Nintendo Gameboy

The Gameboy was Nintendo's little handheld console released to the world at the start of the 90s. Previously most handheld games had been fixed LCD machines so the gameboy with its interchangable games, and sound could easily be forgiven for only displaying shades of grey. Nintendo converted several of their top NES titles, such as Mario land, Zelda and many others, two gameboys could be linked together to play head to head games, and the machine took off like no one had ever imagined it would! Gameboy's took over the handheld gaming world, and even Sega's colour Game Gear with far superior capabilities barely dented the gameboy's market. A super gameboy was released with the ability to change the greys to set colours (although this wasn't overly useful), and the gameboy underwent a re-release recently when the pockey gameboy (same hardware, but thinner and lighter) was released. Many peripherals have been created for the gameboy, such as digital cameras and even a printer. Today, games are still being produced for the gameboy, and you can still buy them in high street stores like Dixons. With technical information about the gameboy being widespread these days, it has even undergone a renaissance in the demo coding world. Demo competitions have sprung up, allowing coders to show off what they can do on the powerful portable. With the Colour Gameboy (which can also play all old gameboy games) due out soon, there's a lot of life left in the gameboy yet!

Gameboy

This was one of the first gameboy emulators on any system, back in August 1995, being released just 3 months after Marat Fayzullin's famous VGB for the PC. It was released anonymously by the Purple Monchichi (for fear of reprisals from Nintendo), and was warmly received by the whole Acorn community, as the first console emulator for the Acorn. The emulator is single-tasking, and can either be run on a one to one scale, pixel to pixel, or set to full screen mode where the display is stretched to fit the screen (but this does slow the emulation down somewhat). The compatibility is surprisingly good, and can run most games, though the sound emulation is less than perfect, and some games have distorted or even no sound (such as Choplifter 3 where music is absent).

Battery backed RAM support is missing which is quite a shame since the wonderful Zelda cannot be saved as it was meant to be. The super gameboy can also be emulated and the different colours specified in a file inside the application, though this is a hassle to adjust, and is best left alone. The emulator has no support for two player options by emulating the link between two gameboys, as has been done with emulators on other platforms, which is a shame since two player gameboy tetris is superb.

Since it is tricky to configure the colours and the keys for Gameboy (it involves looking up numbers and typing them in a text file), Rosemary Miskin has written a few little utilities to allow these to be configured in the desktop and saved to the emulator. She also has a small utility called unRAR to decompress ROM images saved in this format, which is written by Matt Aldridge.

Most interestingly, the source code to this emulator has now been released for all to examine.

Gameboy v0.59 (3/10/98)
Speed Rating: ARM 2 ARM 3 ARM 6 ARM 7 StrongARM

Gameboy (44Kb ZIP file)
Andreas Stroiczek's homepage

Rosemary Miskin's utilities
Beercan's gameboy pub - several colour tables for super gameboy

GBoyEm

This uses the same core emulator as Gameboy, but was hacked by Paul Clifford in order to multi-task. The emulator is not strictly multi-tasking, as although it plays games in a window on the desktop, it takes over the whole machine until you press escape which pauses the emulation and allows use of the rest of the desktop. Unlike the single tasking version, Paul's hack works at perfect speed on a StrongARM, without the need for any patch. Paul made the emulator easily configurable; super gameboy colours, key presses, and control of the framerate can all be setup from an options window.

Extra functionality has also been added to the emulator, allowing battery backed RAM to be saved and reloaded. The battery backed RAM is saved in the same format as battery backed RAM saved by Marat Fayzullin's VGB for the PC, for compatibility. Also Gameboy Game Genie functionality has been added and it's codes can be entered to be used to cheat on the emulator. These key features have vastly improved what was already a very good emulator, but unfortunately for low end users, the emulation has slowed down an awful lot, if you have an ARM3 or lower I suggest you stick to Gameboy, otherwise this emulator has a lot more to offer.

Speed Rating: ARM 3 ARM 6 ARM 7 StrongARM

GBoyEm (60Kb ZIP file)

GBoyEm Compatibility list
The Official Galoob GameGenie page
Unofficial Gameboy GameGenie page

Virtual GameBoy (VGB)

David McEwen has ported Marat Fayzullin's infamous VGB to the Acorn. VGB is infamous for several reasons; it was one of the first gameboy emulators ever (even before the very early !Gameboy), it is also known as one of the most compatible gameboy emulators around running nearly all gameboy games, and it is also one of the most prolific having been ported to about every modern platform in existence. Perhaps it's most momentous feature is the Colour Gameboy emulation, and VGB is the first emulator to support this on the Acorn.

Other platforms versions even emulate the gameboy pocket camera and pocket printer, though these are yet to be supported on the Acorn port. Practically everything you can imagine a gameboy emulator wanting is present in the VGB source code, and features are being added to the Acorn port. It emulates every kind of gameboy imaginable, Pocket GB, Super GB, Colour GB and even support for combined Colour & Super GB. At present, cheat codes are supported, both GameShark and Game Genie, it also supports direct MIDI output since at the moment there is no sound. As with most of David's other ports, ZIP file support is present so that ROM images can be run without being decompressed, in the format in which they're normally downloaded. Save RAM is also supported for battery backed games, but at the moment these files aren't compatible with !Gameboy - David's working on it.

Above you can see Zelda before and after, the grey version is the original Zelda ROM running on !Gameboy, the image on the right is the Colour Gameboy ROM ZeldaDX running on VGB. In some cases the original gameboy game has just been slightly adjusted, had the colour details added, and been re-released as a CGB game - a bit cheeky of Nintendo, be a sensible consumer and leave them on the shelves! A note for the uninitiated, Turok 2 is nothing like the N64 version, it's just a dodgy platformer.

If you've got a StrongARM this is definately worth having a look, particularly for ZeldaDX and TetrisDX, though you'll want !Gameboy if you like your games with sound. For others, give it a go, but you'll probably be disasppointed with the speed, but don't worry, I think some CGB games work ok under !Gameboy (if the files aren't too large for it).

VGB v1.4 (6/1/99)
Speed Rating: ARM 3 ARM 6 ARM 7 StrongARM

Marat's VGB page

Gameboy Development Kit

Paul Clifford has ported Pascal Felber's Gameboy development kit to the Acorn. This allows you to develop software for the gameboy in Z80 assembly, or even C via the C compiler included if you prefer. Paul also wrote his own little utility MakeTile, to compliment the Gameboy Development Kit. MakeTile can be used to convert Sprites to Gameboy tiles suitable for use with the GBDK.

The Icebird group have created their own (unreleased) Gameboy development kit, with which they have created their HotGB demo, and it's follow up, Dawn, which are very cool indeed, and available below.

GBDK (18/2/97)
RISC OS GBDK (497Kb ZIP file)

MakeTile v0.04 (6/4/97)
MakeTile (6Kb ZIP file)

RISC OS Gameboy development kit page
Generic Gameboy Development Kit page

Technical Information
CPU - modified 8bit Z80 (similar to Intel 8080) running at 4.194304MHz
Display - 160x144 pixels, 40 sprites with 4 colours/sprite (2.6" screen)
Sound - 2 channels, each with 4 methods of sound generation
RAM - 8Kb
VRAM - 8Kb
ROM - upto 2Mb
reference - kOOPa's updated version of Pan's document (25/9/97)

I believe the Colour Gameboy has a faster Z80 CPU, and can display upto 56 colours at anyone time. More specs anyone?

ROMS:
Hot Gameboy demo (15Kb ZIP file)
Dawn Gameboy demo (31Kb ZIP file)

Gameboy ROMs
Gameboy Gamez
Syko's Gameboy Download site
Loads of ROMs
Dutch Gameboy ROM images (this site's a little tempremental)
Underground Cities Gameboy ROMs
A large list of ROMS
A small but nice list of ROMs
Gameboy emulation heaven (CGB ROMs)

GameGenie codes:
The Official Galoob page
Unofficial but still very large database

Some recommended ROMs:
Legend of Zelda, Mario 1, Mario 2, Tennis, Tetris, Micro Machines, Toshinden, King Of Fighters 95, Worms, Cool Spot, Final Fantasy III, ZeldaDX, TetrisDX.