🎮 Early History of Gameboy Emulation 🎮

Hello Dreamers!
I'm back and with another installment of Early Emulation History!
This time I heard your cries for Gameboy Emulation and I spent a good portion of time researching what I could. The Nintendo Gameboy is a neat piece of hardware and not much is known unfortunately about pre-1995 emulation attempts. Though successful emulation seems to start around late 1994-1995 when computer hardware steadily increased to the point of being fast enough for emulation. A situation that was very similar to NES emulation I might say. gamboy
A couple of these names like Marat Fayzullin and Paul Robson might sound familiar because of the previous video "Early History of NES Emulation". I will say that GodBoy caught me off guard for the Gameboy Emulation segment, I'm not altogether familiar with the Atari Falcon or Atari ST scene. Though, I've definitely learned quite a bit when going through this exhaustive list of Gameboy Emulators. One thing was super dissappointing though, that was the amount of forks that contained source code for GB97' and other emulators that frankly didn't do anything. And where UltraHLE was the crowd favorite, there wasn't really one for the Gameboy until much later and even now, the community is much more decentralized, which I like, simply because there's such a slew of emulators to choose from, each with their own flavors and approaches to the problem of accuracy and platform.
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Twitter Conversation With Jens Restemeier:
/ 1139620415125565441
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Twitter: / too_late_nate
Twitch: / too_late_nate
KZbin:
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Gameboy Emulator Timestamps:
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Editing Notes -- 1:47
ToyBoy -- 2:23
GBSim -- 3:09
VirtualGameBoy -- 4:32
GameboyEmulator (Acorn) -- 5:24
GB97' -- 6:00
Wzonkalad - 6:32
AmiGameboy -- 7:30
GodBoy -- 7:52
No$GMB -- 8:54
Conclusion -- 10:23
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I've also decided to include many of the download links to these wonderful pieces of software for you to try out yourself. I've downloaded many of these and haven't hit any viruses yet, but as always, be careful.
ToyBoy - Argonaut Games
aminet.net/misc...
GBSim - Jens Restemeier
web.archive.or...
VirtualGameBoy - Marat Fayzullin
fms.komkon.org...
Gameboy Emulator (Acorn/RISC-based PC's) - Purple Monchichi ('Andreas Dehmel'?) UI was designed by Paul Clifford
www.riscos.org/...
www.riscos.org/...
GB97' - Paul Robson
www.zophar.net...
Wzonkalad - Ville Helin
Dead Link -- Please if someone finds another link let me know!!!
AmiGameBoy - Juan Antonio Gómez
www.zophar.net...
Godboy - Resevoir Gods
rg.atari.org/go...
No$GMB - Martin Korth
www.zophar.net...
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Gameboy Commercial
• Nintendo Game Boy TETR...
GodBoy Footage Courtesy of petsasjim1
World of Longplays
Mariofan98
& Others, Let me know if I missed you! Terribly sorry if I did!
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Music:
Vector U -- Tal Tal Heights Remix (Probably one of my favorite remixes of all time now)
• Zelda - Link's Awakeni...
Link's Awakening -- "Title Theme"
• Link's Awakening - Tit...
Artists: Level 99 (Stevo Bortz) & prophetik (Bradley Burr)
Album: threshold.ocrem...
James' Retro Remix -- "Stage 1 (Kid Dracula) V2"
• James's Retro Remix: S...
Deep Black Skys -- "Super Mario Land Millenium"
• SMG4 outro/channel int...
MusicMike512 -- "Pallet Town"
• POKÉMON Red/Blue/Yello...

[@ab-mk6js]

I was a translator and beta-tester for VisualBoy Advance. I was very active in the emulation scene from 1996 to 1999. This video brings back a lot of memories. Thank you for the work in the video. It is little known that the emulation scene made a great contribution to the world. Emulators were the first software to standardize multilingual User Interface. Before 1998, localizing software had a lot of bottlenecks and problems, especially going through mounds of legal work and bureaucracy because sharing source code meant possibility of idea and technology theft . Overlapping simple alphabet UTF-8 codes into complicated Asian language UTF-16 codes was a big matter also; in spite of Americans and Europeans not needing to go over this hurdle, (I am South Korean). I didn't have a lot of knowledge about code itself, so I wanted to find ways for translators to focus on translating, not needing to learn code from scratch. I learned that the Corn N64 emulator had two user interfaces, English and Mandarin because the maker ContraSF was from Hong Kong. I delved into how this was accomplished, made suggestions to how this can be improved and implemented, and Forgotten of VisualBoy Advance and Quinntesson's AGES Sega 32X emulator made results. AGES read a txt file as document file, spread the words onto the user interface to make wherever localization possible, without altering code of the software. The Gens emulator from Stéphane (Stef) improved over this by having multiple languages in one ini file, which was copied to many freeware software, then to commercial software. The emulation scene was the perfect environment for such innovations to flourish; emulation enthusiasts were few and scattered throughout the world. Updates were inch by inch, move by move. People had to team up and share ideas.

[@TooLateNate]

That's absolutely incredible, thank you for sharing that information with us!

[@romantripp2709]

Always surprised to see you have less than 1,000 subscribers. It feels almost criminal, because the quality of your content feels like it is coming from a channel with 4-5 digit subscribers. I'm quite confident you'll reach that before too long, so keep up the great work man!

[@TooLateNate]

Thanks! It's comments like these that really help me chug my content out! You guys do a lot for the channel and I hope I can keep pushing out decent quality videos. 😀

[@Imgema]

These early emulator history videos of yours are too good. I'm actually trying to build a 1997 Pentium system and fill it with period correct software such as emulators released back then and your videos have been very helpful.

[@TooLateNate]

Hey all! Hope you have a fantastic weekend! What emulator did you first use for your favorite Nintendo handheld?

[@DoomKid]

I love your emulator history videos, have another well earned subscriber.

[@TooLateNate]

Thank you! I hope to keep making content people enjoy.

[@MonCompteTubulaire]

thank you for you video, was very interesting and pleasant to watch :)

[@TooLateNate]

Thank you for the comment, I quite enjoy them myself. :)

[@MegaManNeo]

Interesting to see some of those still in development emulators being worked on so early on. I'm still scratching my head however since the first time I actually ever got into contact with any emulator was when a friend of mine back then come with a floppy diskette that had one of the 1st generation Pokémon games on it, along with some emulator that still required at least a Pentium III to run at full speed and too only worked in fullscreen mode. I believe it was called SMYGB or something? Could be wrong but I remember my computer back then couldn't do it.

[@jayminer]

Very interesting video, and I'm really glad you mentioned the Gameboy Emulators on the Amiga. I used to play lots of gameboy games on my Amiga 1200 with a 68030 @ 50MHz back in the day using AmiGameboy, and it ran most games very well! I remember it being way faster than Wzonka Lad.

[@TooLateNate]

Really? That's so cool! I wasn't really an expert on Amiga emulators (still not) but it's such an interesting platform with a lot of dev history. Maybe I can ask you if you remember any other emulators when I move onto the next video.

[@jayminer]

@@TooLateNate Sure thing! I would love to help out with things like that, and I still have my Amigas so I could perhaps even help with some video. Some of the great emulators I can think about for AmigaOS at the top of my head are AmiMasterGear (SMS/GG) and AmiMSX2 (MSX/MSX2...) done by the same guy who did AmiGameboy, and they were excellent. The other one that really shines is ShapeShifter which is a Mac emulator, which basically ran at native speeds since both platform shared the same CPU, so it was more of a wrapper than an actual emulator. I remember people saying that a 060 equipped Amiga back in the 90:s was the fastest 68k Mac out there.

[@TooLateNate]

@@jayminer Of course! If you don't mind some audio, maybe we can come up with a small video in the future concerning Amiga's.

[@jayminer]

@@TooLateNate That would be alot of fun and I would love to help out in any way I can.

[@PaulRedeemed]

Thank you for this man. This retro history is amazing and needs preserved and retold to the newer folks.

[@TooLateNate]

Thanks so much! It's what I'm trying to do!

[@Dedog0]

very interesting, well researched, amazing presentation. enjoyed this thoroughly. only problem is the audio quality, but it's not like it's impossible to understand! hope you get more views than this!

[@goldhalowings]

You forgot to add the licenses names (beyond of the companies names or license types) By adding the actual name of the license you can tell immediately if the software is a non-free software or free-libre software Did you know that some emulators are still developed today due to free-libre license such as GPL? The license plays an important role to software (in general) and especially to emulators which keeps nostalgia alive and the code for future generations.

[@Zinkolo]

Hell yeah! I should've subbed awhile ago! Also thank God for Dolby atmos on my note 9

[@TooLateNate]

Thanks for subbing!

[@mrsmith1938]

This channel is underrated

[@TooLateNate]

My editing and content has a long way to go, but I sincerely appreciate the comment!

[@RevZman]

Great work. Keep it up

[@TooLateNate]

Thank you! And merry Christmas

[@firstnamelastname6118]

This series is amazing!

[@TooLateNate]

Thanks, I appreciate it!

[@Jamie-yp7qz]

I wonder if you could do early history of NEO·GEO emulation. That would be a good topic.

[@Horbach322]

Early gameboy emulation in 2 words: NO$GMB POKÉMON.

[@dandyfeller]

I've been waiting for this!

[@johnjohny1312]

Great video! Does anyone know where the poll is?

[@TooLateNate]

John Johny upper right corner towards the end of the video.

[@garouwolf8034]

Anyone have the resgistration for the no$gmb??

[@madoka006]

Hey man! I've been watching these vids for a while! I was wondering if you wanted to like collab some day, on like a future project!

[@anhbaatarbaasanjargal3780]

I never had console so I searched on the internet how to play Pokemon so I played gba

[@DeadMouseis]

good vid..there was also one for dos with no sound BUT Could Turn Gb roms into Self running .exe

[@TooLateNate]

That's an interesting one

[@tweakPTCG]

history of DS emulation

[@andrewpaulakis7202]

Hey man, awesome video! If you want help recording some old emulators in action footage, hit me up!

[@TooLateNate]

I would love that! When I get the poll results we'll talk!

[@Lollero200q]

Perspillu means gameboy in finnish

[@TooLateNate]

Thanks! 😀

[@anonamatron]

I used something on PC well before no$. It may have been Marat's emu but I'm pretty sure it was freeware. It had a gameboy bezel graphic. GBemu or something simple like that. Late 90s.