Play SNES, gba, in your terminal, even in tmux
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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
HN · launched Jul 30, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 71%) · 1 view
Niche: retro gaming emulators and ports · 98 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -33% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Dev tools
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 98 launches in retro gaming emulators and ports →
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 : 536 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #399 of 537 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 261 days after the earliest competitor.
- OnlineClassicGame · ph · 2026-10-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- rom-cli · github · 2026-10-22 · 120 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- 老玩客 · ph · 2026-10-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- snes9xPS5 · github · 2026-10-03 · 26 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- SuperMarioAllStarsRecomp · github · 2026-10-20 · 51 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- ClassicEmu · ph · 2026-10-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- sm64ds-3ds · github · 2026-10-09 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- BelthasarProject · github · 2026-10-11 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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