About The Nintendo Game Boy Handheld

The Game Boy is an 8 bit handheld system that debuted in the 4th generation of game consoles that was created by Nintendo. This was during the console generation of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It was first released in 1989 and was the second handheld Nintendo released, with the first being the Nintendo Game & Watch.

The system contained a dot matrix screen with an adjustable contrast dial, a D-pad, two game buttons (A and B), and a start and select button. It also had one speaker that had an adjustable dial, allowing players to increase and decrease the volume.

The handheld played games off of cartridges and has 1046 games that were released during its lifespan. At the launch of the system, it was sold both as a standalone unit, but also had a bundle that contained Super Mario Land and also Tetris.

The GBoy had many unique accessories that were released for it, some being the Game Boy camera and the Game Boy printer. Upon release, the handheld received mostly mixed reviews and was stated as being not up to par with other handhelds at the time such as the Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and NEC TurboExpress.

The system lacked a backlit screen, its graphics were very rudimentary, and it was quite bulky in design, however due to its library of games it became the best selling handheld gaming system by far. It outsold all of its competition, selling over a million units in its first couple of weeks being on store shelves.

During its lifetime, its sales surpassed over 118 million (including the Game Boy Color) units sold. This makes it the fourth best selling video game system of all time.

Its production ceased in 2003 years after the Game Boy Advance was released in 2001 showing just how popular the handheld was.

How To Emulate The Game Boy

By far, the best Game Boy emulator you can get is the mGBA emulator. Don’t let the name fool you, while it does have GBA in the title, it can play Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games.

mGBA is available for Windows PC, macOS, and Linux. It runs games exceptionally well and is very easy to setup and use.

RetroArch is an emulator frontend that allows players to run games from a variety of different gaming systems including the GameBoy. Players can also emulate their favorite Gboy games using the RetroArch emulator thanks to the RetroArch mGBA core.