Unless you were in on the Active Desktop craze in the late 90s, your wallpaper has probably been a static image for as long as you can remember. Now, you can spice things up thanks to rockdanister‘s GBWallpaper, a Windows program that allows you have a GameBoy game as your desktop background!

What is GBWallpaper?

As its name suggests, GBWallpaper is a program that lets you have a fully functioning original GameBoy game as your wallpaper. This program, which was done as a tribute to the console’s 30 year anniversary, lets you play classics like Pokemon, Tetris and Castlevania in a nice 4:3 window with a blurred background to fill up the rest of the screen without hogging resources as it automatically disables itself when you have a fullscreen window open (it still runs if you have a non-fullscreen explorer window open for example).

Other than being efficient in how it works and making use of a proper aspect ratio, it also has the following features:

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  If you’re on Windows 7 like myself, you’ll have to be content with fiddling around with the tray icon as GBWallpaper doesn’t work yet

  Sound support so you can experience the mighty chiptunes of the GB-era in all their glory

  • Obviously, they get disabled when you switch to another fullscreen window
• Obviously, the game’s state is saved when it’s paused by opening a full-screen window so you can pick it up where you left off
• Saving works for games that support it although there’s no word on save states
• You can save macro input or a series of moves and automatically play it back like an animated wallpaper (which you could also turn into a screensaver with little extra effort)
• A basic audio visualiser and different screen layouts
  • Perhaps in the future, the set of WMP9 audio visualisers could be added in the background which would be pretty cool!
• Other features listed in the README below

While it has many features, it must be noted that what was just released is a version 0.1 release which means that it may have some bugs (like Super Mario Land not working) and some features aren’t included. Among the stuff that rockdanister plans to add in future releases, we find multi-monitor support, a better pausing algorithm and more macro input options.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on Windows 7 as it requires Windows 10 (although it curiously works on Windows 8.1) but according to a Reddit comment by the author, it should be easy to port it over.

How do I install it?

Installing GBWallpaper is pretty simple and can be done by following these steps:

• Grab the GBWallpaper ZIP file from the GitHub link below and extract it (some antiviruses like Avast may take issue with it but it should be safe)
• Open ‘Start.exe’ and right-click the tray icon that pops up
  • Here, you can modify any options you please and there are quite a few
• Select Open ROM File and navigate to the GameBoy game of your choice
• Enjoy having a GameBoy game as your wallpaper – do note that your desktop icons disappear while a game is on (as per the screenshots) even though they can just stay in the space not occupied by the game without interfering anything

 

Conclusion

Thanks to the release of GBWallpaper, we may see an uptick of people trying to make the wallpaper more interesting and perhaps, we’ll also get NES, SNES and Genesis (running Sonic on your desktop would be pretty cool, eh?) versions of this program! As for now, wasting time by pressing minimise is only available in GameBoy flavour on Windows 10 so if you’re not a fan of them, you’ll have to wait a bit before you can procrastinate with the click of a button 😉

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GBWallpaper Website: https://rocksdanister.github.io/GBWallpaper/

GBWallpaper README (should be read before using): https://github.com/rocksdanister/GBWallpaper/blob/master/README.md

GBWallpaper Download Link: https://github.com/rocksdanister/GBWallpaper/releases

Reddit Thread By Author: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/bpp2k9/gameboy_emulator_as_windows_wallpaper_saw_this/