The Game Boy Advance or GBA is one of the most popular handheld game consoles of all time and who knows how many of you spent countless hours playing it in its heyday. If now the moment of “nostalgia” has come, but you do not have a Game Boy Advance, you should know that there are several emulators that allow you to play GBA games on a smartphone or tablet with an Android operating system. In this guide, we have collected what are the best Game Boy Advance emulators for Android and if you want to know what they are, then I invite you to continue reading this article.
The emulators allow the user to be able to use the games of other consoles, in this case on an Android smartphone or tablet.
Some emulators are able to emulate a single console, while others allow you to emulate many consoles with a single application. In fact, it is not difficult to find emulators capable of emulating the games of the Megadrive, Playstation, NES, and so on with a single application. With an emulator, you can therefore take a dip in the past and use all the old games that were played as a child, think for example of Super Mario, with which you can comfortably play it in its original version directly from your phone.
In this article, we will talk about the Game Boy Advance emulator, a console that many users have had and that probably someone remembering some game that remembers his childhood would like to play it again. Knowing that it is then possible to play an old game directly from your smartphone is the best, but be careful, generally, the emulators do not have pre-installed games, in fact, you will have to download them from sites where ROMs are downloaded, then add the game to all emulator to be able to play with it. The ROMs, that is the games are free to download and can be installed on the console in a very short time, just proceed with the download of the ROM, search for them with the file manager of the app that emulates the console for which the game was downloaded and then start it.
That said, let’s see below which are the best Game Boy Advance emulators for Android.
The best Game Boy Advance emulators for Android- Pizza Boy
Pizza Boy is one of the most recent and accurate Game Boy Advanced emulators for Android that we can find and it works perfectly on Android devices, so much so that it is currently considered one of the best Game Boy Advance emulators for Android. Pizza Boy owes its success to the fact that it has excellent performance and allows you to carry out many changes that can make the emulation more accurate or modern, it has skins that replicate the variants of the GBA, hitting the user more on the nostalgia for this console. As for the accuracy of sound and final image, compared to other Pizza Boy emulators it is the one that most reflects the original Game Boy Advanced. The app does not include ROMs or games, which must instead be downloaded from specific sites. Pizza Boy is available in both a Free version with limits and a paid PRO version, but in this case, you will have all its features available.
Best Game Boy Advance emulators for Android- RetroArch
RetroArch is a single application that allows you to emulate multiple consoles, including the Game Boy Advance. These emulators are represented in “Core” and there are multiple RetroArch cores to choose from for each system you wish to emulate. In particular, VBA-M and mGBA are very good options. RetroArch might be complicated to set up initially, however it is one of the applications that allow you to emulate the Game Boy Advance at its best. Besides being a good Game Boy emulator, RetroArch also allows you to emulate other consoles, such as Game Boy Color, Nintendo NES, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Super Nintendo SNES. RetroArch does not include any games, these in fact must be downloaded from special sites that allow the download of ROMs.
The best Game Boy Advance emulators for Android- John GBA
For those who want a Game Boy Advance emulator for Android that keeps things simple while at the same time being reasonably accurate and with lots of features, John GBA is probably one of the most recommended Android emulators. The app is made with various options that allow you to improve the rendering, it also supports Dropbox which allows you to synchronize saves and configuration data directly on the cloud, so these can be used from one Android device to another that have the same in common cloud account. The default virtual gamepad layout isn’t great, but at least it can be changed and there’s also support for using a Bluetooth controller.
Download Game Boy Advance emulator (GBA)
The best Game Boy Advance emulators for Android- My Boy!
A well known and appreciated emulator by Android users who want to play Game Boy Advance games on their smartphone is My Boy! Once there was a free version of this emulator, but it seems that it has been removed and that only the paid version has been left which, at the moment, costs just under 5 Euros. The emulation of My Boy! it is quite good, but the cost of purchasing the app could make many people desist, as there are valid alternatives that allow you to perfectly emulate the games in use by the Game Boy Advance without having to spend even a cent.
There are several Game Boy Advance emulators that you can download from the Google Play Store, but only a few are able to best emulate the games of this old console on an Android phone or tablet. If you feel a little nostalgia and you are an old Game Boy Advance owner, you can take a dip in the past with the emulators you find above. If you don’t want to waste time with RetroArch configurations you can go directly to the direct use of the games with simpler emulators to use like My Boy!. But be careful, the emulators are free of games, you will have to download the ROM downloads separately from the appropriate sites.