How the Game Boy has found a new life through emulation

When the Nintendo Game Boy came into the world in the late '80s, two events occurred. The first was that the handheld was immediately sensational – the Nintendo sold its entire first sale in Japan in two weeks and 40,000 units the day it arrived in America – and the second was to change the way the games can be played. He brought games to the outside.

I have never had a Game Boy. It was only after the release of the Game Boy Advance that I had a Game Boy Color because my parents were a little biased by the last material. If I remember correctly, it happened shortly after children of my age switched to 3D consoles, such as Sony's Playstation 2, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube. The moment, at least for me, had passed. We have found Haloand we could drive to the LAN café. But I never felt that I was missing anything from that time because I had discovered emulation in previous years. That was how you could play Game Boy without having a Game Boy.

"Emulation" is a big word in the game development industry because it is an area contiguous to hacking. Emulators mimic proprietary hardware, which means that if you have the code of a game, you can play games on just about any computer without making any hardware changes. This too is only partially against the law. The legal precedent says that emulators are not illegal in themselves, but the download of game files is due to the fact that this material is protected by copyright. It's kind of like it's not illegal to have a bang – you can use them to smoke anything, after all – but having grass, in most of the United States, can to be enough to put you in jail. The sites on which you could download ROMs seemed just as sordid. They were full of classifieds and had a certain brutality on the part of the Geocities. You can buy a bong at gas stations throughout America, but depending on where you live, buying a pot is a riskier experience, involving A Guy.

(There has long been an online rumor that if you remove ROMs that you store after 24 hours, you would be immune from legal action, but that is absolutely not true. The United States Copyright Act protects original works for 75 years and the games have been popular for only a few decades. Probably to archive games on ROMs, provided that you own the game in question and do not share the file.)

The emulators also allow you to do things you could never do on original equipment, such as fast forward cinematics, record anywhere, slow down the game time to perform maneuvers that you might not be able to do otherwise, use hints. more easily and optimize Tool-Assisted Strokes (TAS). You can also play new games designed for old equipment; through software, you can even resurrect old computers that no longer physically exist, such as Jupiter Ace or Nascom 1.

The story of the Game Boy emulators is a bit murky, but the first one began to appear around 1996, seven years after the release of the console. Virtual Game Boy, written by Marat Fayzullin, was probably the first emulator to play commercial games, which was a revelation. No $ GMB (pronounced "no GMB money") arrived in 1997 for DOS. This is important because Game Boy emulators were among the first console emulators to exist. They were preceded by some NES emulators (notably iNES, also by Fayzullin, and Pasofami of Nobuaki Andoucost money), but it was only in the late 1990s that computers became fast enough to emulate consoles.

Picture of Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

"Well, I've also grown up with emulators," said Vicki Pfau, the developer behind m-GBA, who is widely regarded as the best Game Boy emulator on the internet. "I did not have a Game Boy before the release of the Game Boy Color.I think it was around 1998." Pfau's parents had offered him to buy him a game console when she was very young, but she refused. "I ended up saying," No, I want the Sega Nomad instead because it's in color, and I can play Sonic on it, "she says. "I always have this Nomad. It still works. Pfau is 29, about my age of 27 and, like me, she was imitated at a critical time, while she was young enough to want to play games that she could not play otherwise, but old enough. know how to solve it herself.

"I remember playing Red Pokémon in No $ GMB [now No$GBA], which was a kind of DOS in full screen. It was not really planned for 1998, "she said, which in my opinion was more technically advanced than it perhaps was. That and NESticle – an ambitious NES emulator released in 1997 that redefined the way the public played retro games and also named after a specific body part – were Pfau's introductions to emulation. She had only three games for the system, and for her, it meant that emulation presented her with classics like Super Mario Bros. 3she did not have.

"I remember sites that said you had to delete them within 24 hours," she says. "But you know, as far as I know, no child has ever done it." Later, Pfau used vSNES, a popular emulator of Super Nintendo, to play Final Fantasy VI and Super Metroid. Then, when the Game Boy Advance is out, she immediately has one. At about the same time, Pfau also downloaded Visual Boy Advance in "[give] some games a round, ".ike Breath of Fire II, a port of "Super Nintendo RPG a bit badly translated" which had ended on the Game Boy Advance. Pfau liked it so much that she finally bought a copy. "It was my introduction to the RPG genre, a genre I really liked. But, you know, if it had not been used to play it in an emulator, I would never have heard of it.

Pfau wrote his first Game Boy emulator in 2012. "I decided, jokingly, to see if I could write a Game Boy Advance emulator in JavaScript" – GBA.JS – "and it worked pretty well," he said. she. "It was slow and a complete disaster in terms of implementation. But I worked on it for about a year and a half before saying, "It's not worth my time at all." Although the project was not successful, it was not a failure either. Pfau decided to write a C emulator and see if it could do it fast enough to run on a first generation Raspberry Pi. "And late 2013, early 2014, I really immersed myself in the project, I tried to make it as fast and accurate as possible. He was finally baptized m-GBA at the end of 2014. "

This first version did not make much noise. The games were good enough, but according to Pfau it was "a pretty buggy". Finally, m-GBA gained notoriety because it was simply more accurate than any other option on the market. To reproduce the emulators' TAS on real hardware, you need a very accurate software. The m-GBA became faster and more accurate than VBA, which was enough for people to take note of it.

When I was growing up, I felt the same as Pfau. I never really played Pokémon game before finding a ROM from Pokémon Sapphire and Visual Boy Advance. I remember loving how it played and feeling as if I had stumbled on something that I did not know until then, who knew me. There were other games that I liked too, like Advanced Wars and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. It was before real life began to intrude and before I had to think about anything other than homework. It was like accessing a hidden world. Eventually, I deleted the ROMs, the computer on which I was dead and moved on to something else. At that time, I already had some next generation consoles, and playing online with my friends was more exciting than reviewing games that were getting older every second.

Picture of Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Pfau considers herself a conservative, although her position on piracy is more nuanced. She will not write and carry emulators for the current generation consoles, but she feels better about hard-to-find or unprinted piracy games because, she says, if you buy a copy on eBay, the only person who benefits financially is the person to whom you buy. "I do not really like hacking [because] I know how much this can impact people, "says Pfau. "I will not reduce the sales of the Nintendo Virtual Console. I just do not want to do that. You can do it legally. And I do not want to impose on Nintendo that way either. "

Game emulation is a form of preservation. Exhausted copies of games, for one reason or another, circulate on ROM sites. You can find things online that you can not buy elsewhere. If you think that art and culture deserve to be safeguarded, so that future generations can enjoy it, the preservation of games is of paramount importance. The problem of digital preservation is imminent: companies do not always save the source code or the original resources in the games, and more broadly, they are the formats. (What happens to games that, for example, only lived on floppy disks?) There are organizations like The Videogame History Foundation, headed by the archivist Frank Cifaldi, that are trying to list and back up as much as possible the first few days of the game. At the 2016 Game Developers Conference, Cifaldi spoke about emulation, claiming that emulation was the best way to republish old games in order to avoid the fate of early films. "More than half of films made before 1950 are faded away," he said.

The other day, I downloaded m-GBA. When I searched for ROMs online, I had the impression that the landscape had changed. None of the websites was familiar; the sites were more slippery and seemed less unpleasant. I have downloaded some games, started the program and everything went well. The old magic was there – sort of. But now I buy my own games and consoles, and the emulation was not what it was for me anymore. I do not need it as I thought then. But it's because it shaped me.