Ewan's Musings

Retro Gaming On The Move

Away for a short break this weekend, and the long nights in a freezing cold caravan is the perfect time to test out the latest retro emulator; a Sega Game Gear emulator for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance (GBA). With a library of around 300 games designed for mobile gameplaying, there's a lot of well designed games to choose from (there's some complete rubbish as well, but that's the same for any game system).

I think it would be fair to say that many of the choices Sega made to differentiate the Game Gear to the original Gameboy hampered the system to such an extent that only the dedicated hands stuck with it. The colour screen is an obvious point. While it clearly made the point that it wasn't a Gameboy, it did mean that the machine needed an almighty six AA batteries that would only last four hours if you were lucky.

Nowadays, the GBA has solved a lot of these problems, but Sega is out of the handheld market (and the console market as well, pretty much). But thanks to oneof the most obvious applications I've yet to see, the Game Gear isn't dead - you can now load a Game gear Emulator onto your Gameboy Advance.

All the PC based tools, screenshots, FAQ's and other important stuff can be found at the Dr SMS site. And because of the architeture of the Game Gear, it also doubles up as a Sega Master System (the 'other' 8-bit console) emulator.

The key is getting this executable file onto the GBA - which is where my F2A Linker (which I got from the guys at GBAX). The F2A is a 'blank' cartridge and a short cable plugs into the PC to allow me to transfer the exe file over to the machine. 20 to 30 Game Gear games in my pocket? Rather!!!

But it all comes back to modern console games aren't a patch on the older ones - where gameplay was more important that graphical power.