Play the GameBoy Advance on your tablet with the GameBoid emulator

In this tutorial we are going to show you how to emulate a GameBoy Advance on our tablet thanks to an application called GameBoid. GameBoy Advance is a Nintendo console, successor to the GameBoy Color, manufactured from 2000 to 2008 and belonging to the 32-bit generation. His best-selling games were the saga Pokemon and the saga Super Mario.

The features of this emulator are:

• Great compatibility with most commercial roms.
• The games work with sound with great fluidity.
• Configurable controls.
• Save slots
• Turbo function.

Installation

GameBoid is not available in the Play Store, so we can download it for free and legally from slideme.

From this website we will download an .apk installer file that we must install on our device. This file is not signed by Google. If we do not know how to install applications not signed by Google, we can follow the following tutorial in TabletZona.

By default, the emulator comes without roms and without Bios, so you will have to download the games independently and generate the Bios thanks to a program available in the Play Store.

We install the application and it will create an icon in the applications menu. We run the emulator by pressing on said icon and the first warning we get is that, in order to play the roms we need to download the Bios.

Bios Download

To download the Bios we can use a program called Any Bios Emulator available in the Play Store.

Once the program is downloaded, we execute it and we can see the main screen.

In the "Select your console" section we select Game Boy Advance Bios, and in the section "save Bios files to" we establish the path where we want to save the Bios. Once these steps have been carried out, we click on "generate Bios files" and we will see a message that indicates that the Bios files have been created successfully.

Commissioning and configuration

Once the Bios is downloaded, we run the GameBoid emulator again, and it will ask us again for the Bios directory. Click on "browse" and go to the folder where we have saved the Bios, in our case, / sdcard / Game Boy Advance Bios. We select the file called "gba_Bios.bin" by clicking on it.

Next we already have the Bios loaded, so we will proceed to load the rom that we want to emulate. To do this, in the file explorer that appears, we will move to the directory where we have saved the roms.

We press on the rom that we want to play to load it in the emulator.

The emulator is configured by default to start playing just by downloading the Bios and placing it in the roms directory, but it also has a configuration menu with some options. To access it, we open the menu and click on “settings”.

In this menu, the first option we see is the Bios directory, since if we change it, we will have to specify again where said Bios is located.

In the "Audio & Video settings" section we can establish whether we want to activate or deactivate the sound, as well as the image scaling mode and the frame skip. In "input settings" we can configure everything related to the controls, from a mapping of keys to being able to use a trackball or one of the sensors of our tablet, such as the motion sensor.

Finally, in the "Other Settings" section we can configure the orientation of the screen, the use of an external command, if we want to activate or deactivate the cheats and the type of saved game, since each game saves the game in a different way By default, it is recommended to leave it on "automatic".

There are alternatives in the Play Store, but most that have a good number of positive votes are paid, so with GameBoid we will have everything we need, for free, to be able to emulate our games.

A payment alternative in the Play Store is GBV.