How I got Game Boy Games Running on the PS3

A photograph of a slim red PS3 displayed next to a larger black PS3.

I have been looking at how to get our GB Studio games running on various consoles and I realized that I have not 1, but 2 different modded PS3 consoles one running HEN (Homebrew enabler), and one running Rebug CFW (Custom Firmware) that I have never touched since modding them. While modding a PS3 is outside the scope of this article, there are various guides online on how to do this.

Preparing Your Console

The PS3, when modded, has an easy-to-use package manager that you can use to install your homebrew, so we simply need to find an emulator. I found a version of VBA that works on the PS3 after a quick google search. This is the one I used. Copy the package file to the root of a USB that’s formatted to FAT32, plug it into your PS3, and your package manager will recognize it. Then simply install it, and you will see VBA added to your menu.

A photograph of the PS3 user interface. The package manager is selected.
A photograph of the PS3 user interface. A Gameboy emulator is displayed.

Launching Your Games

Next up: getting your games onto the PS3. You can run them directly from the USB drive, but I opted to FTP them to my PS3 using the FTP server built into multiman, then selecting HDD0 and creating a folder named roms, then another folder inside that named gameboy where I then placed my GB Studio games.

When I launched VBA, it asked me to navigate and select the Game Boy game I wanted to play.

A photo showing VBA user interface after launching the program on a PS3.

When I selected my Game Boy game, it launched immediately and played without hiccups.

A photo of a gameboy game being successfully launched on a PS3.

This has been the most painless experience so far getting our games working on a console yet, and that really says something about the PS3 homebrew community, checking off another console that our games run happily on.

Liked it? Take a second to support GB Studio Central on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!