Homebrew: Gameboy Emulator in the works, play some Pokemon Red from the cloud

So you love playing all of those old-school Nintendo Gameboy games, but you finally graduated to a smartphone and you miss them? Well if you were on Android or iOS, you'd probably be using an emulator to get your fix right now but sadly Windows Phone has been left out in the cold. Until now that is!

Developer Samuel Blanchard has been working on a new ">Gameboy emulator dubbed WJ7 (aka Wario's Jewels 7) and boy does it look awesome. It's currently at v0.4.5 but Blanchard promises the public release date "should be very soon". So you may be wondering what the heck took so long for a real emulator to come out for Windows Phone, and the main reason is that Microsoft's APIs are just so limited that it was hard as hell for homebrew developers to figure out how to sideload their own content for their apps. In the case of an emulator, you need to load ROMs of each game into the emulator in order to actually play it but apps in Windows Phone are siloed and therefore unable to read ROMs from anywhere else you may be storing them on the device.

Luckily it looks as if Blanchard has figured out a way around this little setback through the use of GameLists which generates an XML file after you add whatever games you want to play to it. From there you input the XML file link into WJ7 and BAM!, you can play Gameboy games! If that's too complicated for you, think of it like this: the actual game file is in the cloud and you use your phone to 'stream' the game. Now, the only limitation we can see from this method is that it may require an internet connection to play (or at least to load up the game at first) and therefore it could suffer from lag.

We'll try to find out more from Blanchard and if you'd like to follow news about WJ7 direct from the source, you can follow the Twitter account here and the Facebook page here. Also, of course, you can read the original thread at XDA-Developers forums right here as well. If you want to see just how GameLists work and how to prepare your own, jump past the break for a quick YouTube video tutorial.

Update: We have been informed that BadCam3 is not in fact the head developer but rather Samuel Blanchard is. Post has been updated to reflect that.

Via: WPSauce
Source: XDA-Developers Forum