GBWallpaper - Gameboy Emulator as windows wallpaper
Contents
About
Feeling bored with basic picture wallpapers? Want to play a quick game while all windows are minimzed? Well why not just run a full gameboy emulator as desktop wallpaper!
Don't want to play? then disable keyboard input & use Macro input, save sequence of moves & automatically play it back; Like an animated gif wallpaper.
Don't worry about performance overhead, it will pause when running fullscreen games or application.
Download
Latest version: v0.1 (Windows 10 Only)
Gameboy Wallpaper.zip
(SHA-256: 523a4a48f6010eb241383a0d6dacf6a3be3d34aafe057100968914cff00db809)
Latest alpha release: v0.2 (Windows 7, 8.1 , 10)
Gameboy Wallpaper v0.2.zip
(SHA-256: 1459ede418ef1f5cdef96fbf973bdf7e466261d4458381f3b98d6ecb41ed806e)
What's new:
- Shuffle roms, everytime you comeback to desktop from fullscreen application rom can change ( searches the rom folder containing the currently playing rom)
- windows 7 , windows 8.1 support
- Multimonitor users: A tool to adjust wallpaper position, for now you will have to manually enter the offset values, will automate it later.
Unzip the file, select Start.exe to get started.
To update the program, just delete the old folder & extract the new version; Run it once to fix the new startup path if run at startup enabled.
Save files & settings are stored in \Saved Games\GBWallpaper.
Features
- Different layouts styles.
- Emulator will pause when running fullscreen application or games (~0% cpu & gpu usage).
- Sound & keyboard input will get disabled when not on desktop, game will continue to run.
- Audio Visualiser for running games.
- Runs at system startup (optional).
- Macro input, save sequence of moves & automatically play it back; Like an animated gif wallpaper.
- Keyboard input & audio can be disabled.
- Save works for supported games.
What is planned for future release
- Multimonitor system support.
- Currently using unity-gb emulator, might switch it with a better one.
- Better pause algorithm that works in various situations.
- More macro input options.
- Bug fixes.
Issues
- SUPER MARIOLAND crash in menuscreen.
- Keyboard input sustaining if you hold and change window focus.
- Currently disabled on multimonitors systems due to bugs/further testing required.
- Certain applications will interfere with window focus, will require user to click on desktop to give input.
FAQ
Who asked for this?
Saw the suggestion on discord chat, got intrigued; took me longer than expected to make. Is this useless? maybe. Did I waste my time? Possibly. It was a good learning experience & fun to make.
High system usage?
The default style of blurred background is a bit expensive if you don't have dedicated graphics, just use different layout style such as "Simple". Regardless, when fullscreen application or game run it will goto ~0% usage.
Not taking input?
Certain applications can interfere with focus, just click on desktop or taskbar to regain focus.
Where is the source code?
I will update it later after cleanup & final update.
Attribution
The following projects made this possible:
Unity-gb : https://github.com/KonsomeJona/unity-gb (MIT License)
Octokit.net : https://github.com/octokit/octokit.net (MIT License)

