The Best Gameboy/GBColor Emulator for Nintendo DS: Lameboy
Just because we have a DS doesn’t mean we don’t want to play some older portable Nintendo games.  While we could play the original Gameboy cartridges on our Gameboy Advances, the Nintendo DS doesn’t afford us that luxury.  However, with a little emulation power, we can resolve that issue and make your portable gaming life even better.
What Is The Best Gameboy/Gameboy Color Emulator?
While GNUboy DS (aka DS_GBC / DSBoy) was the first Gameboy emulator for the DS that had sound support (there was also the GBA-based Gooba Color), Lameboy quickly rose to victory as the superior emulator for the classic Nintendo portables. Â Lameboy is constantly being updated (last update as of this writing was just a few months ago) and has excellent compatibility, sound emulation, and save state support that its competition can not boast of. Â Â There is still some slight room for improvement, but I think you will be pleased by how polished Lameboy actually is. Along with nesDS, it is on the top of the Nintendo DS Emulation family.
Easy Installation
After some of my frustrating experiences getting some of my GP2X emulators to run, I was very happy with the simplicity of the Lameboy installation. Assuming your homebrew cart doesn’t require patching, all you do is download the executable file and put it in a folder with some Gameboy ROMs. (Actually, you don’t need folders, and your ROMs can be elsewhere, but folders usually help keep things organized)
For my CycloDS Evolution cartridge, I just copied over a folder (named “GBâ€) that had the executable and my ROMs on to MicroSD card, popped it in my DS Lite, and I was good to go. No configuration is required to get things up and running.  If you have an older homebrew solution, you may need to patch the executable before use.
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Video Tour of Lameboy
To get a better feel for how Lameboy handles, I’ve recorded a quick video that walks through some of the menus and shows a few games in action.
Lameboy’s Best Features
- High compatibility
- Full speed for most games
- Support for large games greater than 2 MB in size
- Zipped ROM support for games smaller than 2 MB
- “Fast Mode” with L-trigger
- Auto save on exit to menu
- Pseudo bilinear upscaling mode
- Super Game Boy borders and coloring support
- Rumble emulation with slot 2 devices with rumble
- Green color scheme option emulating original Game Boy color palette (green to very light green)
- Configurable X/Y Keys
- Save states
Complaints & Limitations
- I can’t seem to exit out of Lameboy and go back to my CycloDS menu (like I can with regular games)
- Some games like Shantae have some minor audio processing issues (see video above for Shantae example)
- Would be cool to have a rewind feature like nesds
Download
Note: Special thanks to Ivo for helping me explore all of the emulators for the DS — you should see more of these posts from us in the future.
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There is an SNES emulator, but it’s kinda hit-or-miss in term of compatibility — and even then it requires a lot of manual settings tweakings to get a lot of the compatible ones to work,.
There’s not a word about link support. >:(
I dunno if another commenter mentioned this, but the very latest version (0.11) has support for the internal clock functions (RTC) used in Pokemon G/S/C. Sure, other emulators on the PC can do this, but I think this is the first emulator for a portable console with RTC support.
the save game on all the pokemon games doesn’t work correctly. It saves only sometime. is there any update for this problem?
shuld make a gba 1 for dsi peeps
shuld make a gba 1 for dsi peeps
does the lameboy support gba? if it supports the previous gameboy systems why not the Advance…I really don’t want to buy a second device…and I have high hopes for the lameboy!!…someone should make an emulator where you could play all the gameboy games on the DS, without a freakin second device,…also does the lameboy support cheats?(maybe as an option)…
thank u
i want game boy
hey i think this emulator sucks you better have lameboy
I have a problem with 0.12, Pokemon Yellow, Silver, Gold, and Crystal don’t save. Red and Blue do though.
Can anyone recommend a good device like a supercard or m3 to put lameboy on?
hey, just wondering.. how do i download it, and if i do will i still be able to exit and go to the main ds menu where i can select my gba game or ds game?
nesDS misses a lot of sounds in the NES games, examples RBI Baseball 2 it tells you when ur out, or striked but the emulator missed all that. Mike Tyson Punch Out is garbled.
Super Mario 1 starts off in level 0-1 and you have to press A and press start to get the game to work properly for some reason.
Jenisis faired a little better but the problem with it was that it didn’t play any x32 games first one i tried was star wars. lol Although im looking for nhl 95 and defender of rom 2
anyways tried the snes emulator and it kicked butt!
@”Random Guy” GBA Emulation on the DS is imposible. In order to emulate someting the speed of the device has to be about 5-7 times the speed of what your emulating. The DS is 67mhz and the gba is 30 something so, the DS is only twice the speed.
Note: 67mhz is only the speed of the ds original and light.
The DSI can run around 120mhz.
Correction to what said:
The DS Original and Lite each have 2 CPUs “One 67.028 MHz ARM9 and one 33.514 MHz ARM7TDMI with 4MB of RAM”(from wikipedia).
The DSis stats however are more vague.
“a 133MHz ARM Processor with 16MB of RAM”.
myne is broke its now al in a map dat’s cald some kind of + help wat can I do?
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I have a DS lite and am playing Zelda II Adventures of Link. I found the Hammer but it dosen’t show up in my inventory to use. Is there something I need to do to make the game play correctly on my DS. Please help!
OMG! Thank you Nintendo for such a great handheld.
Now I got most NES, GB, GBC, GBA and some DS Titles on one Module and I can even add some Master System oder Genesis Roms. HOW COOL IS THAT?!
Hope there will be a better SNES Emulator in the future, any rumors?
3DS suxxs =)
I wish we could use the regular cartridges too. I also with that they left the GBA slot on the DSI (and put it on the 3DS… ) but, the system is old, and they supported it with the slot 2 port for a long time, so I guess it is all good. I know the supercard dstwo has the built in emulator for GBA, and lameboy seems to be pretty good for GBC games. But I would love to be able to soft reset it, and load different games / get back to the ds card menu instead of having to power down each time.
I wish there was a way to add gameshark/action replay/game genie codes and enable disable function. 🙁
I’m a big fan of Racketboy, so I’m excited to try out Lameboy.