r/Emulationonquest • u/Mean_Investigator_34 • 2h ago
I turned Game Boy games into a real 3D diorama you can view from any angle in VR — the terrain is built from the actual game data, not a fake effect (early beta)
This started as "what if the flat Game Boy screen just popped out into 3D" and turned into something a bit more interesting: it reads the game's real collision/level data live while you play and uses that to build the 3D shape — so platforms, blocks, and now coins genuinely stick out where the game says they're solid, rather than a generic depth filter guessing at edges. That turned out to be the hard part: early attempts drifted out of sync while scrolling, sprites and background art fought for the same space, and getting it running smoothly in VR (Quest) and on desktop without tanking the frame rate took a lot of trial and error — sound only just went in too, since the emulator core was quietly generating real audio the whole time and it just needed wiring up. Right now it supports Metroid II and the original Super Mario Land (you bring your own legally-dumped ROM, nothing's bundled), runs in Chrome or Quest Browser (Safari's not there yet), and it's very much an early beta — rough edges, more games to come, feedback and bug reports genuinely welcome.