Para responder a pergunta do que dá para fazer utilizando PHP, surge o projeto de um emulador de GameBoy via terminal.

Some people will ask me: "Why you did that?"

Well, a friend asked me "What PHP can do?". I thought about that awhile and the idea came up. With PHP7's performance improvement now it's possible to emulate some systems :smile: and, come on, that's funny! :dancers:

It's based on the GameBoy JS Emulator.

Fonte: https://github.com/gabrielrcouto/php-terminal-gameboy-emulator/