Enjoy your old Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, without jailbreaking, on iPhone and iPad.
If officially console emulators are banned on the App Store, solutions exist to enjoy your old games from the iPhone or iPad. Game Play Color is one of them, and allows, through a Progressive Web App (PWA), to run a Game Boy and Game Boy Color emulator in JavaScript, directly in Safari.
To work, Game Play Color must connect to a Google Drive account on which you must first store the ROMS of your games, which implies giving the application permission to view and download all your Google Drive files. We therefore advise you not to use your usual Google Drive account, but to use one that will be entirely dedicated to this use.
In addition, the downloading of copyright protected ROMs is illegal, you will have to extract the games yourself from the old cartridges that you have, using a specific cartridge reader and dedicated software. .
1. Store your ROMs on Google Drive
Go to your Google Drive to store the ROMs of the video games you have backed up. Files must be in .gb format for Game Boy games and .gbc for Game Boy Color games.
Game Play Color also offers the possibility of displaying the visual of your cartridges.
To take advantage of it, you will need to store on your Google Drive, a file in JPEG format with the same name as that of the associated game file. If you have, for example, a Pokemon_bleu.gbc ROM, the associated visual should be Pokemon_bleu.jpg.
2. Install the emulator
From your iPhone or iPad, go to the GamePlayColor website.
Go to GamePlayColor (Free)
Hit the Play Now button, then, on the next page, hit Safari’s share button, and choose to add the site to the Home screen.
Then validate the addition by pressing Add. The Game Play Color icon should automatically be added to your device’s home screen.
3. Connect your Google Drive account
Launch Game Play on your iPhone and click on the Sign In button to initiate the connection to the Google Drive account.
Safari launches, enter your username and password and press Allow to allow Game Play Color to access its content.
Once the connection is established, copy the code displayed in the frame, and close Safari.
Open Game Play again on the iPhone then, in the Enter access code field, paste the code copied previously and press Continue.
4. Configure Game Play Color
Game Play Color should finally open on the main window giving access to your games library. Enable sound activation by pressing Enable Sound.
Game cartridges should appear grayed out. The emulator detected them on Google Drive, but did not download them locally to your device. Tap on each of the games to load them locally.
Optionally, you can customize the display color of the emulated Game Boy Color. To do this, press Settings and select one of the colors offered.
To start a game, simply press the cartridge. The Game Boy interface should automatically display and load the selected game.