Since getting the Quest 3 on launch day, I really wanted to have a mess around with the new mixed reality feature. So I installed Unity and started to re-familiarise myself with it as it’s been a while since I last used it.
After searching around for a while, I found an open-source Gameboy Emulator plugin for Unity, it isn’t the best emulator and has a lot of compatibility issues, but for a quick project, it would do the job! (https://github.com/KonsomeJona/UnityGB). So with the emulation out of the way, all I had to do was sort out the mixed reality passthrough and controls etc.
So after several hours of messing around, I finally put together a mixed reality Gameboy Emulator.
If you want to give it a try you can download it from HERE
You will need to have enabled developer mode on your Quest 3, then extract and sideload the APK file using SideQuest.
Once installed you can copy Gameboy ROMs to your Quest by plugging it into your PC and copying the .gb files to \Quest 3\Internal shared storage\Android\data\com.northdevonretroarchive.GameboyMR\files\
There is a weird bug at the moment where occasionally the controls don’t always respond properly, if this happens then just restart the app. I haven’t looked into what is causing this yet, so I will update it once I have.
You can move the Gameboy around by grabbing it with the right controllers trigger button. You can also rescale the Gameboy by holding both grip buttons and moving the controllers away from each other. This allows you to play on a 50m tall Gameboy if you so wish!
This looks fantastic!
Thanks, it’s a little buggy, but when it works it is good fun to play around with. Hopefully in the future we will see a lot more of this sort of stuff available for the Quest 3. An exciting time to be alive 🙂
Stop by Reddit.com/r/EmulationOnQuest
Sadly there aren’t many people programming things like that… First of all, thanks for doing this.
Several notes: The emulator is running at 72fps because you have tied it to the 72hz refresh. Try making the screen work at 120Hz but setting the emulator to half, at 60fps, this way it will run at the real speed and will not suffer from judder. Another tip: You’re running it at 1623×1759 resolution. With the GPU at level 4 you can turn it up to almost double, and the gb screen looks much better. Another tip is to take a look at this emulator: https://github.com/curif/AgeOfJoy-2022.1
It is made in Unity and uses retroach (libretro) android cores that work very well.