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PRODUCT REVIEW
Give me Liberty or give me, um, a Game Boy
By Dan Amrich
Warning
Since the writing of this article, the Liberty GameBoy Emulator has seen a lot of media attention. Unfortunately, however, it wasn't for a positive reason. A Trojan horse application appearing to be a crack for Liberty has been circulating. In actuality, if you download and run the application, it could potentially wipe out all the programs stored on your Palm device. The best way to avoid the problem is to make sure you only download the version of Liberty from Gambit Studio's site or PalmGear, the application's exclusive distributor.
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Really, this was inevitable. As cell phones turn into Web browsers and Pocket PCs turn into MP3 players, the convergence of the greatest handheld game system of all time (Nintendo's 11-year-old Game Boy) and the niftiest handheld computer on the market (the Palm organizer, duh) simply had to happen.
Unfortunately, maybe it happened a little too fast.
Mind you, simply making Game Boy software run on a Palm device is extremely impressive. The gang at Gambit Studios (at http://www.gambitstudios.com) has pulled a wild one with Liberty, the first GameBoy Emulator for the Palm OS--and yes, it works. It's pictured in Figure A and is being distributed exclusively by PalmGear at http://www.palmgear.com.
FIGURE A
Liberty lets you play Game Boy games on your Palm device.
Tetris, Pokemon, Bionic Commando, Joust…there are a few hundred Game Boy games out there you can run with Liberty. However, of those few hundred, maybe a handful will be enjoyable and functional, at least today, anyway. The future, on the other hand, looks a whole lot brighter in terms of functionality.
Speed demons
For now, it's the present you should worry about. Liberty (currently version 1.0e, with an enhanced 1.1 expected shortly) runs original Game Boy freeware, but that's not what you want to play. There are lots of "backup" Game Boy ROMs out on the Internet if you know where to look, and a simple converter program (free with Liberty) turns those ROMs into PDB files. The classic block-dropping puzzle game Tetris, for example, is downloadable from any good 13-year-old's l33t site. And yes, it's sort of legal to play Nintendo's version of Tetris on your Palm device, as long as you own the original Game Boy cartridge. I'll go into that in more depth later.
The important thing is that Tetris runs, even with the demo version of Liberty, which is limited to Game Boy games with 32K or less. However, it's not exactly "playable." On my PalmPilot Professional with a Palm III upgrade, overclocked to 23 Mhz with Afterburner 3.0 (making it faster than a Palm Vx, according to Benchmark) this sucker is s-l-o-w. Like, a quarter of the original speed, if not slower. The Liberty version of Tetris is pictured in Figure B.
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