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Grandparent: Playing, oddly enough, my Game Boy Color games that I haven't finished, that I can't play on the DS

Parent: You know, you can buy a flash linker that comes with emulators... to play GB games on the DS.

The Game Boy emulator you speak of is Goomba, and it's compatible only with monochrome (gray cart) and dual-mode (black cart) games. Specifically, it is not compatible with GBC exclusive (clear cart) games.

Most people don't realize this, but the GBA had backwards compatibility with GB, SGB, and GBC games by including a Gameboy Color on a chip. The older gameboy carts are larger and have a different voltage, so when they are in, the hardware activates the GBC on a chip. When GBA games are in the slot, it activates the GBA circuitry. Both can't be active at the same time. Since many people like to use Flash carts for the GBA, so that they can make a game playlist of their favorite titles, similar to how an MP3 player lets you make a music playlist of your favorite tunes, all without lugging around the original media... work began on an unofficial, yet high-quality Gameboy emulator for the Gameboy Advance, so that people could use a GBA flash cart to include a playlist of their favorite GBA titles as well as their favorite GBC, SGB, and GB titles.

Little did people know at the time that the GBC-on-a-chip would be done away with in Nintendo's next portable. Hence the Gameboy emulator for the GBA became even more important.

So to play old (non-Advance) Gameboy games on a DS, get a GBA flash cart. Put Goomba (GB emulator for the GBA) on it, and then you can play GB and SGB games on your DS. Of course, with the SGB games will play as if they are in a black and white Gameboy and not a Super Gameboy, so you won't get the Super Gameboy enhancements, such as more colors, borders, and other special features.

There are many other uses for these flash carts than piracy. Rip your own games and make your own multi-carts of your favorite titles. I have a multi-cart containing my favorite NES titles along with my favorite GB titles. So one little cart can fit hundreds of great games. That way I can have a variety of great games (puzzle, action, rpg, racing, shooter, etc) without lugging around handfuls of carts.

One last note. The Goomba page I linked above is the official site, but it lacks the most recent version, which can be found at the author's personal page. You can also find the latest version of his NES emulator for the GBA.

Funny how an unofficial NES emulator existed for the GBA long before Nintendo got around to re-releasing their classic series for the GBA. Too little, too late, Nintendo. I still have over 100 NES carts in my closet. I am not about to pay full price for them all over again, and yes I still enjoy playing them.

The Nintendo DS plays many original Game Boy games just fine through Goomba and a GBA memory card. It's the GBC-only games that need a new DS-native emulator.

Nothing like classic Zelda or Tetris on the beautiful DS screen...

The only thing the DS has that got me to buy it was it's backwards compatibility with GBA games.

Not only that, but with the EFA-Linker (under $100 incl. shipping), you can play a boatload of NES games and many Game Boy games as well. So now the Nintendo DS is compatible with GBA games and unofficially compatible with many NES and GB games, but Sony couldn't be bothered to include a PS1 emulator with the PSP and uses code signing to prevent the free software community from stepping up.

I know of Goomba, which works for GB ROMs, but for GBC ROMs, I get "This game works only on Game Boy Color."

get an ipod (smaller than an archos crapbox) and a gameboy. use a eprom cart and writer

Can a fellow even buy GBC flash carts anymore? All that seems to be sold nowadays is GBA flash. GBA flash works only with GBA games and with emulated GB mono games, not with GBC-only games.

no more lugging around loads of gameboy cardridges, just upload and play.

This has been possible for a long time. The Game Boy Advance with a GBA flash cart can emulate the Game Boy monochrome system; a single flash cart can hold up to 32 MBytes or 64 MBytes of GB ROMs.

There is also something called the GB Bridge, which translates between GB mono/GBC wire protocol and GBA wire protocol, letting the GBA run GBC games using its GBC hardware, but it doesn't work with most of the newer flash carts.

The Nintendo DS has a slot for DS games, and it has a slot for GBA games and GBA flash carts containing emulated Game Boy Mono (DMG) games. It does not have a slot for Game Boy Color exclusive games.

It shouldn't be that difficult to write a gba rom that wraps gb(c) roms.

There is such an emulator for Game Boy mono ROMs, but it doesn't support GBC-only (transparent plastic) titles.

(Like an mp3 player NDS cartridge that uses GBA cartridges as disks.)

If you just want to play music from a flash cart on your Nintendo DS, you don't need to go into DS mode. Get GSM Player, which works on anything that can play GBA flash carts, and fit 150 minutes of music on one 256 Mbit cart (or less if you have games on the same cart).

Why don't you just wait for an emulator?

You may be out of luck for GBC games, but there is a rather good GB emulator (Goomba) that you can load onto a GBA flash cart with all your games. That is, unless Nintendo has done something to the DS to make it not read GBA flash carts.

Of course, I meant "Nintendo DS can play all single-player and GBA games that work on GBA SP".

The DS does not play anything older than a GBA-specific game.

It plays many GB mono games (through emulation) and almost all GBA games (natively), but there is a gap around GBC-specific games.

there's actually a gameboy emulator for the GBA, which means you can play all the Gameboy games on the DS after all.

I know what emulator you're talking about. Half the games display "This game works only with Game Boy Color" and freeze.

and its only a matter of time before someone comes out with a fully functional SNES and Genesis emulator for this thing.

Has the Xbox been cracked optically yet? From what I've read about the encryption on the DS cart bus, it may prove tougher to crack the DS through its cart slot than it was to crack the Xbox, and tethered exploits such as that of PSO are much less useful on a handheld because even if someone manages to crack DS download play, you'd have to carry a Wi-Fi laptop around to boot the thing, and by the time you're doing that you're already playing Gens and ZSNES on that laptop. Owners of Nintendo DS systems will probably have to live with the limitations of SNES Advance (limited compatibility, no sound) for the next couple years.

There are ways around this little caveat, but the legality of it all is a little questionable.
Firstly you need to get hold of a GBA linker and flash cartridge. You also will need download Goomba, a Gameboy emulator for the Gameboy Advance. Use the linker to dump your Gameboy games on your PC, then combine them with Goomba into a .gba or .bin rom file. It's then just a matter of transferring the file to the flash cartridge and you're away.

The DS already has two processors: the ARM9 at 64 MiHz and the GBA's ARM7 at 32 MiHz (double the speed of the one in the GBA, which was clocked at 16 MiHz). Both run at once. In DS mode, the ARM9 handles the game, while the ARM7 handles the I/O.

The GBA can already run GB mono software in emulation.

Sure can.

1) The article said there would be a separate
cart slot for GBA games, dunno if they'll still
support GB/GBC games (there's no reason not too,
other than adding a Z80 somewhere...)
I think the GBA used a seperate hardware path for GB/GBC. Personally, I think GBA support is enough. *cough*goomba*cough*

The GG also had a better speaker.

I've heard the Game Gear's speaker, and it's not all that good. Reading the specs, I discover that its tone generators can generate only 1/2 duty pulse waves, not 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and arbitrary waveforms like the Game Boy could. In addition, the Game Boy's tone generators could go nearly an octave lower. Plug in headphones and listen to the soundtrack of, say, Zoop or any Mortal Kombat game for each system, and you'll notice that the Game Boy version's instruments sound marginally more differentiated.

It could play every Sega Master System game with an adapter.

That was good for its time. But now the Game Gear Advance can play Sega Master System games as well, not to mention NES games. (Yes, I'm calling the GBA the Game Gear Advance because it's the handheld that Sega develops for now.)