Getting the Most Out of Your Game Boy Games

I'll admit that I've spent much more time thinking about the Game Boy than most people. It's the very first system that I ever owned, and after years of playing its games and learning about its internals, I have a pretty good grasp on how to get the best experience out of playing my Game Boy games. This might sound like a simple task — you just play them on an emulator or hardware, how hard can it be? However, I've often run into people who are surprised that it's possible to play Pokemon Red with better colors, simply by changing your emulator settings. To that end, let's briefly take a jaunt down memory lane to explore the different Game Boy devices Nintendo released, so that you too can know whether or not your Pokemon Yellow ROM should have a .gb or .gbc extension.

The Game Boy

The year is 1989, and Nintendo is on the top of the world. After the video game industry crashed in 1983, their Famicom and NES devices single-handedly brought it back, making them a boatload of money in the process. For their next trick, they decided to liberate their customers from their television sets, giving them the freedom of playing on the go.

Enter the original Game Boy. For the time, it was a revolutionary device, and a massive hit. Unlike some of its later competition, such as the Sega Nomad or TurboExpress, they didn't strive to play NES cartridges or even make it easy to port games to their new device. Instead, its capabilities were chosen to maximize its most important attribute — its battery life. I could go into great detail about the Game Boy's specs in general, but for our purposes, we're really only interested in the display — a 160x144 pixel screen with a whopping 4 possible colors. This display was chosen for its viewing angles and energy consumption, but at the cost of only giving developers four colors to choose from — white, light gray, dark gray, and black — although if you've used Game Boy hardware before, you'll know it's really four shades of green.

I do want to briefly explain how the Game Boy colors its graphics, as it will make it easier to understand how the differences between some games. The Game Boy collects its colors into four color "palettes". These palettes determine which colors are available for each individual sprite to use. It might seem a bit silly to bother with palettes since there's only four colors available, but that allows for effects like fading out the screen, not to mention being forward-looking for adding proper color down the line (which they did). The Game Boy draws its screen in three "layers" — the Background, the Window, and the Sprites. The Background and Window share the same single palette, while the sprites can choose between which of two palettes they wish to use. Keep all this in mind, we'll come back to why this is important later.

The Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Light

In addition to its original model, sometimes referred to as the "DMG" (Dot Matrix Game), the Game Boy received two hardware revisions. The first was 1996's Game Boy Pocket. The Pocket plays the same library of grayscale Game Boy titles, but has three notable changes. The first is its smaller size, being much more approachable than its brick-like sibling. Battery capacity was also changed, going from requiring four AA batties down to just two AAA batteries. Quite a dramatic change, which assisted with accomidating a smaller size, although battery life is notably worse on the Pocket because of it. Lastly is the screen itself. From an emulation perspective, there's no changes, but improvements in screen technology allowed the Pocket to have an actual grayscale display, no more green.

Two years later, in 1998, came the final revision — the Game Boy Light. This was a Japan-exclusive product that was similar in size and capability to the Pocket, but with a built-in backlight. Battery capacity was altered to help power this light, as the Light takes two AA batteries, although that's still half of the original model.

I mention these two revisions not only to provide historical context, but also to drive home the fact that there's no "correct" Game Boy coloring. All three of these models look differently in person, despite playing the exact same game. You'll mainly see emulators use "true" grayscale colors, but they can be tinted anyway they like, even if they're not realistic to how they originally looked on any hardware.

The Super Game Boy

For the first true Game Boy enhancement, we need to take a step back before the Pocket's release. In 1994, Nintendo released the Super Game Boy, an attachment for the SNES that allowed users to play their Game Boy games on their televisions. As you can imagine, this was an enticing product. Rather than deal with the cramped Game Boy buttons and screen, worrying about its battery life, you could plug your Game Boy titles into your SNES and play with its controllers, on your nice TV for your friends to enjoy with you.

Special Feature — Custom Borders

A few questions immediately come to mind regarding the Super Game Boy. Firstly, how will a game appear on the screen? As stated, Game Boy games always play at a resolution of 160x144 pixels. Televisions of the day didn't come in the same resolution in every region, with an American SNES displaying at 256x224 while the European at 256x240. In either case, the Game Boy display is too small to fit in the whole space of a television, requiring a border around the gameplay. The Super Game Boy kindly comes with several borders for the player to choose from, ranging from a faux Game Boy appearance to looking like the top of a desk. There was even an option to draw your own border. Intrepid artists could use the clunky drawing tools to create their own masterpieces to decorate their favorite games.

This is not an uncommon concept. Nintendo would reuse this idea when creating their Game Boy Player to play GBA titles via a GameCube. Many retro ports on Steam will place a border around the gameplay with a handful of designs to cycle between. With the Super Game Boy though, Nintendo went above and beyond, giving Game Boy developers the ability to create and display their own borders. Many Game Boy games released after 1994 are "Super Game Boy" enhanced, where one of the possible enhancements being the inclusion of borders.

For example, Pokemon Red is one such game. When playing on your TV via a Super Game Boy, the game will automatically replace the screen border with a Pokemon themed one, showing the title of the game at the top and some images of Pokemon around the sides.

Most borders are plain, static images like this. However, games were not limited to displaying a single border. They could swap between them as they wished, with some using this functionality for gameplay purposes. Pokemon Trading Card Game, for example, used its border to display how many gym leaders the player had defeated. As you progressed through the game, the badges of defeated leaders would appear in the border, showing at a glance your progress through the game.

If you're curious, sites exist which have compiled screenshots of all the borders available on the Super Game Boy library.

Special Feature — Custom Palettes

The second major advantage the SGB provided over the original Game Boy models was its colorization. I feel that this is a feature that is somewhat unknown, especially compared against the later marketing of the Game Boy Color. In addition to providing additional screen resolution, playing a Game Boy game on a television allowed developers access to a full color spectrum, which many utilized. The Game Boy screen may be limited to four shades of color, but there was no reason that a Super Game Boy need have that same limitation.

However, while the SNES handled the color output itself, developers were still limited by the specifications of a Game Boy system. Let's return to the discussion about Game Boy layers and palettes we began earlier. A Game Boy game, even running on a Super Game Boy, still only has three palettes to work with — one for the background/window, and two for the sprites. What the Super Game Boy does differently though, is allows for any colors to be defined for these three palettes, not just four options. This means that while your backgrounds could have any four colors, every tile in the background had to use those four colors. Sprites, likewise had two four color palettes to choose from.

This might not sound all that interesting, but the effect is more dramatic than you might think. Take Pokemon Red and Blue again. If you're familiar with the game, you'll know that all of the town in the game are named after colors. Cerulean City, Lavender Town, Vermilion, Fuchsia, and of course your character's home town of Palette. These might seem like somewhat ambitious names, given that the game was released for a system with four shades to work with, but that's where the extra Super Game Boy palettes came in. Upon entering any city in the game, the developers would change the background to match the city's name. Lavender Town would indeed turn lavender, Cerulean would turn a (too dark in my opinion) shade of blue, and Cinnabar Island would turn an overwhelming shade of red.

For players living in the mid-90s, the Super Game Boy really was a phenomenal addition to your arsenal. I think it might be the single best accessory Nintendo ever made, not only providing a simple functionality, but also extending the games that went with it. Compare this to the GameCube's equivilent device, the Game Boy Player. It added a border around gameplay, because it had to, and... not much else. The Super Game Boy remained dominant for several years, until true competition arrived in the final Game Boy model — the Game Boy Color.

The Game Boy Color

The Game Boy Color was, to 6 year old me, the greatest prize in the whole world. Less of a successor to the original Game Boy and more of a "Game Boy Pro", the GBC shared the same CPU architecture as its older sibling, as well as its display resolution, audio capabilities, and inputs. What it did have was a new form factor, twice as much VRAM, and the ability to display eight different palettes of 15-bit color. If you don't know what any of that means, just know that it was a dramatic step up in what the system could do, even compared to the Super Game Boy.

Many developers quickly flocked to the new format, eager to finally flex their creative muscles on a handheld system (remember, the GBC came out in 1998, same year as the Dreamcast). However, a problem presented itself. The original Game Boy sold millions of units, should they just abandon that entire consumer base to make GBC games?

Fortunately, they didn't need to make that choice. Game Boy games are capable of detecting which hardware they're running on, and run different code accordingly. This is how developers were able to do different color effects on the Super Game Boy, which a regular DMG wouldn't care about. Now, you could design games that would have full color when played on a GBC unit, but still play fine in grayscale when on a DMG. While special SGB support largely vanished after the GBC released, that wasn't always the case. Pokemon Yellow, for example, supported all three hardware versions — playable in grayscale, with the rudimentary colors shown above on a Super Game Boy, and with fuller color when played on a GBC unit.

Games that supported the DMG in some capacity continued to be manufactured in the same cartridge style as they always had been. Typically black, with a concave indentation at the top for easier grip. Later on, as the Game Boy Color gained enough of an install base, developers elected to not support the original Game Boy at all. In an attempt to avoid confusion and annoyed purchasers, Nintendo would brand these games with a prominent "Only for Game Boy Color" labeling on their box, as well as mandate the use of translucent cartridges with a convex grip. Due to the shape of the cartridge housing, these games could not be inserted into a DMG or SGB unit without modification. If you manged to do so, the games were mandated to display a message that it was not supported on that hardware, the only grayscale functionality the developer would add in.

Now, it might seem pretty straight-forward which hardware to play your games on. The Game Boy Color had a full color screen and was compatible with (almost) the entire Game Boy library. If you have one available, pick that, then the SGB, and finally the DMG if all else fails. Alas, things are not quite that simple. For games with true GBC support, yes, you are best off playing them on a Game Boy Color unit. For games that don't... well, we need to see what a GBC would do.

Let's return to Pokemon Red and Blue again. As stated, these games did have SGB support, but released prior to the GBC, so they didn't get the special Color support that Yellow did. You would think that a GBC would then default back to the SGB colorization, but here's the crux of this whole article — the Game Boy Color could not render games in Super Game Boy mode. Even if the developers went through all the trouble, a Game Boy Color unit was only able to play games in GBC mode or else fall back to DMG. I've done a bit of digging, but I have never found any justification as to why this is. My assumption was that it was either too complex to manage all three modes, when they figured GBC would be the way going forward, or perhaps they felt that managing things like a border that no one would see would either be wasteful or caused bugs. I'm not entirely sure, but it does seem like a wasted opportunity to throw away the SGB mode like that.

"But wait", I hear you say, "I played Pokemon on a Game Boy Color. I vividly remember there being color!". You're not alone, growing up, I only had a Game Boy Color unit, and so all of my early Pokemon Red experience was seeing it on that device. However, what we both remember was not the specialized color that the SGB provided, but the default effect that the Game Boy Color would apply to all DMG games. Nintendo wanted to show off their fancy new color device, so playing grayscale Game Boy games in grayscale seemed like a bit of a waste. Instead, a GBC would apply the same trick the SGB did and map the grayscale palette to a color one. The difference between the two then, is that on a GBC this palette remains exactly the same for the entire game. By default, this converts the background into shades of red while the sprites get shades of green. A SGB would set these palettes to the developer's choosing, and switch them if desired, but the GBC was stuck with a fixed set.

I personally didn't know for years that Pokemon Red and Blue had different colors than what I had grown up seeing, and it was somewhat of a shock when I learned. If you were stuck using a Game Boy Color like I was, was there anything you could do to customize your experience?

In fact there was. In what might be the Game Boy Color's worst kept secret, it was possible to change which basic palette the system used for DMG titles. By holding a direction on a D-Pad plus either A or B, the system would replace its default palette with another for the entire game.

Strictly speaking, there are some games that don't use one of the 12 default palettes, they have their own baked in (and actually Pokemon Red and Blue are two of them). Still, it was always mind blowing to show your friends how to play DMG games with a completely new color scheme they'd never seen before.

Differentiating in the Digital Age

While this may be interesting information, it wasn't super vital to know back in the day. A Game Boy Color was always superior to a Game Boy, and the Super Game Boy was such a different form factor that it was almost an apples to oranges comparison as to which you wanted to play on. Besides, only the really rich and famous would have had the option to choose between them as they pleased. However, the vast majority of people playing Game Boy games these days aren't doing so on real hardware, but are doing so via emulation. While this is certainly more convenient for most people, it does make it rather unclear as to what configuration you're actually playing your games under, with some emulators not even giving you the option to switch. Nintendo's official releases on the 3DS, for example, do not give the player the option to decide which mode they're playing the games in. Games are either pre-assigned to be either Game Boy or Game Boy Color games, and to my knowledge no official 3DS release exposed Super Game Boy functionality at all.

Third party emulators are much more forgiving though, with most having at least some way to choose which hardware version they're playing on. For emulation though, it's a pretty straight-forward decision. If your game supports GBC, use that. If it instead supports SGB, use that, and only fall back to the DMG if you have to. It's only the risk of missing out on Super Game Boy features by playing games in DMG or GBC mode that you really need to look out for.

File Extensions

When dealing with digital files though, there's also the question of how to name your files. If you happen to have... acquired... any Game Boy or Game Boy Color games in your life, you'll notice that they almost certainly have a .gb or .gbc file extension. These seem like perfectly reasonable extensions, after all games will either be for the Game Boy or Game Boy Color, right? Tetris was released only with DMG features, so it's a .gb game for sure. The much later Metal Gear Solid was only for GBC, so .gbc certainly seems appropriate. What about Pokemon Yellow though? It has a original Game Boy styled cartridge, but has Game Boy Color support.

By my count, there are five different configurations you could possibly encounter; with a game being for the DMG only, having SGB features, having just GBC support but nothing for the SGB, supporting both, or being GBC-only. It wouldn't make sense for any games to support the Super Game Boy but not the Game Boy, such a configuration couldn't exist, giving us our five.

It's the middle three rows that give us the most trouble. Without a special .sgb extension, .gb seems fine for row two. However, rows three and four are less clear. Both would have the black DMG-style cartridges, which might imply .gb, but they do all work on a Game Boy Color — and that's the configuration most players would want to use — so perhaps .gbc. If you go by what the commonly found extensions for the games are online, they're all given the .gbc extension... except for Pokemon Yellow, which is .gb. Noticing this fact was honestly one of the main reasons I wanted to write this article. I don't know why it was determined that only this game was to go against the trend, but it's honestly irritates me a bit.

The naming scheme they settled on is probably the best one, even if it's the more confusing to people familiar with the physical games. You would expect the "Only for Game Boy Color" games with their special cartridges to be .gbc, but the purpose of a file extension is to tell your computer which application to use. This day and age, any Game Boy emulator worth its salt can do both, but strictly speaking you may want to differentiate. Most sources will put in parentheses whether the game supported other hardware, such as saying "(SGB Compatible)" in the filename. I've never really liked this solution, but I begrudgingly accept the file extension isn't the place to store such information.

One Final Super Game Boy Feature...

While I'm extensively discussion about what a Super Game Boy can do, there are a handful of games that really went above and beyond. Donkey Kong is strictly an original Game Boy game, but when paired with a Super Game Boy, it achieves a level of colorization that wasn't seen anywhere else in the library.

The details of this are a bit fuzzy to me, but while most games simply used the palette colorizing feature, Donkey Kong was able to tap into the power of the attached Super Nintendo (bet you forgot it was attached down there). This gave the developers the ability to color the game in a way that wasn't possible until the GBC came out a few years later.

However, one game went ever farther in surpassing Donkey Kong's effects, and it came from a somewhat unlikely source. The Game Boy release of Space Invaders is... well it's just Space Invaders, there honestly isn't anything too special about it.

Where things get interesting though, is if you decide to play it on your Super Game Boy. Typically, the game just boots up in the same fashion as it would on a Game Boy, just with color and a border. However, Space Invaders instead greets you with a new option.

Following a bit of a protracted loading period, you are met with something that no other Game Boy game can claim to offer.

Space Invaders is the only Game Boy game to really, truely leverage the power of the SNES that it's sitting atop. It's the only game that actually turns itself into a Super Nintendo game, and despite being a fairly basic arcade port, propels itself into being one of the more noteworthy games on the system. This functionality, a mix of Game Boy and SNES, is actually supported by very few emulators even today. For most of the screenshots you see on this article, I've been using the excellent Sameboy emulator, as it lets you easily change which hardware you're playing the game on, in addition to offering differen color palettes. Sameboy will play Space Invaders up until the loading screen, where it then freezes forever. Only Ares seems to be able to fully handle the game, most likely because it supports not only Game Boy, but native SNES as well. If you wanted to try it for yourself, it's a bit of a hidden function, requiring you to load a SGB BIOS file while in SNES mode, where you're then given the option to load a Game Boy game after.

While I do enjoy ranting about some lesser known game system functionality and file extensions, I do hope this is useful to some people. The Game Boy was an interesting system, and yet it still holds some secrets that could allow people to replay their vanilla games with a better experience than they thought possible.