Game Boy/Game Boy Color emulators

The Gameboy handheld console

The Game Boy is an 8-bit, 4th generation handheld console released by Nintendo in 1989. It had a monochrome display. A revision, called Game Boy Pocket, was soon released, offering a more compact body and a better screen. In Japan, a special edition of Game Boy Pocket, called Game Boy Light, added a frontlight to the screen, a feature that westerners would need to wait for until the Game Boy Advance SP. Many Game Boy emulators offer at least some of the special features of Super Game Boy, a special cartridge for the SNES, which allows playback of games for the original Game Boy with added borders, colorization, single game cartridge multiplayer and a few more features. Its successor, the Game Boy Color (GBC), was released in 1998. Unlike the original, it features a color screen and double the speed of CPU. Otherwise, it is very similar, which allowed a lot of cross-compatibility between the two platforms, so they are often related to as only one.

Emulators

PC

Name	Operating System(s)	Latest Version	GB/GBC	Game Link Support	Libretro Core	Recommended
BGB	Windows	1.5.2	✓	✓	✗	✓
BizHawk	Windows	2.9.1	✓	✗	✗	✗
Gambatte	Multi-platform	r571	✓	✗	✓	✓
GBE+	Windows, Linux, OS X (untested)	SVN 30.5.2016	✓	✗	✗	✗
higan	Windows, Linux, OS X	0.101	✓	✗	✗	✗
KiGB	Windows, Linux, OS X	v2.05	✓	✓	✗	✗
MAME	Multi-platform	0.264	✓	?	✓	✗
mGBA	Multi-platform	0.4.1	✓	?	✓	✗
Visual Boy Advance-M (VBA-M)	Multi-platform	SVN	✓	✓	✗*	✗
GiiBii Advance	Windows, Linux	v0.2.0	✓	✗	✗	✗
TGB Dual	Windows, Linux**	"L" v1.2	✓	✓	✓**	✗

* VBA-M libretro core does exist, but it only emulates GBA.

** As SDL port (libretro version is based on this version)

Consoles

Name	Operating System(s)	Latest Version	GB/GBC	Game Link Support	Libretro Core	Recommended
GameYob DS	Nintendo DS	Git	✓	✓ (NiFi)	✗	✓
GameYob 3DS	Nintendo 3DS	v1.0.8	✓	?	✗	✓
Visual Boy Advance-M (VBA-M)	Wii, Gamecube	r1231	✓	✓	✓ (as VBA-Next)	✓
MasterBoy	PlayStation Portable	2.10	✓	✗	✗	✓
GeMP	PlayStation Portable	3.3 Final	✓	✗	✗	✗
RIN	PlayStation Portable	1.32	✓	✗	✗	✗
Virtual Console	Nintendo 3DS	8.10	✓	✗	✗	✓

Comparison

GameBoy-only emulators

• BGB has excellent Game Boy and Game Boy Color accuracy, as well as near flawless link support. It has a wealth of options for color palettes and even enabling Super Gameboy colors and borders, though it doesn't emulate all of its functions. It also has an advanced debugger.
• Gambatte is probably the most accurate Game Boy Color emulator. It has a good range of options and features, though not quite as much as some other emulators. It's open source, but there is no activity lately.
• Visual Boy Advance-M (VBA-M) has solid GB/C emulation as well as GBA.
• mGBA recently added GB/C support, so it's still in development, but it's already on the level of many others.
• GBE+ is a recently rewritten emulator that can load custom tiles in games, including colorized tiles for GameBoy games.
• GiiBii Advance has full GB Camera emulation, including webcam support. Otherwise it is an unfinished emulator with the basics set up, but it's promising future currently on hiatus.
• TGB Dual is an ancient emulator that supports link cable emulation. It supports Netplay though it requires VPN. libretro port supports local multiplayer using player 2's controls.
• KiGB is an old and obsolete emulator which boasted with accuracy, but was proven to be full of game-specific hacks. It has a wide selection of features, but there are emulators which can do much better now.

Multi-system emulators

• higan is the only emulator that properly emulates all of the Super Game Boy's features, such as utilizing the SPC sound chip, due to having a separate SNES core. Older version of bsnes used the Gambatte core for its Super Game Boy functionality, but later Byuu made his own Game Boy core, which has quite average accuracy. The last version of bsnes to use Gambatte as its SGB core is version 0.73.
• BizHawk uses a modified Gambatte core. It provides speedruning tools.
• MAME has solid Game Boy emulation, with worse Color compatibility. However, it features compatibility with obscure mappers, which other emulators usually ignore, like Wisdom Tree games, or MMM01 multicarts.

Emulator features

Comparison of saturation levels in VBA-M and Gambatte.

Oversaturation

Emulators tend to over-saturate the colors that would have been seen on the GBC's screen. This can often be fixed with emulator options.

Tilt Sensor

Used only in Kirby Tilt'n Tumble and Command Master as part of the cartridge, and actually required to play it. Existing patches to be applied on the game make only the intro playable, with no way to actually control Kirby (like in other similar GBA games) so such patches are not recommended. While VBA and KiGB have a "Motion Sensor" option to map four directional keys to emulate the cartridge tilting, BGB can emulate the tilting features with the use of the mouse.

Game Boy Camera

The Game Boy Camera is an official Nintendo accessory for the handheld Game Boy gaming console and was released on 17 September 1998 in Japan; it ceased manufacturing in late 2002. It allows taking pictures and modifying them with stickers and frames and also has several minigames. There are three different versions: Japanese, western and a special golden Zelda limited edition.

The first emulator to have some capability of emulating the Game Boy Camera was a modified version of a very old emulator Hash, called Hashcam. It can still be found on Darkfader's website, who is the author of the modifications. While there were some efforts to run the Game Boy Camera ROM in BGB unofficially, the author didn't show much interest in it. However it is fully emulated with webcam support in a less known emulator named GiiBii Advance.

Resources

• Gameboy Development Wiki - Information about the Gameboy
• GB Accuracy Tests (TASVideos), Test ROMs (GBDev) - Test results on various emulators using test ROMs
• Emulating Gameboy Camera and Gameboy Printer in BGB (work in progress) - Gameboy Camera ROM running in bgb unofficially by exploiting linking capabilities