Click And See

General Questions

  1. Are there any GameBoy emulators for the personal computers?
    YES, there are several GameBoy emulators available. The most well-known one is the Virtual GameBoy, written by me, Marat Fayzullin. It can be obtained from

    [#] http://www.komkon.org/fms/VGB/

    The Virtual GameBoy is portable. Its distribution includes C source code which can be compiled on any computer (given that there are system-dependent drivers for this computer) and a set of sample drivers for Unix/XWindows. There are also versions of VGB compiled for MSWindows, Macintosh, and MSDOS. For more information, refer to documentation at above-mentioned WWW.

    Another GameBoy emulator, called GBSim, is written by Jens Restemeier. It includes a very nice debugger, and is probably faster than VGB, but it only runs on MSDOS-running PCs, and has quite a few incompatibilities with the real thing.

    Yvan Rivard is working on yet another emulator, PCBoy. It is also an MSDOS-only project, and it still can't run most of the games. PCBoy is written in 80x86 assembly language.

    There is also a GameBoy-look-alike emulator for the Commodore Amiga called ToyBoy. This emulator can be obtained via FTP from WUARCHIVE or any other AmiNet site.

    [#] Gameboy68000.lha from WUARCHIVE

    Unfortunately, this package is incomplete and HAS NOTHING TO DO with the real GameBoy. It was stolen from a UK-based company called Argonaut which does hardware and software development for Nintendo. According to Argonaut's managing director Jez San, ToyBoy was an in-house emulator written to see how difficult it would be to program GameBoy games. Since its authors knew nothing about internals of the real GameBoy when they were writing the emulator, ToyBoy is completely incompatible with GameBoy.

  2. Is it possible to build a backlight into GameBoy?
    A Japanese company sells a kit to add the EL-backlight to GameBoy. The kit costs 5000yen. This information provided by Cinnichiro Ichise.

  3. Are there any game copiers for GameBoy?
    There is a SmartCard copier allowing to download data from GameBoy cards to PC via parallel port and store up to 4 games in a 4MBit flash-RAM cartridge. There are said to be GameBoy adaptors for MultiGameDoctorII, MultiGameHunter, SuperWildCard, and SuperComPro. Also, there is a device allowing to play games stored on credit card-like magnetic cards which is produced in Japan and isn't sold in U.S.

  4. MultiGame cartridges for GameBoy:
    Yes, these cartridges are at least half-illegal because their producers violate copyright law.
    Yes, these things exist for GameBoy. At present time, there are four kinds of them: 48in1, 64in1, 86in1 and 105in1 (although there were rumors about 200in1 and even 1500in1 cartridges. The latter is said to be 15-20 cm long).
    They all seem to contain the same basic set of games most of which are either old Nintendo products (like Alleyway or Tennis) or low-quality games from other companies with a couple of good games added. Number of games in such a cartridge is actually SMALLER than the number written on the box because some games are present in two or three copies (with a number of lives and other things changed). For example, 64in1 cartridge contains only about 48 DISTINCT games. At least 27 of them can be classified as "logic" or "strategy" games. There were many requests to list games multigame cartridges contain. So, here is a list of games how it appears in a menu of a 105in1 cartridge. Other multigame cartridges contain subset of games listed below. Notice the large number of japanese titles and repetitions. There are also some titles which actually correspond to the same game.

  5. Using GameGenie with multigame cartridges:
    No, GameGenie DOES NOT WORK with multigame cartridges.

  6. GameBoy clones:
    There seem to be several GameBoy clones produced in Asia. Two of them are called Sunny and WonderBoy. The only difference is the name printed on the case. This information was supplied by Simon Lai.
    The Russian GameBoy clone is called Bitman2000, if it is a clone and not a real GameBoy distributed in Russia under that name.

  7. Japanese cartridges:
    These are cartridges which are not available in U.S., although you can find them if you are lucky. Following descriptions of japanese cartridges were prepared by Mark Kaufman.
    Parodius [TYPE:Shooter PRODUCER:Konami]
    This is the legendary Japanese shooter to which all others are compared. It is awesome, huge, creative, challenging and fun, fun, fun.
    Twinbee [TYPE:Shooter PRODUCER:Konami]
    Another Japanese cart that should be sold over here. It's better than 90% of all GB games.

  8. Where to get parts to repair GameBoy?
    Mark Kaufman found address of the company selling replacement parts for GameBoy [as well as Sega AC adapters and Atari parts]. Here is their phone number and a list of GameBoy parts they carry:

    MCM Electronics
    TOLL-FREE: 1-800-543-4330
    FAX: 1-513-434-6959
    VOICE: 1-513-434-0031
    M-F: 7AM-8PM EST Sat: 9AM-6PM EST

  9. Some time ago, there was a preview of a 3D vectored game for GB called "Lunar Chase" in Nintendo Power magazine. What happened with this game?
    According to Nintendo, the game was cancelled :(. This information was obtained from Nintendo hotline [1-800-255-3700 in USA].
© Copyright by Marat Fayzullin