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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I built a multiplayer Gameboy

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.

This is a multiplayer Gameboy project built using WebRTC to enable real-time peer-to-peer connections between players. The creator developed it as a learning exercise to understand WebRTC technology while creating a… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I built a multiplayer Gameboy launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]: > If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos. Hopefully I did that? Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize! [0]…

    2024 · lanparty.house · its alternatives →

  2. 2IS
  3. 3

    With all the turmoil in the game engine world recently, I thought I'd quickly post to show progress on our game platform dotbigbang.com. It's a fully integrated game platform where the multiplayer game editor and games all run on the web. You can make multiplayer games and share them with just a link with no setup at all. Breakdown of major features here: https://twitter.com/bobbydigitales/status/152647067103481856... We have comprehensive docs at http://docs.dotbigbang.com and a cosy Discord server at https://dotbigbang.com/discord All…

    2023 · dotbigbang.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Play classic 8-bit retro games online with friends! Free multiplayer emulator in your browser. No downloads required.

    2018 · nes.party · its alternatives →

  5. 5IM

    I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…

    2022 · battle-of-flags.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    SCTP is a low level protocol focused on reliable packet transmission. Unlike hopelessly flinging packets from one device to another, it makes sure that the packets are correct using CRC, removes duplicate packets, and allows for packets to be sent in any order. Going into an established library, I thought that everything was already implemented and that there wasn't anything to do until I went through the existing issues and organized all the tasks and decided on an order. Sean DuBois (https://github.com/Sean-Der), one of the co-creators and current maintainers of Pion, an…

    2025 · pion.ly · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Arduboy▲156

    A mini open-source game system you can program yourself 👾

    2016 · arduboy.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    A portable vintage gaming concept for two

    2015 · lovehulten.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10MP

    I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…

    2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →

  11. 11AC

    Hello HN. This is a project me and some friends built at university in 2017. It was originally built in a rush, but we've added a few improvements over the years. It's a fun game to host at a demoparty and project on a big screen - We did that at Instanssi many times. The implementation is still rough, and suffers from the fast pace of the modern web - The frontend is likely very outdated, and the backend is built with Vapor 2 and Swift 3.1, both no longer supported. You can host this yourself, but it might be a bit of a pain to set up. The WebSocket protocol is fairly trivial to work out…

    2022 · pixel.vkoskiv.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12
  13. 13

    A web framework for building multi-user virtual reality experiences. - networked-aframe/networked-aframe

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14WP

    2013 · bitflop.me · its alternatives →

  15. 15MW

    Link: http://xoxo.cm The idea here was to build a multiplayer game with the lowest possible barrier to entry to get started. That is, no registration, no game setup, as few steps as possible to actually start playing. There's not much substance here right now and there's still a few bugs that need to be hammered out. I'm also thinking of expanding on the idea with some other simple games down the road. Any feedback or suggestions on the concept in general would be much appreciated.

    2011 · xoxo.cm · its alternatives →

  16. 16IA

    Hey HN! Been working on this emulator on and off for the last couple years, and thought now would be a good time to try and show it off here. As far as unique features... I think this is the only online GameBoy emulator with support for save files? So there's your reason to exist, I guess. The WASM port was something I had in the back of my mind but I just kept putting it off because it seemed like it would've been a pain in the ass to implement, but all in all I think it took less than a week so that was a nice surprise!

    2023 · nicolas-siplis.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    Axis▲65

    A multiplayer math game

    2014 · axisthegame.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi HN! I built a 3D arcade racing game in HTML5 using PlayCanvas. It features arcade-style physics inspired by OutRun, with PS1/Dreamcast-style graphics. The multiplayer is asynchronous: you race against the “ghosts” (replays) of up to 7 other players, and after finishing a run you can share a link with a friend so they can race your ghost 1v1. The game currently has 20 tracks, plus a “daily challenge” mode with procedurally generated tracks. We’ve tested it on both desktop and mobile. It supports touch and keyboard controls, though I personally prefer playing with a keyboard in…

    2020 · gamesnacks.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    WebGL Multiplayer game with NodeJS backend. Contribute to Lallassu/wizardwarz development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    About a year ago me and a buddy joined Google's HTML5GameJam, a game building hackathon. Finally I've had the time to dust the project off, upgrade some of the required libraries (node.js bumped from 0.4.2 to 0.8.11 in the meantime) and did some minor patching to get it done for some finishing touches and hopefully release somewhere this year. We implemented the full real Tetris® (yeah, that means T-Spins and funky stuff Tetris addicts like) in MVC, with configurable renderers (canvas, ASCII, Divs), input methods (keyboard, swipe, touch), 2player split mode and offline singeplayer. The…

    2012 · en.wikipedia.org · its alternatives →

  21. 21SM
  22. 22AM

    Hi everyone! I'm one of the developers behind this project. I wrote it with my two brothers, Daniel and Ricardo. For years the three of us have been curious about how multiplayer games work, which is why we decided to work on this project. Our goal was to gain a deep understanding of how different players can share the same 3D space, which is why we wrote our own tiny game engine instead of using something like Unity. We wrote the engine using C++ and OpenGL, and we then compiled it to WebAssembly using Emscripten so that it would run effortlessly on web browsers. We are really excited about…

    2022 · play.moonlightmuseum.io · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    It's been about 3 weeks since I dusted off the Multiplayer Tetris game that me and a buddy wrote A year ago and that's been collecting dust since then. A lot of after work and weekend hours have been pooring into the project since then, and I think it's about time to show the progress What's been done: - Preloading - Completely rewrote layout for desktop / tablet browsers using css3 :target. - Usage instructions added (one of the comments I got: "Yeah, it works, but how do I play?" ) - Sending all powerups to other users now works (click on another user's playfield to send powerup) - Game…

    2012 · goo.gl · its alternatives →

  24. 24WM

    Just launched a very early beta of a multiplayer "FPS" made in WebGL using ThreeJS library. (possible to switch between FPS and 3rd person) Just a hobby project that I would love to get some feedback on, in order to see if I should continue working on it or not. Note; It will add the project to github as open source once I've spent some time cleaning up the code. URL: http://wizardwarz.nergal.se

    2014 · its alternatives →

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