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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

I recently downloaded "My OldBoy Free" a gameboy color emulator for Android phones, and am really impressed with it. With only a D-pad and two buttons, its still easy enough to control with a touch screen, and the 2x speed feature lets you avoid the often-slow pace of these classic games when you wish to. Supposedly you can also use a wireless 'link cable', which sounds cool but I haven't tried it yet - might only be the paid version.

Pokemon Blue was a favorite game in grade school, and playing it again is a lot of fun.

Nintendo could double their revenue if they released an official emulator in the mobile app store. I hardly ever spend money for mobile games, but would happily drop $5 per title. The quality and depth of these old titles puts almost every modern mobile game to shame.

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I think it's a real shame that Nintendo is running the Virtual Console almost the same way Disney runs their vault. They're clearly quite capable of writing viable emulation software and tweaking it (and the original games) to work around issues with the tech. That market is just huge, but it's fragmented between three devices, all with different libraries for arbitrary reasons, and I don't understand it.

I would pay so much money for access to Nintendo's retro library. I think such a system would work particularly well as a subscription, but I wouldn't mind paying for games individually if they were all or mostly available. There's no real technical limitation, and since Nintendo is the publisher / licenser, I can't imagine there's a huge amount of legal limitations either. It seems like they're just dragging their feet on what could essentially be free money from a passionate fanbase.

I would buy the emulator from Nintendo and a controller that would fit android phones too. IMO, the touchscreen joypad is iffy.

I've been playing with an USB NES Controller; they cost less than $5 nowadays and using a OTG cable and the My Boy emulator, it was literally plug-n-play.

Mind sharing a link to the one you are using? :)

I literally went on eBay, searched for "usb nes controller" and bought the cheapest one :)

Ok thanks! :)

I highly recommend RetroUSB: https://retrousb.com/

They make adapters for the original console controllers. I have one of their USB-to-SNES adapters, and it works perfectly.

I have the 8bitdo from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Bluetooth-Controller-Classic...

Highly recommend it. Very high quality controller, feels just like the original.

For bluetooth, 8bitdo are widely accepted as the best quality. For USB, iBuffalo.

Beware of the cheap pads as they often have mushy buttons and dpads and generally aren't nice to play on.

Nintendo should do what Rockstar did with GTA on mobile platforms. I would not hesitate to pay $5 per game if they did.

The HyperKin Smart Boy basically turns smart phones into GameBoys: http://hyperkinlab.com/smartboy-development-kit/

At least that's their goal, it's not out yet.

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