Game Boy Emulator (Blackbag)
The Game Boy emulator by Blackbag is a homebrewn Nintendo 64 emulator which has a few Game Boy games that you can play. It was released on 01 Mar 1998 by Snake & McBain for the Presence of Mind ’98 competition that year. They won 2nd place, well done!
You can download the ROM from the download page for this homebrew game by using the password bustatetris.
The game has two sections – an intro section and a game section.
The intro looks like many of the other demos from the era. In fact, it was made by the same people who made 3DSEXAM, Snake and McBain hence the same Simpsons cube featured in both ROMs.
The second part of the ROM is a little bit more interesting. This is where the actual emulation (and text scroll) takes place.
Yo!
2 Gameboys for ya!
Go ahead, play them, use pad 1 or 2, just hit start 🙂
Credits for this little Pom98 release go to:-
Coding by Snake & McBain, Music by Dr. Hibbert, Thanx to Lac for the use of his cool Music player LacMod!
Greets flying out to:-
Mushroom & KingPin, Nagra, LACJovis, Locke, KComm, Marat, Pan, Frac, Foo Chen Hon, Jihad/Hitmen, DataWiz, Stumble, Titanik, Silo, Ste, Bpoint, Actraiser, Hartec, ATX, Widget, Stan, NOP, Decypher, NIL, segmond, EgoUK, Oman, RBubba, Flanders, Bootsy, REDBOX, KidStardust, Uxo, Immortal, Sispeo, Trilili & DANZIG!
Fuckings going out to LFC, you know why you little cunters… Ok yeah, Better just mention, that we (Snake & McBain) have now joined BLACKBAG! So look out for the final release of the Emu with linkup and sound under the blackbag label soon…
l8rs…
The game included by default is this weird Game Boy-style space scene. You can control what looks like planet earth in front of a starry night while this box in the lower-right corner fades in and out of existence. There’s not much to say about it except that it’s hard to change the planet’s momentum so it often just slides off the screen never to be seen again.
This game comes with a surprise though. If you manage to hack the ROM’s binary the right way, it gets converted into “Illegal mode” which unlocks two retail Game Boy games instead of the planet demo. These games are Tetris and Bust-a-Move 2. You can select them during the spinning cube phase of the demo.
Though I must admit that I’m more familiar with Tetris than Bust-a-Move 2, the games play as you’d expect. I didn’t encounter any glitches or anything like that, so this is actually a pretty good way to experience these game if you can’t otherwise.
The emulator doesn’t have any of the games’ sound effects though, instead opting for a continuous music loop by Dr Hibbert which stretches through the entire ROM. They do mention in the marquee that this is only an initial release and that the final version would have working sound, but I haven’t found any mention of that anywhere.
Overall, this is a very interesting project. It would be interesting if they mentioned how they got the emulator up and running, especially considering that this was years before PokĂ©mon Stadium came out. (That’s the only N64 game I know that could play GB games). Also we’re limited to just this small selection of games with no sound.
I do love the presentation though, the spinning Game Boy cube looks great and even though there’s no sound, the music is very enjoyable to listen too.
If the Game Boy emulator came out in the era of Git and public code repositories we could have a look and be able to re-implement it to play homebrew Gb games on the Nintendo 64 – Kind of like a homebrew-ception.
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