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AndroidBoy Brings Gameboy, Honest-To-Goodness Gaming to G1

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It’s not an NES/SNES emulator. It’s not a PlayStation emulator. But it’s the next best thing: Gameboy color. And it’s coming (or has already come) to an Android device near you. AndroidBoy is a free emulator and allows its lucky owner to get their game on old school style. Although the interface and overall feel of the app could use a little spit ‘n shine, the fact remains: GameBoy + Android = Sweet Love.

And while the G1 isn’t necessarily going to be better or worse than the iPhone or similar devices for mobile gaming, one thing that the G1 does have as an advantage is physical keys. One of the most frustrating drawbacks to gaming when I had my iPhone was the lack of keys to smash and mash during a session of Mario. Anyone who’s ever used the PS, GB, NES/SNES emulators on the iPhone can vouch for me in saying that it’s pretty unrealistic to be truly immersed in the game when you’re tapping virtual buttons and covering half the screen with your fat thumbs.

Hopefully in the future (and, as always with Android, the future is basically next week), we’ll be able to use those nice, tangible keys to do our AndroidBoy-ing. Until then – game on!

[via MobileCrunch]

Spencer Gardner
Spencer sheds blood, sweat, and sometimes tears over each and every story that is written. All in the name of Sci..er..Android! He also runs many miles many days of the year and hugely enjoys the tech world in general.

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9 Comments

  1. you know if came a nds emulator??

    p.s. sorry for my english

  2. Do you mean an NES emulator? At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be one.
    Your English is probably better than mine :)

  3. no there is no nintendo ds emulator yet but i know so many people are working on it for the iphone and g1 just wait out and there will eventually be one. its harder to configure two screens to one. sorry spencer gardener but it clearly says NDS not snes or nes theres a d =P

  4. NDS is Nintendo DS.

    I don’t think even computers have a decent one yet.

  5. twilightwolf90 is correct – there is not even a decent NDS emulator for a PC. Chances of developing a usable NDS emulator for Android using Java are zero.

    @ spencer – G1 will never compete with the iPhone for mobile gaming. iPhone has 40Mb of RAM available for games and can load 24Mb of textures to the GPU. G1 caps applications at 16Mb of RAM and approximately 8Mb of textures on the GPU. This G1 RAM limit is largely a result of the decision to allow apps to run in the background – it means you have to share the RAM among more processes whereas a game on the iPhone gets lots more RAM because it is the only process. Basically the single process model of the iPhone is much better for games.

    Add to that the pathetic amount of app storage on a G1 means games developers will scrimp on graphic and audio assets meaning games on iPhone will look and sound much nicer than those on the G1.

    Finally the iPhone has a dedicated floating point unit for doing floating point maths – this is a huge boost to 3D games which are very math intensive.

  6. i been trying to learn how the fuck do i add the rom to to the sd card i know how to mount it and everything i alredy download donkey kong gbc but where dose it go in the sd card

  7. screw iphone! If your smart enough to root your phone and use app2sd then the android becomes powerful! We can run any game just like the iphone its just a matter of developers creating emulators… stfu

    also… if your a fan boy… remember this.. maybe write it down…

    no pc…. =no mac = no iphone.
    Your mac is running all pc hardware

  8. rooting g1 is not hard at all
    & mario, just u task killer to kick apple’s ass

    apple is way over priced, and its not that good anyways

  9. screw iphone! If your smart enough to root your phone and use app2sd then the android becomes powerful! We can run any game just like the iphone its just a matter of developers creating emulators… stfu

    Untrue. Do you think Gameloft or other developers will make 50mb or 100mb games if only the 10% of users who are 1337 enough to root their devices can buy and install more than a few of them at once? :/

    PS: I’m a HUGE Android fanboy and proud Motorola Droid owner, but I’m willing to admit when the iPhone is better than android at *certain things*

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