Nintendo Game Boy Web App

Thanks to mind-boggling advances in computer speeds, we can use modern processors to emulate older systems that were once glorious like the Game Boy. While most of cutting-edge emulators rely on very optimized code, the original GB console is so (relatively) slow that it can even be emulated via Javascript (which itself uses a virtual processor, hehe…). That’s what the jsGB project is about.

While this project is just fun to look at (eventually, it should be fun to play with), it reminds us of one benefit of the “web app era”: it has provided an incentive for companies to write faster Javascript engines for web browsers. And that’s only the beginning: in the coming years, we should witness a huge increase in HTML graphics performance, thanks to hardware acceleration.