Gambatte
Gambatte is an open source Game Boy Color emulator designed to be portable. The core emulation is kept separate from the user interface, so it is platform independent and easy to port to other operating systems.
Gambatte is also designed to be accurate, and is based on extensive testing of hardware corner cases and reverse engineering. This focus on accuracy gives it very high game compatibility.
The Qt frontend handles platform-specific tasks such as video, sound and timers, and is meant to run on any system, although the Gambatte team only provided builds for Windows and macOS.
Gambatte is available as a standalone emulator and as a core for RetroArch, and it is the Game Boy Color emulator used by OpenEmu.
Development status
The standalone Gambatte is no longer developed. Its last release, r571, came out in 2014, and the author’s GitHub repository is no longer public. The emulation core lives on as a RetroArch core, and forks such as Gambatte-Speedrun were built on it for speedrunning.
Which download to pick
Both buttons are the final r571 release of the Qt frontend.
- for Windows is a single program file with no installer. Put it in its own folder and run it.
- for macOS is a disk image built for Intel Macs.
There is no Linux build. On Linux, the RetroArch core is the easiest way to use Gambatte.
Getting started
Open a game with File > Open. Gambatte plays both original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, and the standalone version does not need a Game Boy boot ROM.
The RetroArch core can optionally show the original startup logo by using the Game Boy and Game Boy Color boot ROMs (gb_bios.bin and gbc_bios.bin in the system folder, with the “Use official bootloader” core option turned on). These files must be dumped from your own hardware; without them, games still run normally.
