GBWallpaper turns your Windows 10 wallpaper into a fully fledged Game Boy emulator

Windaga · May 18, 2019

Now this is cool!

Now to get no work done...

kuwanger · May 18, 2019

Sonic Angel Knight said:
Yeah, and if I had to dedicate that much for a emulator, especially when I bet having every single gameboy game ever released would still not even get half that amount required.

Totally size, maybe around 480MB compressed (including GBC)? I'm used to the notion of bloat. That doesn't bother me. The part where it's Windows only does. Surely it could be built into Retroarch as a generic feature.

Personally, I'd be impressed if they got something similar working with Windows 98. After I saw it on the emulation reddit, I actually looked a little into whether there was a javascript gameboy emulator that'd work in internet explorer 5.5/6.0 so Win 98/ME Active Desktop could do something similar. I didn't get very far since most the certificates are out of date in my VM (might be a way to import new ones) so most https sites don't work. :/ In any case, that'd be the obvious route.

CMDreamer · May 18, 2019

Nice thing to play with if you spend most of the time watching at your wallpaper rather than using your computer for something more.

Not for me though...

Thanks anyway.

DarkCoffe64 · May 19, 2019

So now winzozz 10 is actually good?

Wolfy · May 19, 2019

KyleHyde said:
This sounds neat, though I probably won't use it permanently. I tend to like having drawings or other kinds of illustrations as my wallpaper. If this had come out around the time that video wallpapers (with sound) became a thing, I would have used it most, if not, all of the time. Thinking about that has made me feel a bit nostalgic about the animated gif icons you could get from the old Animal Crossing website (GameCube) which I'd set as tiled wallpapers every now and then.

I think you'd like this, @KooPako.

Heyyyyyyy, just curious, did you ever download those gif icons? Just curiousssss

KyleHyde · May 19, 2019

Wolfy said:
Heyyyyyyy, just curious, did you ever download those gif icons? Just curiousssss

I did, but unfortunately they're long gone. I used to have them on an old desktop PC that died out many years ago.
I'm not sure if someone out there made a backup of them.
The old site seems to be accessible through Wayback Machine and the wallpaper downloads still work (so far), though I've yet to run into the icons set. If it wasn't on that one, then it was probably on Wild World's website (either NA or EU).

arceus · May 19, 2019

RattletraPM said:
View attachment 167367

Wallpapers can sometimes be a bit boring. Even if you install several customisation tools, add many widgets to your desktop and put a thousand different images in your slideshow folder, there's always something that feels a bit dull and static. But what if there was a way to put away all these silly animations and gadgets away and get a real dynamic wallpaper, one that would be fully interactive and would also respond to your inputs? What about something that would give you a challenge right away instead of just letting you stare idly at your icons, links and taskbar? What if you could have... a completely functional Game Boy emulator as your wallpaper?

You've read that right, thanks to the developer rocksdanister and its newly released GBWallpaper tool, you can now do just that! The application is essentially an unity-gb emulator wrapper acting as a live wallpaper and it includes several features and customisation options, like different layouts and an audio visualizer. You can choose to either play the game yourself like you would on any regular emulator or record macros and play them back, essentially turning the game into a nice animated backdrop. If you're worried about system resource utilisation, then don't be, as the emulator will automatically stop when you run fullscreen apps and games.

However, there are a few limitations that need to be addressed. GBWallpaper is currently only officially compatible with Windows 10 and does not support multi monitor setups; plus under some conditions, like temporarily switching focus to a window or running some applications, may make the input non-responsive. Finally, if you're a fan of Super Mario Land you may be disappointed, as the game is currently incompatible with this tool.

If you're interested, you can read the ReadMe below (as well as a download link in the sources):

Source
Official website

desktop emulators taken too seriously

raxadian · May 19, 2019

This is really cool but I don't use Windows 10.

Mama Looigi · May 19, 2019

RattletraPM said:
View attachment 167367

Wallpapers can sometimes be a bit boring. Even if you install several customisation tools, add many widgets to your desktop and put a thousand different images in your slideshow folder, there's always something that feels a bit dull and static. But what if there was a way to put away all these silly animations and gadgets away and get a real dynamic wallpaper, one that would be fully interactive and would also respond to your inputs? What about something that would give you a challenge right away instead of just letting you stare idly at your icons, links and taskbar? What if you could have... a completely functional Game Boy emulator as your wallpaper?

You've read that right, thanks to the developer rocksdanister and its newly released GBWallpaper tool, you can now do just that! The application is essentially an unity-gb emulator wrapper acting as a live wallpaper and it includes several features and customisation options, like different layouts and an audio visualizer. You can choose to either play the game yourself like you would on any regular emulator or record macros and play them back, essentially turning the game into a nice animated backdrop. If you're worried about system resource utilisation, then don't be, as the emulator will automatically stop when you run fullscreen apps and games.

However, there are a few limitations that need to be addressed. GBWallpaper is currently only officially compatible with Windows 10 and does not support multi monitor setups; plus under some conditions, like temporarily switching focus to a window or running some applications, may make the input non-responsive. Finally, if you're a fan of Super Mario Land you may be disappointed, as the game is currently incompatible with this tool.

If you're interested, you can read the ReadMe below (as well as a download link in the sources):

Source
Official website

How come a lot of the special gameboy emulators like this and widegb don’t support super Mario land?

rocksdanister · May 19, 2019

Hi creator here,
I did this for fun, honestly did not expect people to like it like this haha.

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raxadian said:
This is really cool but I don't use Windows 10.

its even easier to make it work with win7, I just don't have a win7 system with me to test and make sure everything works as expected.

CMDreamer said:
Nice thing to play with if you spend most of the time watching at your wallpaper rather than using your computer for something more.

Not for me though...

Thanks anyway.

Its more like just take a break between work sessions, just minimize desktop winodw have a quick game...but yeah I get what you mean I guess I just did this for the fun of it.

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kumikochan said:
Fuck only works with a single monitor setup, have 3 monitors set up and doesn't work

I don't have multimonitor setup to test, multimonitor setups can be complicated like the different aligment of the monitors, it needs to be adjusted for that. I did get it working for a friend, its not pretty he had manually add the offset & resolution in a text file. Also I'm not sure how pause should work in multimonitor, should it just goto sleep when any of the monitors have fullscreen application running?

Sonic Angel Knight said:
256MB of storage, for a gameboy emulator?

Its bundling the unity libraries since its made in unity, but the underlying code is c# and can be made small...I have some plans with it.

TheZander · May 19, 2019

I totally had this idea 30 years ago, Steve Wozniak and I spent hours trying to overlay a gameboy on a mac in my garage.

bixxewoscht · May 19, 2019

Imagine how awesome it would be if it was possible to somehow get all the data from our old playthroughs of for example Pokemon and play them back as a wallpaper. I'd probably sit and watch my old playthrough of Pokemon Yellow for hours.

rocksdanister · May 19, 2019

mmm recording keystrokes and playing back, thats a good idea..

Ericthegreat · May 19, 2019

Sonic Angel Knight said:
Not everyone is rich.

I will agree with this, but you dont have to be rich to buy 20tb worth of hard drives (even ssds) hard drives >.<

gamesquest1 · May 19, 2019

could just leave a random play through video steaming in a browser behind whatever your doing, or leave an emulator running, idk i guess i'm not the intended audience i like retro games and stuff but it feels a bit too much.....maybe as a screensaver might make sense, it would also be kinda cool if it automatically scraped some TAS files and ran random speed runs and stuff in the background

SuperDan · May 19, 2019

I saw this on Reddit yesterday... Very cool idea indeed . I hope the make a GBA or GBC one in the future...

PaBo · May 19, 2019

Tex_McBladeSword said:
There was a NES version of this that I used a few years back, it's fun to mess around with, if you have enough games.

link please!

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SuperDan said:
I saw this on Reddit yesterday... Very cool idea indeed . I hope the make a GBA or GBC one in the future...

gbc would suffice

air2004 · May 19, 2019

Sonic Angel Knight said:
256MB of storage, for a gameboy emulator?

I guess you're still using a hard drive from the early 90's in your computer lol

Sonic Angel Knight · May 19, 2019

air2004 said:
I guess you're still using a hard drive from the early 90's in your computer lol

No, but I still can't believe a emulator needs that much. :wacko:

SuperDan · May 19, 2019

PaBo said:
link please!

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gbc would suffice

Like I everyone else how I loved my Gameboy that was one of the best Christmas days ever... But I mostly use a HD projector in my man cave.... The white glare would be too much... But if it was in color it would be very cool . It's a great idea..

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