Game Boy is a video game console developed by Nintendo. It was first released in Japan in the year 1989. Game Boy became very popular all over the world in the 90’s. When it was first launched, Game Boy was accompanied with six games – Tennis, Baseball, Tetris, Mario and Alley-ways. Around the time Game Boy was discontinued in 2003, Nintendo released a new powerful edition of Game Boy called Game Boy Advance (GBA).
If you want to play Game Boy or Game Boy Advance games on your Windows PC, then you can use an emulator called Visual Boy Advance. The software is available in a portable application format. We can extract it to a folder and launch it from there.
In order to enjoy old Game Boy Advance games on your Windows PC, you are going to need two more things – game ROM files and a game controller. Even though Visual Boy Advance supports the use of keyboard for playing the games, it has a better support for the game controllers. The games also have game controller settings and show which game controller button is to be used for which action.
The game ROM files can be created by the users themselves or they can borrow them from their friends. After this, we can simply launch Visual Boy Advance and then drag-n-drop the game ROM file over its window. Another way to load a game ROM is by specifying it as a command line parameter.
In the Visual Boy Advance settings, we can enable cheat codes, we can change video or audio configuration, we can switch to the full-screen mode etc. We can record the game play as well as capture screenshots. We tried Visual Boy Advance on Windows 10 and Windows 11, we could not find any problems with the emulator. The games run as usual and we could easily play games in the full-screen mode.
You can download Visual Boy Advance emulator from https://github.com/visualboyadvance-m/visualboyadvance-m.