Crankboy brings full-speed Game Boy emulation to Playdate—if you shell out $10

Playdate maker Panic has now officially added “Crankboy” to its Catalogue, letting owners use the quirky yellow handheld to revisit classic Game Boy titles, including four homebrew games included with Crankboy.

However, the Crankboy Game Boy emulator for the Playdate isn't free: it costs $10, which is a tad expensive given the Playdate’s unique but limited platform and the fact that the device itself is already $229. Users can, however, still snag a refurbished unit for as low as $179. This would still cost nearly as much as purchasing a standalone, renewed Game Boy on Amazon.

Once you purchase Crankboy from the Playdate Catalogue, you get four pre-installed homebrew games: Life’s Too Short GB by Pixel Ghost, Dashosaur by Sleeping Panda, GBBS95 by Beatscribe, and Lo-Fi by Beatscribe, a music album built inside the Crankboy emulator but actually intended for your Playdate.

Playdate owners can download ROM hacks and other homebrew games directly within the Crankboy app. If you’re looking to play some classic retro Game Boy titles like Pokémon Red and Blue, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Metroid II: Return of Samus, or Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, that’s entirely possible as well.

The catch is that you’ll have to legally dump your own Game Boy cartridges and use the Crankboy Manager tool to import your games onto your Playdate and into the Crankboy emulator.

The developers behind the project, known as Sodium and Stonerl, poured months of effort into making Crankboy run at full speed and feel snappy on the Playdate’s modest hardware. When hype around the Playdate was at an all-time high, people wondered whether it could ever run emulators, but skeptics figured it was too underpowered to handle even lightweight Game Boy games. However, the two developers managed to prove them wrong. In an earlier interview with ReadOnlyMemo, developer Sodium said:

“A lot of people were speculating that the Playdate is too underpowered to be able to run a Game Boy emulator. But it turns out not to be true. The trouble is that until recently, most people were not aware of what exactly the performance bottleneck on the emulator was. The real bottleneck was the size of the cache.”

To bypass this limitation, the two developers decided to slim the emulator’s core code to a mere 2 kilobytes, using the device’s tightly coupled memory (TCM) so that data and code remain in place between frames rather than being copied in and out.

Stonerl also had to make specific audio tweaks because certain sound channels could lead to frame drops, which, of course, is a no-go for a $10 Game Boy emulator on a niche $229 gaming handheld with a crank.

Ultimately, you can play Game Boy titles with 44.1 kHz audio, support for multiple save slots per game, and plenty of tweaks for retro gamers, such as widescreen support.