This ESP32-powered Game Boy streams games straight to your phone's browser

Published Aug 20, 2026, 2:33 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary This tiny Game Boy was built with a $4 ESP32 and a custom 3D-printed shell. The emulator runs on-board and streams to your phone via Wi‑Fi/WebSocket. ROMs are stored in the ESP32's flash (uploaded from a phone). This pint-sized, ESP32-powered Game Boy streams games right to your phone's browser. According to ArtificialAGE, the project's creator used a $4 ESP32 (specifically the ESP32-S3) and a custom 3D-printed Game Boy shell to build it. The headless emulator runs on the ESP32, which hosts a local web interface and streams video and audio directly to your phone’s browser. According to ArtificialAGE, one core is used for emulation, while the other core is used for streaming. Here's how it works: the board is a Wi-Fi access point that your phone can join. You then use a browser to open a Game Boy user interface, and the game's video and audio stream over WebSocket. On-screen buttons (or a keyboard if you're using desktop) then send controller input back to the chip. ROMs, which you, of course, need to legally obtain by dumping cartridges you already own, are stored in the ESP32's flash memory and are uploaded from your phone (ROMs can be up to 2MB). In a short video clip alongside the Reddit post, ArtificialAGE shows off Pokémon Red and Blue running. Steps to create your own local web server that streams a Game Boy emulator are on GitHub There's even an extensive troubleshooting video online, too As is often the case with ESP32 projects like this, steps to create your own tiny Game Boy server are available on GitHub, including the firmware that powers the setup. ArtificialAGE also takes things a step further with a "full build and troubleshooting video" they uploaded to YouTube. Looking to the future, ArtificialAGE says they plan to get the setup working with an ESP-NOW link cable to replicate the Game Boy's multiplayer Link Cable functionality. While this is overengineering at its finest, since you can very easily play Game Boy ROMs natively on your phone, it's an interesting experiment nonetheless, especially given how small the actual ESP32-powered Game Boy is.