Running Game Boy ROMs on the STM32 ARM Cortex Microcontroller
Got Tetris running on a 26€ STM32F429 Discovery board emulating the Game Boy CPU and graphics on the ARM Cortex M4. Really fun project to hack together, need to try the original Game Boy Pokemon (red/blue) games next.
Running Game Boy ROMs on the STM32 ARM Cortex Microcontroller launched on October 8, 2024 with 33 votes, #738 of 5,185 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
In plain words
This project enables Game Boy ROM emulation on an affordable STM32F429 Discovery microcontroller board. The creator successfully implemented a Game Boy CPU and graphics emulator on the ARM Cortex M4 processor, demonstrating it by running Tetris. Designed for hobbyists and embedded systems enthusiasts interested in retro gaming and microcontroller programming, the project showcases how classic handheld games can run on modern, inexpensive hardware through careful optimization and emulation techniques.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Running Game Boy ROMS on the STM32 ARM Cortex microcontroller - jnz/stm32boy
Does a similar job
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Hey HN, Over the past ~1.5 years, I built an open-source FPGA retro emulation handheld that can play Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges. To my knowledge, there isn't an existing open-source FPGA emulator that can play physical cartridges like this. One of my main goals was to do all of the pieces myself, and be able to understand every component of it, so I designed my own PCB, wrote the firmware, wrote a Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulator for the FPGA (using the Chisel HDL), and designed a 3D-printed case. I detailed the design and development process in the…
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OFRAK Tetris is a project I started at work about two weeks ago. It's a web-based game that works on desktop and mobile. I made it for my company to bring to events like DEF CON, and to promote our binary analysis and patching framework called OFRAK. In the game, 32-bit, little-endian ARM assembly instructions fall, and you can modify the operands before executing them on a CPU emulator. There are two segments mapped – one for instructions, and one for data (though both have read, write, and execute permissions). Your score is a four byte signed integer stored at the virtual address pointed…
Pokémon Emerald Ported to Raspberry Pi Pico 2Aug 2026 · github.com · ▲58Pokémon Emerald ported to the RP2350 microcontroller. No emulator, 60 fps HDMI output. Recompiled from ARMv4T to Cortex-M33 and the Game Boy Advance's video hardware is reimplemented in software on the second core.
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I built a handheld CHIP-8 game console to teach myself embedded systems2022 · github.com · ▲128A 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…
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