• 3 years ago

Looks like the linked game is a GBA game, for now this is just a GB emulator (can probably play some GBC titles as well). Was considering making a GBA version of this though.

seabass-labrax2• 3 years ago

Thank you for the explanation :)

sen2• 3 years ago

For people who were expecting online multiplayer with physical game boys, check this out: https://youtu.be/KtHu693wE9o

It uses the Link port to simulate local multiplayer over an RPi Pico.

I’ve bought the kit (https://stacksmashing.gumroad.com/l/gb-link) and it works great.

Show HN: I built a multiplayer Gameboy

Related Stories