The GameTank has an emulator that was developed alongside the hardware and continues to be improved as both a software development tool and a wrapper for GameTank binaries to run on modern desktop, laptop, and mobile devices.

This page is specifically about the original emulator developed in C++ and SDL at https://github.com/clydeshaffer/gametankemulator

Currently for the Windows version a prebuilt packages is created every 24h and available at this link.

Building the GameTankEmulator is assumed here to be done under WSL, and you should have git already installed and set up.

Get the emulator source:

git clone https://github.com/clydeshaffer/GameTankEmulator.git
cd GameTankEmulator
git submodule update --init --recursive

You'll also need SDL2 development files, at time of writing the emulator uses version 2.26.2 for MinGW https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/tag/release-2.26.2 This should be extracted into the same parent folder that you cloned the GameTankEmulator repo

wget https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/download/release-2.26.2/SDL2-devel-2.26.2-mingw.tar.gz
tar -xvf SDL2-devel-2.26.2-mingw.tar.gz

Finally you'll also need the MinGW compiler suite for cross building from Linux to Windows

sudo apt install mingw-w64

Once you have the tools and libraries installed you should be able to build the emulator. For some reason when the windows version is launched from WSL it has a very long initial load time ONLY when the exe is stored in the WSL drive. Copying the exe file to a location in your normal windows drives such as C: and running it from there fixes the issue.

make OS="Windows_NT" XCOMP=yes SDL_ROOT=../SDL2-2.26.2/i686-w64-mingw32 -j 1
mkdir -p /mnt/c/Users/{YOUR WINDOWS NAME}/Emulators/GameTank/
unzip dist/GTE_Win32.zip -d /mnt/c/Users/{YOUR WINDOWS NAME}/Emulators/GameTank/
/mnt/c/Users/{YOUR WINDOWS NAME}/Emulators/GameTank/GameTankEmulator.exe ./roms/badapple.gtr

Building on OSX, for OSX is a bit more straightforward:

Get SDL:

brew install sdl2

Get and build the emulator:

git clone https://github.com/clydeshaffer/GameTankEmulator.git
cd GameTankEmulator
git submodule update --init --recursive
make OS="macos"
./build/GameTankEmulator ./roms/badapple.gtr

Building on Linux, for Linux is also somewhat simple:

Get SDL:

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev

Get and build the emulator:

git clone https://github.com/clydeshaffer/GameTankEmulator.git
cd GameTankEmulator
git submodule update --init --recursive
make OS="ubuntu"
./build/GameTankEmulator ./roms/badapple.gtr