Play SNES, gba, in your terminal, even in tmux
Details
- External ID
- 49117254
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Play SNES, gba, in your terminal, even in tmux
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- July 30, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.2873357228195938
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
rom is a ~5k-line C libretro frontend that plays games in the terminal. It renders native pixels with the kitty graphics protocol in Ghostty or kitty, inline! even in tmux!Nine platforms: SNES, NES, GB/GBC, GBA, Genesis, PC Engine, N64, Doom/Heretic/Hexen, Wolfenstein. macOS and Linux, MIT.https://github.com/jhickner/rom
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- retro game emulator for terminal
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Writing a high-performance C emulator frontend interfacing with libretro, handling low-level terminal I/O, and rendering via the Kitty graphics protocol requires deep systems programming and graphics pipeline knowledge.
What it would actually take: A real version requires an idiomatic C code base implementing the libretro API, handling raw terminal mode (termios), dynamic library loading of emulator cores, and packetizing RGB framebuffers into chunked Kitty graphics escape codes inline without blocking input. Hard parts include maintaining 60 FPS timing, synchronizing audio through ALSA/CoreAudio, and handling terminal window redraws and tmux passthrough quirks.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 143 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #117 of 144 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 261 days after the earliest competitor.
- nesterm · github · 2026-09-28 · 49 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- rg-sp-ds-style · github · 2026-09-15 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- GBC2DMG · github · 2026-09-17 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- BusterBustsLoose · github · 2026-09-28 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- pspoke · github · 2026-09-15 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Matchaboy — Good games. Greener days. · ph · 2026-09-18 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Python running on the Super Nintendo (in-browser demo) · hn · 2026-07-06 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- LUAp0rt-GBA · github · 2026-09-22 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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