Crankboy Brings Game Boy to Playdate

In the retro gaming scene, the Playdate keeps finding new tricks. Panic’s handheld, with its crank and 1-bit screen, can now run Game Boy titles at full speed thanks to a new emulator called Crankboy.

The development was reported by Notebookcheck. The Playdate uses a 400 MHz Cortex-M7 CPU, and Crankboy shows that the device can do more than its native Lua-based games.

Crankboy is an emulator, software that makes one system behave like another. Here, it mimics Nintendo’s original Game Boy, which used a Sharp LR35902 CPU, a Z80-like chip clocked at 4.19 MHz. Getting that running at full speed on the Playdate is a neat technical result.

The emulator also translates Game Boy graphics to the Playdate’s monochrome display. The crank is not used for gameplay in Crankboy, so play is handled through buttons rather than the handheld’s signature control.

Playdate owners can sideload Crankboy rather than install it through the official Playdate Catalog. The app is not free, it requires a $10 payment to unlock full functionality. That puts it in the less common camp for Playdate homebrew, where many projects are free or pay what you want.

For owners, the appeal is simple, a bigger library of classic Game Boy games on a very unusual handheld. If you want more Playdate coverage, see our news tag and our earlier piece on Afterplay.