Retro Gaming Hacks

Emulate the Game Boy on Your PC

Make the classic portable not so portable.

Although Nintendo has been producing home video game consoles since the 1970s, soon after the introduction of its portable Game Boy system in 1989, gaming on the go has become the company’s main moneymaker. The latest in the line, the Game Boy Advance SP, can play every Game Boy game going all the way back to the original black-and-white cartridges. So there’s still quite a bit of nostalgia, even at Nintendo, for the classics.

In fact, the Game Boy (GB) evokes such heartfelt feelings in its fans that there are a tremendous number of homebrew games and tech demos available at public domain ROM sites like http://www.pdroms.de—over 300 for the original GB and 700 for the Game Boy Advance! If you’d like to play these games quickly and easily, you’ll need to use a Game Boy emulator for your personal computer. And with the right equipment and software, you can even play them on a real Game Boy Advance [Hack #47] .

Emulating the Game Boy and Game Boy Color

When selecting an emulator, you’ll want to make sure that it can emulate all three iterations of the first Game Boy hardware—Game Boy, Super Game Boy, and Game Boy Color. The Super Game Boy was an add-on to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that let users play GB games on the system, and certain GB games were programmed with Super Game Boy-specific color palettes and extra features such as backgrounds and hidden games.

Although a staggering amount of Game Boy ...