Friday, September 1, 2000

Give me Liberty or give me, um, a Game Boy

.KEYWORD emulator
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Give me Liberty or give me, um, a Game Boy
.OTHER
.SUMMARY The myth is finally reality. Liberty is the first GameBoy Emulator for the Palm OS, and it works. Sort of. Dan Amrich reviews this convergence of the greatest handheld game system of all time with the niftiest handheld computer on the market.
.AUTHOR Dan Amrich
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Warning
Since the writing of this article, the Liberty GameBoy Emulator has seen a lot of media attention. Unfortunately, however, it wasn’t for a positive reason. A Trojan horse application appearing to be a crack for Liberty has been circulating. In actuality, if you download and run the application, it could potentially wipe out all the programs stored on your Palm device. The best way to avoid the problem is to make sure you only download the version of Liberty from Gambit Studio’s site or PalmGear, the application’s exclusive distributor.
.END_SIDEBAR

Really, this was inevitable. As cell phones turn into Web browsers and Pocket PCs turn into MP3 players, the convergence of the greatest handheld game system of all time (Nintendo’s 11-year-old Game Boy) and the niftiest handheld computer on the market (the Palm organizer, duh) simply had to happen.

Unfortunately, maybe it happened a little too fast.

Mind you, simply making Game Boy software run on a Palm device is extremely impressive. The gang at Gambit Studios (at http://www.gambitstudios.com) has pulled a wild one with Liberty, the first GameBoy Emulator for the Palm OS–and yes, it works. It’s pictured in Figure A and is being distributed exclusively by PalmGear at http://www.palmgear.com.

.FIG A Liberty lets you play Game Boy games on your Palm device.

Tetris, Pokemon, Bionic Commando, Joust