Skip to content

Nintendo Game Boy Color

Overview

The Game Boy Color (GBC) application for webЯcade is an emulator for the Game Boy Color handheld game console.

µCity by Antonio Niño Díaz

Controls

The emulator supports one controller. The keyboard and gamepad mappings are listed in the tables below.

Keyboard

Keyboard controls are listed below.

Name
Keys
 Comments
Move
A or
B or
Start
Select The Right Shift Key.
Show Pause Screen

Gamepad

Gamepad mappings are listed below.

Name
Gamepad
 Comments
Move  or 
A or
B or
Start Not available for Xbox and not recommended for iOS (see alternate)

Press the Menu (Start) Button.
Start
(Alternate)		  and  Hold down the Right Trigger and click (press down) on the Right Thumbstick.
Select Not available for Xbox and not recommended for iOS (see alternate)

Press the View (Back) Button.
Select
(Alternate)		  and  Hold down the Right Trigger and click (press down) on the Left Thumbstick.
Show Pause Screen  and  Not available for Xbox and not recommended for iOS (see alternate 3 or 4)

Hold down the Left Trigger and press the Menu (Start) Button.
Show Pause Screen
(Alternate)		  and  Not available for Xbox and not recommended for iOS (see alternate 3 or 4)

Hold down the Left Trigger and press the View (Back) Button.
Show Pause Screen
(Alternate 2)		  and  Not available for Xbox and not recommended for iOS (see alternate 3 or 4)

Hold down the X Button and press the View (Back) Button.
Show Pause Screen
(Alternate 3)		  and  Hold down the Left Trigger and click (press down) on the Left Thumbstick.
Show Pause Screen
(Alternate 4)		  and  Hold down the Left Trigger and click (press down) on the Right Thumbstick.

Battery-backed SRAM

Some Game Boy Color cartridges include battery-backed SRAM as a means of preserving state between sessions. The Game Boy Color application supports persisting this SRAM state into the browser's local storage or optionally to cloud-based storage. The SRAM contents will be persisted to storage whenever the pause screen is displayed (or the game is exited). Therefore, the menu should be displayed periodically for games that support battery-backed SRAM to ensure the state is properly persisted.

Feed

This section details how Game Boy Color application instances can be added to feeds.

Types

Two Game Boy Color application types are available, each offering different trade-offs in compatibility, features, and system resource requirements. Libretro SameBoy is the default (⭐) and is mapped to the gbc alias. The default can be overridden globally in Settings > Applications, or on a per-item basis in the Feed Editor.

Name Type Filters Cheats Low CPU
Libretro SameBoy ⭐ retro-sameboy-gbc ✅ ✅
VBA-M vba-m-gbc ✅

Properties

The table below contains the properties that are specific to the Game Boy Color application. These properties are specified in the props object of a feed item.

Property Type Required Details
cheat URL No URL to a cheat file for the current ROM. See the Cheats Tab in the Item Editor for details on assigning cheat files.

(Libretro SameBoy only)
rom URL Yes URL to a Game Boy Color ROM file or a zip file containing a ROM file.
zoomLevel Numeric No A numeric value indicating how much the display image should be zoomed in (0-40).

This property is typically used to hide the black borders that are present on some games.

Example

The following is an example of a complete feed that consists of a single Game Boy Color application instance (type value of gbc). The rom property value is a URL that points to a Dropbox location that contains the excellent homebrew game µCity by Antonio Niño Díaz

{
  "title": "Game Boy Color Feed",
  "longTitle": "Nintendo Game Boy Color Example Feed",
  "categories": [
    {
      "title": "Game Boy Color Games",
      "longTitle": "Nintendo Game Boy Color Games",
      "items": [
        {
          "title": "µCity",
          "type": "gbc",
          "props": {
            "rom": "https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/l7iwsmwbcbjqyfe/ucity.gbc"
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

This example can be tested by adding a feed with the following URL within the webЯcade player:

https://tinyurl.com/sample-gbc-feed

References

Back to top