PALMGB 2.0 REVIEW:

Manufacturer: Revolution Software
Site:  http://www.eskimo.com/~hayes/PalmGB.html
Cost: $30

Here's some of the features:

- save/load states
- gameboy color and super gameboy support
- works on HPC and PPC
- supports MIPS, SH3 and Strong Arm Processers
- supports sound.
- up to 4 players
- Game Genie type cheats

INITIAL IMPRESSION:

To tell ya the truth, I WAS NEVER REALLY INTERESTED in GameBoy Emulation before.  Not that I don't like or respect the GB I just don't see much sense in it.  The way I see GB emulation is kind of like this: "I got a freaking $2500 PIII500+ system with a SB64Gold, Voodoo2 and a TNT accelerator.   What the hell am I doing playing black & white games with cheesy music on such a powerful machine.   It's like driving a Dodge Viper in a city traffic jam.  Besides the whole appeal of the GB is that the games are simple/fun and it's PORTABLE"

Well If you have a laptop (I don't) you can say it's "portable" but you'll still be driving your Viper in city traffic and a laptop is still kinda big.  Another thing is that most laptop power supply don't last more than 3 hours.  I REALLY doubt most people will spare much of the precious power supply to play gameboy. 

When I saw that there's a GameBoy emulator for the WinCE I was like KEWL! HPC/PPC units seem to be the PERFECT and NATURAL platform to emulate a GB on.  Why?  It's small, black & white, portable, and most HPC/PPC units power last at least 10 hours thus keeping the same appeal as a real GameBoy. 

I got a Philips Velo 500 (75mhz, 16mb, Grayscale screen).  You can say that it's a 2nd Generation HPC.  I don't know officially but I think these new color HPC/PPC color units are the 3rd Generation.  So I guess my unit is "a little bit slow" compared to today's 100+ mhz cpus

Anyway I've been a registered user of PalmGB since v1.0 a year ago.  One of the most noticable change from 1.0 to 2.0  (along with all the between beta builds) is SPEED.  Prior to v2.0 most of the games I play is so jerky or slow (depending on how u set the "Performance & Speed bar") that the emulator is restricted to games where the screen don't move or change much. (Tetris and Dr. Mario comes to mind).  Acutally it was so slow on my unit that I didn't play it much and was thinking I wasted the $30 on it. At the time I didn't know how it was and the demo version on the website is kind of crappy and don't offer a "true evaluation".  I can't find a pirated version floating around so I bought it, thinking I can play all those cool gameboy games on my HPC.  So I was feeling kind of shitty buying that.

With 2.0, the author implemented many features such as Color Gameboy & Super gameboy support so you people with color HPC/PPC can play full color games :).  Asside from color support they use "Direct Screen Write" and "GameX" (sorta like Direct X for WinCE) and the speed increase is WAY UP.  Most of the other options stayed the same since 1.0 (ex save/load states, key set etc..)

Just make a connection between your HPC/PPC and your desktop and run the PalmGB setup file. If you can't do that there's something wrong with you.  Ohh yeah you also need to transfer the ROMS (game cart image file) to your WinCE device in order to play them.

On the subject of roms, It's pretty cool that the PalmGB website offer a $5 bux discount to buy the "GBXchanger" just to keep it "legal". In a nutshell it's a $25 gameboy rom dumper.  It just dump the roms you can't upload it back to your GB unless you buy the "Flash Rom Pack" thingy for around $89+ depending on the size of the FlashRom Cart.  The FlashRom thingy is basically a flashable cart that let you upload games to it and play it on your GB).  But of course I know most people will just do a net search and pirate roms like there's no tomorrow.