This hack lets you play Pokémon on your Apple Watch
Now you can catch 'em all on your Apple Watch.
Not to be confused with Pokémon Go for Apple Watch, a new project by developer Gabriel O'Flaherty-Chan turns your Apple Watch into a mostly functioning Game Boy through the magic of emulation.
The program is named "Giovanni" after the villain in the original Pokémon games. All of the code for the emulator is open source, so others can build on it.
"Since getting an Apple Watch last fall, I’ve been disappointed by the lack of content," O'Flaherty-Chan wrote in a blog post. "To help address this, I made my own game a few months ago (a 3D RPG), but obviously it still didn’t address the bigger issue.
He then decided to make an emulator, which would make a lot more games accessible on the watch.
O'Flaherty-Chan said he had to make some trade-offs between performance and framerate, which resulted in a somewhat slow but fairly useable result. He was also inspired by some Facebook developers who got Doom running on watchOS a few years ago.
He also took advantage of the digital crown for the up and down keys and put the rest as tappable icons at the bottom of the screen.
The project is just a prototype for now, and it's very unlikely that Apple will ever allow an app of this kind to be part of the official App Store. While you can find emulators on Google Play, Apple typically keeps them off the App Store—likely because they encourage piracy.
Still, Giovanni is an amazing proof of concept and hopefully an inspiration for developers to do more with the Apple Watch.
Topics Apple Apple Watch Gaming Pokemon
Freia Lobo wrote about Tech News for Mashable in NYC. You can follow her on twitter at @freialobo
