Being interested in videogame history, and collecting, I was looking into Nintendo's methods of 'official' emulation of handheld gaming that have been used in the past for the consumer. To jump straight to my idea, skipping all the background I've written, just scroll down to the blue text. The earliest commercial hardware I know of is the Super GameBoy. For those that don't know (both of you), this is basically a GameBoy in a SNES cartridge. Minus the screen, buttons and speakers, which are all handled by the SNES console and TV. The EXT. port was also missing in the original configuration of the SuperGameboy, but with a little bit of work, and some knowledge of electronics this can be added by the adventurous type (like me). The SuperGameboy, to my knowledge, played every game in the original GameBoy library. If there were any games incompatible, I'm not aware of it. And, let's face it, it's nice to play GameBoy games on the SNES. The reason I own a Super GameBoy is because of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. And more recently, albeit still a long time ago, we had the GameBoy Player, for the GameCube. This was effectively the same device as the Super GameBoy, only updated to GameBoy Advance hardware inside. Again, it was almost the entire GameBoy Advance inside, including all the hardware needed to act as a GameBoy Advance. Minus the screen, buttons and speaker, which were handled by the GameCube and TV again. This time, Nintendo included the EXT. port as part of the original hardware. Probably because a lot of people used it more on the GameBoy Advance than they did on the original GameBoy. So, that's second generation and fourth generation Nintendo hardware with handheld emulation. What about the third generation, the Nintendo 64? Apparently Nintendo did make a device to play GameBoy and GameBoy Color games on the Nintendo 64, again, using the display, sound and controls of the Nintendo 64 to play. Only, this device was only available to the developers and media. And costing a staggering $1400 (£853.44, in real money). Even by todays inflation, that is a massive amount. So now, it's understandable that this piece of hardware is rare, and even more expensive. Now, I already own a SNES, complete with a SuperGameboy with the EXT. port I added. I also own a GameCube, with a GameBoy Player. So, effectively this idea is pure vanity, and not a necessity what so ever. As, whatever functionality that could come from this, I can reproduce via other means already. But, in saying that, I like to think in terms of "Why not?" rather than asking the simple "Why?". So, my proposal, and hopefully, the beginning of something impressive: To my knowledge there are two Nintendo 64 games that use the Transfer Pak to not only access specific data from GameBoy games, but the entire game itself. Allowing it to be played on a TV. These are Pokémon Stadium, and unsurprisingly, Pokémon Stadium 2. Not knowing the exact mechanics of these games, and how they use the Transfer Pak as a peripheral, I can only speculate. But, based on my experiences, combined with what knowledge I have of computing and data transferring, I think that the Nintendo 64 games copy the entire GameBoy game onto the console to play it. I'm basing this on the time it takes the games to "Load", when compared to the more modern equivalent. That being Pokémon Box for GameCube. I think, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that the disc for Pokémon Box contained entire copies of Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire. I say this because of the speed the games boot up, not to mention that once "Loaded", the GameCube gives you the option to turn the GameBoy advance off. Meaning there's no data being streamed from the GameBoy Advance cartridge during play. And the console only asks for the GameBoy Advance to be turned on again when transferring saves. Again, I could be wrong, and the GameCube could copy the entire GameBoy Advance game across at a much faster speed. In any case, using this as a basis, I assume that Pokémon Stadium and Pokémon Stadium 2 don't have the GameBoy games included on the Nintendo 64 cartridge. So, with that in mind I came up with this idea: Using the same method as Pokémon Stadium, could a homebrew Nintendo 64 program be created to run on Everdrive 64 (or any of the other flash carts) which would access the Transfer Pak, and play GameBoy and/or GameBoy Color games on the Nintendo 64, using the original GameBoy cartridges? I'm not expecting this to be answered any time soon, I just wanted to put the idea out there, in the hopes that someone with a lot more knowledge than I have on console development could possibly take an interest and maybe develop something. I know it would probably be easier, and more accessible to the user to develop an emulator to run ROMs directly from the Nintendo 64 flash cart. But, where's the challenge in that? Not to mention the legal implications. In creating a program to use officially manufactured GameBoy cartridges, you eliminate the "piracy" potential that a ROM based emulator would carry. And I am painfully aware that I'm talking about a homebrew app to be run on a device capable of acts of piracy. But, some of us are honest, and are drawn to the potential of exploiting features of our hardware never available to us before, rather than just playing games we don't want or never intend to pay for. And just for information purposes, I don't own the Everdrive 64, or any other device like it (yet). So, even if someone was to pick this idea up, I couldn't do any testing for them, as I don't have a Nintendo 64 flash cart. I am, however very interested in seeing what spawns from this seed I have planted. Good luck to anyone who ventures it. Sisee.
This is what I want to figure out as well. So far I haven't found any information regarding the transfer pak or anyone has worked with it. I have been looking through controller paks communications in general and looking for weird commands in the disassembled of most games that used the transfer pak, but I got off track.
Ok, first off the N64 Controller port is ultimately the connection from the transfer pak to the system. It is not parallel. So the transfer pak is going to read into memory the contents off the cartridge. From there the game is emulated. The quality of the emulator or type of emulation could be anything. If they so chose it could be a very specific emulator to run Pokemon or even be a N64 recreation/port of Pokemon that just loads your save data off the cartridge. If it is an emulator and is flexible, you could probably either replace the included ROM or disable the check to only run the Pokemon roms to try to play other games. But I suspect it's not a full on emulator or doesn't support gameboy color because if it was good they could have released a Cartridge with the emulator software along with the transfer pack and called it Ultra Gameboy or whatever. Be happy with the Gameboy player. Oh one idea though that may have already been done in some form but for the EverDrive maybe a feature could be added to Dump GB/GBC carts and saves onto your SD card.
