Dolphin Can Finally Emulate the Game Boy Player, 16 Years After It Was First Asked

The GameCube’s Game Boy Player was a clever little box: a Game Boy Advance with no screen that bolted onto the bottom of the console and piped its picture and sound up to your TV. It let the GameCube play the entire Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance library on the big screen. Emulating it properly has been on Dolphin’s wishlist for more than sixteen years. With release 2606, it works.

The team actually teased Game Boy Player support as an April Fool’s joke first, then turned around and shipped the real thing. Under the hood it does what the hardware did: the emulated Game Boy Player and the GameCube talk to each other, with the handheld feeding video and audio to the host and taking input back from the controller. To use it you load a GBA ROM through the new Game Boy Player ROM option, then boot the official Start-Up disc or the Game Boy Interface, and Dolphin attaches the hardware when it is needed.

It is not the only thing in 2606. The Key of Avalon, the last unplayable Triforce arcade game, now runs, with support for linking up to five instances together for its four-player setup. Graphics Mods also squashed a long-standing high-resolution visual bug that affected a pile of major games.

I single out the Game Boy Player part because it is exactly the kind of preservation that goes unnoticed. The Game Boy Player was a real, sold product, a legitimate way Nintendo itself offered to play handheld games on a console, and now there is an accurate software record of how it behaved. That is the job. Every weird peripheral that gets emulated correctly is one more piece of the era that does not quietly rot. Sixteen years is a long wait, and it was worth it.