Experimental and optional features

Game Windows

PyBoy is bundled with several renderers, called "Game Windows". The recommended is SDL2, and its installation is described in the installation instructions above.

The installations instructions here, will be sparse, as they are mostly for the technically interested.

1. SDL2 : Instructions are found above.
2. scanline : Instructions are the same as SDL2.
3. OpenGL : Install OpenGL and FreeGLUT through the system's package manager. Install pyopengl and optionally pyopengl-accelerate through pip.
4. dummy : No installation required.
5. headless : Same as SDL2. Used for rendering to a buffer.

The window can be chosen via the arguments supplied to python. For example:

python3 -m pyboy gamerom.gb --window SDL2

Screen Recording

If the imageio module is available, PyBoy can record video from the screen and save it in a .gif format. On Linux, this requires the following dependencies:

libsdl2-dev libtiff5-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev

These can be installed with apt or whatever package manager your distro uses.

Install the module with pip (or pip_pypy on macOS):

python3 -m pip install imageio

PyBoy will detect whether imageio is present, and screen recording can be triggered with the I key.

Rewind Time

By providing the --rewind flag when starting PyBoy, you'll be able to pause the emulation, and rewind the game (for example before you lost the game).