They were preceded by some NES emulators (notably iNES, also by Fayzullin, and Nobuaki Andou’s Pasofami, which both cost money), but it was only around the late ‘90s when computers became fast enough to mimic consoles.
That’s important because Game Boy emulators were some of the first console emulators to exist. No$GMB (pronounced “no cash GMB”) arrived in 1997 for DOS. According to the probably reliable Emulation Wiki, Virtual Game Boy - written by Marat Fayzullin - was the first emulator that could play commercial games, which was a revelation. The history of Game Boy emulators is a little murky, but the first began to appear around 1996, seven years after the console’s release. You can also play new games designed for old hardware through software, you can even resurrect old computers that don’t physically exist anymore, like the Jupiter Ace or the Nascom 1.
That said, it’s probably legal to rip games to ROMs, provided you own the game in question and don’t share the file.)Įmulators also allow you to do things you’d never be able to do on original hardware, like fast-forward through cutscenes, save anywhere, slow down in-game time to do maneuvers that you might not otherwise be able to complete, use cheats more easily, and optimize tool-assisted speed runs (TAS). US copyright law protects original works for 75 years, and gaming has only been popular for a few decades. (There is a long-standing online rumor that if you deleted the ROMs you copped after 24 hours, you’d be safe from legal action. You can buy a bong at gas stations across America, but depending on where you live, buying pot is a more seamy experience, involving A Guy.Įmulators allow you to do things you’d never be able to do on original hardware They were filled with ads and possessed a certain Geocities brutalism.
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The sites where you could download ROMs felt appropriately seedy in the same way. It’s similar to how it’s not illegal to own a bong - you can use them to smoke anything, after all - but having weed, in most parts of the US, can be enough to put you in jail.
The legal precedent says that emulators are not illegal in themselves, but downloading game files is because those materials are copyrighted. This is also only partially against the law. Emulators mimic proprietary hardware, which means that if you have a game’s code, you can play the games on just about any computer without making any hardware modifications. “Emulation” is a dirty word in the game development industry because it is piracy-adjacent. It was how you could play Game Boy without a having a Game Boy. But I never felt like I’d missed any of that era because, in the years before, I’d discovered emulation. We found Halo, and we could drive ourselves to the LAN cafe. In my recollection, that happened shortly after kids my age had moved on to 3D consoles, like Sony’s Playstation 2, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s GameCube. It was only after the Game Boy Advance came out that I had a Game Boy Color because my parents were somewhat biased against the latest hardware. The first was that the handheld became an instant international sensation - Nintendo sold out its entire first run in Japan in two weeks, and it sold 40,000 units the day it came to America - and the second was that it changed how games could be played. When Nintendo’s Game Boy arrived in the world in the late ‘80s, two things happened.
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